The Paradox of Urban Revitalization: Progress and Poverty in America's Postindustrial Era

By Howard Gillette, Jr.

In the twenty-first century, cities in the United States that had suffered most the shift to a postindustrial era entered a period widely proclaimed as an urban renaissance. From Detroit to Newark to Oakland and elsewhere commentators saw cities rising again. Yet revitalization generated a second urban crisis marked by growing inequality and civil unrest reminiscent of the upheavals associated with the first urban crisis in the mid-twentieth century. The urban poor and residents of color have remained very much at a disadvantage in the face of racially biased capital investments, narrowing options for affordable housing, and mass incarceration. In profiling nine cities grappling with challenges of the twenty-first century, author Howard Gillette, Jr. evaluates the uneven efforts to secure racial and class equity as city fortunes have risen. Charting the tension between the practice of corporate subsidy and efforts to assure social justice, The Paradox of Urban Revitalization assesses the course of urban politics and policy over the past half century, before the COVID-19 pandemic upended everything, and details prospects for achieving greater equity in the years ahead.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Jun 7, 2022
• ISBN: 9780812298338

Book preview

Cover: The Paradox of Urban Revitalization. Progress and Poverty in America’s Postindustrial Era by Howard Gillette, Jr.

THE CITY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Series Editors

Eugenie L. Birch and Susan M. Wachter,

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

THE PARADOX OF URBAN REVITALIZATION

Progress and Poverty in America’s

Postindustrial Era

Howard Gillette, Jr.

PENN

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright © 2022 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Gillette, Howard, Jr., 1942- author.

Title: The paradox of urban revitalization : progress and poverty in America’s postindustrial era / Howard Gillette, Jr.

Other titles: City in the twenty-first century book series.

Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2022] | Series: The city in the twenty-first century | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021039346 | ISBN 9780812253719 (hardcover), ISBN 9780812298338 (eBook)

Subjects: LCSH: Urban renewal—United States—Case studies. | Urban policy—United States—Case studies. | Sociology, Urban—United States. | Equality—United States.

Classification: LCC HT175 .G55 2022 | DDC 307.3/4160973—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021039346

For Margaret

CONTENTS

Introduction

Part I. Captives of the Old Paradigm

Chapter 1. Baltimore: Despite Multiple Rebirths, a City Still Divided

Chapter 2. Detroit: Despite a Visionary Strategic Plan, a City Still Depressed

Chapter 3. Camden: Despite Massive Business Incentives, Still a City of Limited Opportunity

Part II. Shifting Ground

Chapter 4. Milwaukee: Beyond the New Urbanism, Questions of Equity and Justice

Chapter 5. New Haven: In a Model City Dominated by Eds and Meds, Still Contested Development

Chapter 6. Washington, D.C.: In Chocolate City, a Fight to Hold On

Part III. Breaking Through

Chapter 7. Oakland: What Resistance Can Achieve

Chapter 8. Pittsburgh: Where Equity Seeks to Catch Up with Innovation

Chapter 9. Newark: The Hard Road to Inclusive Growth

Conclusion

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

Everywhere is it evident that the tendency to inequality … cannot go much further without carrying our civilization into that downward path which is so easy to enter and so hard to abandon.… Though knowledge yet increases and invention marches on … and cities still expand, … civilization has begun to wane when, in proportion to population, we must build more and more prisons, more and more almshouses, more and more insane asylums.

—Henry George, Progress and Poverty, 1879

For some it was Trayvon Martin; for others it was Michael Brown. For me, it was Freddie Gray: a jolt to comprehension, forged over fifty years, of cities, those who struggled most within them, and how far we had come from the urban crisis that marked the outset of my academic career. As a graduate student in 1967 I had witnessed civic uprising, or rioting as it was called at the time, in New Haven, a phenomenon that had previously been considered inconceivable in the nation’s model city for urban renewal. In 1971 I had discussed one-on-one with George Romney, Richard Nixon’s first appointment to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the difficulties in trying to upend the depths of urban poverty we witnessed as we drove along Detroit’s Woodward Avenue past a strikingly dilapidated public housing project. A few years later, I toured Columbia, Maryland, with Barry Preston, a childhood friend who worked for the new town’s developer, James Rouse. Preston assured me that Rouse sought to weave into this community a pattern of integration that would serve as an antidote to the city of Baltimore’s long history of exclusion and segregation. Some years later, I wrote enthusiastically about the progression of Rouse’s career from a pioneer developer of regional malls, which did so much to undermine the commercial vitality of cities, to the point when he shifted direction to seek urban revitalization downtown and subsequently in poor, predominantly Black neighborhoods, most notably the Sandtown-Winchester section of Baltimore where Freddie Gray grew up and died as a result of police misconduct in 2015. As news accounts accumulated, it became clear that Gray’s neighborhood, the object of the most sensitive, sustained, and well-funded public-private investment partnership to my knowledge,¹ had never become a location of hope and opportunity as intended. Surely, I was not the only one to ask what could have happened over time to dash such hopes for improving the life chances of Freddie Gray and those like him, whose aspirations withered under the constraints of similar areas.

On Memorial Day 2020, shortly after I had submitted this manuscript for review for publication, another Black man—George Floyd—died at the hands of police, this time in Minneapolis. Like so many others, I was appalled by the visual record of his death, but even before it ignited worldwide protests, I had to ask again, how could this happen in this particular place? In the early 1970s I had visited the city several times to promote a new chapter of the Ripon Society, a liberal Republican research organization. My successor as president, in 1973, lived in Minneapolis, a city where even Republicans in my experience were progressive. Years later, I returned to the area to attend a conference hosted by Myron Orfield, a former state legislator and now the director of the Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity at the University of Minnesota. Orfield subsequently came to Camden, New Jersey—where I was teaching and where the city was under state control—to make the case for the urgency of addressing the unrelenting effects created over a generation of concentrated poverty. For Orfield, as for me, Floyd’s death was another shock to comprehension. As Orfield and another colleague wrote ruefully, Minneapolis has abandoned its vision of an egalitarian society, stopped enforcing civil rights rules and let inequality and division fester.²

In the 1960s, the deaths of Black men like Freddie Gray and the civil disorders that followed fueled acknowledgment that the United States was experiencing an urban crisis. In response, a national commission formed to investigate the sources of urban violence, the president declared a War on Poverty, and business joined philanthropic organizations to form the first community-based development corporations. In the twenty-first century, such events spurred national efforts to effect criminal justice reform, fostered a growing awareness of the persistence of racially determined inequalities, and prompted the formation of Black Lives Matter. Despite the energy behind it, the new movement remained limited in effect. When the prominent urbanist Richard Florida, pointing to growing inequalities in America’s most successful global cities, declared a new urban crisis in 2017, his message went largely unheeded.³ It took the profound effects of a pandemic further deepening the racial and financial divides in American cities and exposing them to public view to amass the kindling that ignited with Floyd’s death.

Why didn’t the larger world see the explosion coming? A central reason, I argue here, was the apparent revitalization of those places where inequities were most fraught. Such claims for recovery had been made before, of course: during the era of urban renewal in the 1950s and 1960s and in the era of comeback cities in the 1980s. But renaissance, as historian Jon Teaford recounted in his expansive review of both periods, was an uneven road that made the goal of recovery from decades of disinvestment still elusive.⁴ Early in the new century, the tide seemed stronger, the goal of flourishing cities closer at hand. Even as evidence continued to mount of unequal justice under the law, forged as it was by racially restrictive access to adequate health care, education, employment, and housing, the narrative of urban recovery dominated the news. Across the country, accounts of new Brooklyns and cities rising proclaimed an urban renaissance ending decades of decline in cities gutted by the loss of industry and population. In the new postindustrial economy, once-devalued land was attracting new investment. Population losses were reversing. Previously abandoned downtowns were thriving, and housing demand and prices were rising. The Great Recession of 2008 undoubtedly interrupted but did not reverse the trend. Something very important and very exciting is happening in America’s cities, Alan Mallach declared in his 2018 book, The Divided City. For a lot of cities once all but given up for dead, he reported, the last fifteen or twenty years have seen a remarkable transformation.⁵

Urban revitalization brought with it a central paradox, however. Success in adjusting to the demands of globalization and the economic restructuring it required, deepened existing divisions of race and class. The crystallization of diverging trajectories between those taking advantage of a knowledge-driven economy and those left behind by it suggested the title of Mallach’s book and prompted Florida’s declaration, Much more than a crisis of cities, the New Urban Crisis is the central crisis of our time.⁶ Indeed, wealth disparity had reached its highest point in fifty years, and it has been in cities, planning historian and critic Robert Beauregard asserts, that society’s contradictions are contested.⁷ External forces were challenging those cities in new ways. At the same time, the failure to solve divisions of race and class reaching back half a century to the first urban crisis of the 1960s complicated any true meaning of revitalization. For as much as had changed in the years since civil disorder wracked the country, too much of the nation remained—in the words of the U.S. Commission on Civil Disorders (popularly known as the Kerner Commission) formed to examine the causes of that rebellion—two societies, one Black, one white—separate and unequal.⁸ Ferguson had been treated as an exception, the preeminent chronicler of Black Lives Matter and Princeton University historian, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, asserts, but Baltimore exposed systemic—as opposed to superficial or exceptional—injustice and inequality.⁹

That a real estate developer succeeded a former community organizer as the nation’s president made the contemporary urban crisis especially visible to the public at large. For all his bluster about terrible living conditions in Baltimore or Chicago, Donald Trump was not about to turn his embrace of free market capitalism to constructive use, in the provision of funds for needed infrastructure investments, for instance. As acutely aware of what an urban ghetto did to limit life chances as he was, Barack Obama failed in his own way to utilize his previous experience to address the root causes of urban poverty and its persistence among people of color. Burdened as he was by the Great Recession in the early years of his presidency, Obama shifted attention more fully to racial inequality in his second term, without, however, devising any major shift in policy or outcome.¹⁰ Even as cities struggled with and then rebounded from recession, the private sector remained the driving force in development. In such circumstances, it appeared, social needs were not going to be adequately addressed by federal intervention or even state support. In bearing the burden of allocating limited resources, then, it was up to local leadership to forge policies capable of yoking the returns realized by real estate and other investments to address those needs.

To their credit, a number of cities faced both with rising revenues and deepening poverty took steps to address social and economic disparities. As tenuous and incomplete as these efforts were when the coronavirus pandemic upended everything, they stood collectively as markers for future policy. Even as deficits and social needs both soared, advocates for addressing long-standing issues of inequity and exclusion had achievements they could point to in pressing for robust public responses at every level to these structural problems that had persisted for at least half a century. With the country divided during a deepening economic crisis, nothing was assured, however. Calls for institutionalizing the scope and scale of government intervention as manifest at the height of the crisis in the creation of some form of New Deal compact stoked fierce opposition from the right. Even the left found much to be critical of in the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act and related federal legislation. Clearly, the country had arrived at a hinge moment, when either the central questions of racial and class inequality would be addressed or the depth of the economic fallout from the disease would make things even worse. As the author of the highly influential The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander, put it, If we do not learn the lessons of history and choose a radically different path forward, we may lose our last chance at creating a truly inclusive, egalitarian democracy.¹¹ What better time, then, to assess the course of urban inequality in the twenty-first century than when new conditions have forced the question?

In the nineteenth century, Henry George became the leading critic of industrial capitalism, enabled as it was by a prevailing confidence in the benevolence as well as the efficiency of markets to deliver on the promise of American life. Drawing on his observations of urban growth in particular, George blamed growing inequality on land use that pitted those who profited from its exchange value against those who needed it for living. To even the playing field, George proposed a single tax on the unearned profit derived from rising demand as compared to improvement on property. Although his approach gained enthusiastic support from workers, it never materialized as policy. His larger critique, however, anticipated government interventions initiated in the Progressive and the New Deal eras intended to curb capitalist excesses. A counterrevolution in recent years directing policy back to the kind of free market dominance George had criticized—what scholars have come to call neoliberalism—loosened government checks on capital accumulation, thus undercutting the resolve rooted in the 1960s civil rights and Black power era to ensure equal opportunity.¹²

The resulting political economy—one a new generation of critics have seen dominated by what they call racial capitalism—has revealed the ways capital accumulation, in real estate and development more generally, has been driven by racial bias.¹³ From government-backed home ownership loans initiated during the New Deal through the housing bubble that produced the Great Recession of the new century, African Americans bore the brunt of biased policy formulations that denied them equal access to the employment and homes that might ensure their security. In the aftermath of World War II, easy credit combined with exclusionary zoning practices drew white residents to the suburbs as part of a capitalist fix to anticipated decline in demand for goods and services with the return of peace. Indeed, consumer spending for new homes, their appliances, and automobiles to ensure physical mobility boosted the economy as a whole, while draining human and monetary assets from cities.¹⁴ Seeking their own fix to reverse their losses, cities turned to government subsidies to remake whole sections of undervalued locations—often labeled as slums—thus displacing and further marginalizing in the process minorities already excluded from the suburbs. Just as Congress appeared to guarantee equal housing opportunities under the fair housing provision of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, it passed a national housing act that had the contradictory effect of tying minority buyers to inferior inner-city properties where sellers preyed on their financial vulnerabilities. By confining each race to its own section of the housing market to preserve the allure of exclusivity for whites while satisfying the demand of housing for African Americans, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor contends, realtors created a single housing market that tied race to risk, linking both to the rise and fall of property value and generating profits that grew into the sinew binding it all together.¹⁵ It was in this way more broadly that real estate, that is, land turned into property for capital investment, as historian N. D. B. Connolly describes it, served as one of the chief vehicles for the development and continuance of antiblack racism.¹⁶

Burdened with high social costs, America’s cities in the throes of postindustrial decline and population losses assumed the approach to development described graphically in 1981 by the political theorist Paul Peterson, of embracing deep subsidies to business while actively discouraging redistributive policies associated with 1960s activism as bad for the local economy and fostering political conflict.¹⁷ Over time, under this growth first approach, real-estate development became an end in itself, justifying a whole range of policy decisions despite numerous challenges from community-based organizations and their allies seeking greater equity in the distribution of resources. Government, of course, remained a potential counterweight to uneven development that favored one race and one class over another. Chastened by criticism of its complicity with the devastating social effects of urban renewal in the 1950s and 1960s, planning professionals made inclusion a centerpiece in its oversight of development through active public engagement. Recognizing the responsibility for responding to such needs as citizens might express, geographer and planner Samuel Stein contends in his 2019 book, Capital City, A planner’s mission is to imagine a better world. In practice, however, he asserts, their day-to-day work involves producing a more profitable one. Their agendas almost always tend to favor their most powerful supporters—a group that usually includes some strain of real estate capital. And while planning is a public function, planners in capitalist cities are always at the mercy of the market, since most of what they do is regulate private actions. The money planners have to work with is largely derived from property taxes, an arrangement that incentivizes developer and homeowner-friendly policies and restricts the amount of land that is given over to truly public uses.¹⁸

The cumulative effect of contemporary scholarship demonstrates that the paradox of poverty’s intimate association with progress has been no accident. Rather, the exercise of the power of capital has done more than just aggravate social and racial disparities. It has compromised the very notion of full citizenship. As numerous critics have pointed out, uneven use of the police power to discipline the poor has accompanied development in the cause of protecting property and the wealth it can generate. Black ghettos—often strategically located near business sectors or neighborhoods rising in value as they gentrify—are both overpoliced and underprotected, leaving the many Freddie Grays of the world both known to the police and subject to the vicissitudes of their behavior. As historian Colin Gordon puts it, such determinative land-use decisions as zoning and the establishment of political boundaries that confined Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, to spaces of low opportunity subject to police violence, alter the very meaning of citizenship. For those who do not meet the standard of the upright citizen—worker taxpayer, consumer, homeowner—the state … does not just discipline or regulate them: it punishes and preys upon them.¹⁹

Acknowledging at the outset that the urban political economy in the United States continues to operate under a single racialized system that discriminates against people of color despite the civil rights advances of the 1960s, I hope in this book to draw a set of urban portraits highlighting efforts to challenge the growth-first orthodoxy that has contributed so profoundly to the deepening of inequality, even in the best of times. Such examples reveal the power of capital to dictate policy, but it does not ignore the agency of those who would alter the direction and intent of such formulations. As Barbara Ferman writes in suggesting a revised approach to depicting different urban regimes, Certain cities do engage in redistributive policy, do seek to regulate and control capital, and do from time to time question the wisdom of unfettered development. Other cities clearly do not. What differs among them, she suggests, is the role local political systems play in mediating larger structural forces.²⁰

It is in light of a broad view of progress that nonetheless has actually deepened poverty that I review the recent trajectories of nine key cities of different sizes and locales. They range from Camden’s 74,000 people to Detroit’s 690,000. Each of these nine cities experienced racial upheaval and loss of population in the second half of the twentieth century, none more than Detroit, which declined from a high of 1.86 million residents in 1950. With the exception of Washington, D.C., which nonetheless experienced a period of prolonged economic decline and social upheaval, thus putting it in the company of other Rust Belt cities, each lost its industrial base over a single generation. In their transition to the new economy, none has progressed to the point of stratification that New York and other leading postindustrial cities have reached, and so the fate of their residents remains very much in play. Geographer Jason Hackworth is quite right in identifying conservative ideology as a central factor shaping the current bind under which cities operate in what he calls a policy of organized deprivation.²¹ But while they share similar challenges under such constraints, the outcomes of their revitalization efforts differ critically as a product not just of contemporary influences but of past experience: of local organizing, the formation of political coalitions, the quality of local leadership, and the distribution of resources. Recognizing the agency of historical actors, competing narratives defy the assumption of a single hegemonic power dictating further inequality, revealing instead an evolving dynamic where political actors form and reform relationships to produce results.

While the choice of cities here stems largely from my familiarity with them and the quality of existing scholarship on earlier stages in their transformation, they nonetheless offer enough variety in location and demographics to measure a broad range of responses to the opportunities presented by the change to their fortunes in recent years. High minority poverty rates characterize every city, yet some have moved forward toward greater equity than others. To help make sense of the different ways they have responded, I have grouped them loosely along a continuum according to how well they have managed to move from the constraints of the prevailing growth orthodoxy toward the implementation of more equitable policies, what some have called redistributive justice.²² I categorize three cities—Baltimore, Detroit, and Camden—as captives of the old paradigm. Three cities that have made greater strides toward balanced growth—Milwaukee, New Haven, and Washington, D.C.—fall in the middle. The final three cities considered here—Oakland, Pittsburgh, and Newark—have demonstrated the greatest potential for progressive change, despite real limitations on achieving their ultimate goals. Acknowledging similar constraints over time, the stories that emerge from these cities’ recent histories confirm the critical role of political mobilization and vision as pathways to greater equity.

For my assessment, I have drawn widely from academic sources and contemporary journalism. In a few cities, I have benefited from the presence of independent and sustained coverage of local issues, including surviving city papers in Washington, Pittsburgh, and Detroit. The more recently founded New Haven Independent, Pittsburgh’s Public Source, and the East Bay Express, which formed in 2016 when the Oakland Tribune consolidated with the Contra Costa Times, also have been especially rich sources, as have the newsfeeds of Shelterforce, Next City, and CityLab, the latter originally produced under Richard Florida’s auspices at the University of Toronto and subsequently acquired by Bloomberg Business. For an academic model especially germane to my study, I have turned to Norman and Susan Fainstein and colleagues’s Restructuring the City, which used the comparison of five cities to examine the way their political economies shifted in the early years of the postindustrial era. Foremost an evaluation of urban redevelopment, their work focused on the physical environment but with a keen sense of the social costs of renewal. First published in 1983, their book anticipated subsequent commentary about capitalism’s role in dictating policy. Noting the state’s ability to offer concessions in the form of what they call cooptive social programs during the affluent 1960s, they identify a shift after 1973 when stagnation made the process too costly for capital. As production restructured by shifting labor costs abroad and taxes supporting state programs dropped, the fortunes of international finance centers like San Francisco rose while those of manufacturing centers like Detroit declined. The subsequent period of privatized redevelopment, Susan Fainstein later wrote, has been softer in approach than earlier renewal efforts, in that it less often displaces families from their homes or demolishes their places of work.²³ Still, redevelopment remains a process favoring those with money and power over those without. Just as fundamentally, the process of remaking once familiar places, whatever their drawbacks, has had the further effect over time of compounding injustices accumulated over generations.

Although the Fainsteins examine a host of tools employed by public entities to entice private investment, they could not have anticipated the extent of such actions in the twenty-first century. Whether the $1.6 billion in tax incentives provided to Camden or rights extended to a billionaire developer in Detroit to capture taxes on wages of workers in buildings he has redeveloped, such largesse has seldom been seen before. Amazon’s 2017 call for proposals to locate a second headquarters for the company, with its open inducement for generous subsidies, only took this practice to a new extreme.²⁴

Richard Florida joined the chorus of Amazon critics as he decried the skewed returns on the growing wealth of cities, what he called a crisis of success, but he could not escape his own complicity in the ill effects of revitalization. Riding the immense success of his 2002 book, The Rise of the Creative Class,²⁵ as an active consultant as well as commentator, Florida sold cities on remaking their core areas as meccas for living as well as for the consumptions of goods, services, and entertainment. By measuring success in terms of the number of millennials, or more broadly what Florida called the creative class, who could be induced to locate in a revitalized downtown, these cities—from Detroit to Washington and many others—managed to further marginalize and often displace those of lesser means who remained in the way of improvement. Like Rouse, as he shifted his attention from shopping malls to the victims of redevelopment, Florida recognized and acted upon his recognition of what ill effects had accompanied the kind of prosperity he had advocated. As journalist Justin Davidson put it in an essay for New York Magazine, Pampered white millennials converge on superstar cities with advanced degrees and spending money, turning slums into industrial-chic playgrounds. Eventually, even Florida came to see that waves of prosperity lift some yachts and come crashing down on everybody else.²⁶

Shortly before Freddie Gray’s death, a Rouse biographer, Paul Marx, blamed the lack of progress in Sandtown-Winchester on the preoccupation with personal grievances among neighborhood residents. The bottom line for Rouse in all his projects was whether they would lead to personal growth in the people affected by them, Marx asserted in an essay appearing in the Baltimore Sun. Rouse believed Sandtown could be a model for renewal in urban ghettos across the country. In this, Rouse was overly optimistic, Marx concluded, declaring that it makes one think that some areas are too lost to be helped much.²⁷

Common in popular impressions of enduring big-city ghettoes, such explanations are entirely insufficient in explaining the cumulative effects of disinvestment, social exclusion, and enduring crime in neighborhoods like Sandtown. Instead of blaming the victims of conditions that have metastasized over generations, we need to examine and evaluate the context of such changes. Bound by a capitalist system driving uneven development that produces unequal advantages and disadvantages for its residents, each of these cities nonetheless can and do make consequential policy choices. In the inevitable contests for limited resources, some have been resolved more equitably than others. The point, however, is that none of the cities examined here has yet achieved measures of fairness and equity equal to the measures of economic success they are so proud of. That should bother us deeply, not the least when the pandemic put so much of future investment and development at risk. As the nation enters a period of considerable hardship and uncertainty, it is my hope that the lessons of these past years might afford guidance in seeking a new kind of urban renaissance that could be measured not just in terms of revenue generated but in opportunities enhanced and lives enriched.

PART I

Captives of the Old Paradigm

CHAPTER 1

Baltimore

Despite Multiple Rebirths, a City Still Divided

Despite the precipitous decline of its industrial base in the latter part of the twentieth century, Baltimore attracted national attention repeatedly for appearing to have reinvented itself sufficiently to restore the promise that had attracted generations of migrants—Black as well as white—to its distinctive row-house neighborhoods. A robust campaign against blight in the 1950s gave new hope to bold concepts of urban renewal. The subsequent redevelopment of a tawdry downtown as a formidable assemblage of offices and hotels called the Charles Center gave new life to the city core. The conversion of the Inner Harbor to a tourism destination and the opening of the Orioles and Ravens sports complexes further highlighted the city as a destination. A robust collaboration to revitalize the Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood on the city’s West Side and subsequent redevelopment on the East Side instigated by Johns Hopkins Hospital, promised that revitalization would not be confined downtown. Even the intractable issue of access to affordable housing appeared to have been addressed when a landmark court case assured poor residents confined to deteriorating public housing projects that they would gain access to better opportunities in the suburbs as well as other parts of the city. Baltimore took every step deemed necessary to make itself a location of opportunity for Freddie Gray as much as anyone else. And yet, with Gray’s death and the violence that followed, one could be forgiven for feeling so little had changed since the riots that followed Martin Luther King’s assassination half a century earlier.

The Mondawmin Mall is about an eight-minute drive from the Gilmor Homes, the public housing complex where Freddie Gray grew up in the Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood. Two days after Gray’s death from spinal cord injuries incurred while being transported to jail for allegedly possessing an illegal knife, a group of young African Americans exiting the Mondawmin subway stop were confronted by a phalanx of police, alerted by rumors of possible disturbances at the site. Raw sentiment in the aftermath of another highly publicized and controversial death of a Black man in police custody, combined with the scuffles that resulted as mallgoers exited from the subway, led first to physical clashes with the police and subsequently to looting.¹ The disturbances, which left twenty-four police officers injured and some two dozen buildings burned, quickly became the fodder of political commentary, drawing further criticism of police practice from the left and angry denunciations of looters from the right. Virtuously anonymous in life, Gray’s tragic death loomed over the city and nation for months, a clear sign of the failures to resolve the inequities and pain associated with big-city racial segregation so forcefully stated nearly fifty years earlier by the Kerner Commission report. Clearly, Baltimore, like so many other metropolitan areas remained, in the commission’s words, two societies, one Black, one white—separate and unequal.²

Born in 1990, Gray was too young to appreciate the widely praised revitalization efforts directed at his neighborhood in the years immediately before and after his birth. He certainly was not aware of the catalytic effect the Mondawmin Mall had had on Baltimore when it first opened in 1956. Undoubtedly he never met Mondawmin’s developer, James Rouse, who died in 1996, either. But their lives were nonetheless interrelated, and it was a further tragedy that as much as Rouse did to help revitalize Sandtown, his efforts could not make Freddie Gray’s life better, let alone save him from unnecessary death.

Mondawmin was James Rouse’s first shopping center development. Located three miles from Baltimore’s downtown, it aimed to serve a burgeoning suburban clientele. In doing so, the mall sparked sufficient excitement to launch the mortgage banker Rouse on a new career developing regional shopping centers. Intended to serve as anchors to communities, not just generators of revenue, these malls quickly succeeded in draining commercial vitality from historic downtown shopping areas, further undercutting the finances and functions of central cities as human and monetary capital fled to the suburbs. Chastened by what he had helped create, Rouse brought the regional shopping center concept back to the city center, first most famously in the revitalization of Boston’s Quincy Market, then a few miles away from Mondawmin in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, clearly the city’s most acclaimed financial success in a period of rapid industrial decline. A deeply religious man, Rouse through his association with the Church of the Saviour’s work in providing affordable housing in Washington, D.C., came to the view that all low-income people in the US should have the opportunity for fit and affordable housing within a generation, and to move up and out of poverty into the mainstream of American life. Acting on his faith, Rouse widened the scope of his business interests to form the Enterprise Foundation in 1982 with the intent of plowing profits aggregated from his commercial successes back into impoverished city neighborhoods. Following an era of controversial urban renewal efforts, which he had helped spur as a central adviser in the crafting of the National Housing Act of 1954, Rouse was determined to learn from the past by making the communities he sought to support full partners in their own redevelopment. Sandtown-Winchester was anticipated to be the most complete test to date of the robust public-private partnership he envisioned.³

Sandtown’s redevelopment followed the election of Baltimore’s first Black mayor, Kurt Schmoke. Educated at Yale in the latter part of the 1960s, where he was head of the Black Student Alliance and subsequently a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, Schmoke made a commitment to rebuild the deteriorated Sandtown area during his 1987 election campaign in response to a progressive community-building effort initiated by Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development (BUILD), a faith-based coalition affiliated with the Industrial Areas Foundation originally formed by Chicago’s Saul Alinsky in 1940. With BUILD as the primary community partner, Schmoke, in cooperation with the Enterprise Foundation, launched a two-year planning process to determine what the highest priorities might be to achieve neighborhood transformation. The effort culminated in a plan endorsed in a March 1993 meeting of two hundred neighborhood residents to advance not just access to decent and affordable housing but initiatives aimed at empowering residents through employment, education, and health services outreach. According to a flyer the Enterprise Foundation produced on the effort, the foundation bore the responsibility for facilitating the process, bringing together government, private agencies, and community organizations in productive working relationships. A new nonprofit organization, Community Building in Partnership, a majority of whose board was composed of neighborhood residents, was named to serve with city officials while Enterprise representatives assumed day-to-day management.⁴

With Schmoke doing his share of directing public resources to the target area, other public initiatives followed, including a 1994 Compact Schools agreement to improve student achievement through curriculum reform and increased parental involvement. The creation of a homeownership zone funded by the Department of Housing and Urban Development in 1997 attracted another $30 million in funding and increased home ownership from 24 to 32.6 percent. Almost six hundred units of Gilmor Homes were modernized in the early 1990s, and in April 1997 the facility was selected as a demonstration site for the city’s Jobs Plus initiative, a program aimed at dramatically increasing the number of people employed by providing job training, support services, and linkages with businesses. According to an Enterprise Foundation summary of the effort, Community Building in Partnership’s employment center, Sandtown Works, was to collaborate with Empowerment Zone partners to design a comprehensive approach to employment in the neighborhood, using assessment, readiness and skills training, placement, follow-up support, and self-employment.⁵ Through the year 2000, seven hundred houses and apartments had been built or renovated in the neighborhood, and the Sandtown initiative had drawn more than $130 million in public and private funds for its transformation.⁶ While the initiative depended on the buy-in of neighborhood residents—and not everyone participated whether because of hardship or ongoing skepticism about the project—Robert Halpern’s leading study of community development at the time could nonetheless single out Sandtown as successful in involving community residents in planning and implementation.⁷

Even though the Enterprise initiative happened in Gray’s lifetime, the community at the time of his death was far from what Rouse had envisioned. Once a thriving portion of Baltimore’s West Side Black community, the home of singer Cab Calloway and US Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, among others, by 2015, nearly half the working-age population of some ten thousand residents was unemployed or working only in occasional jobs. More than half its households survived on less than $60,000 a year. The area had roughly double the city’s rate of unemployment, poverty, homicides, and shootings. Lead-paint violations were four times the city average, as was the percentage of vacant buildings.⁸ Growing up in poor housing conditions himself, Gray was exposed early to lead paint, according to a deposition filed by his mother, Gloria Darden, in 2009. Never having completed high school, she admitted to having a heroin habit before receiving treatment. Troubled by attention disorder, most likely a product of his exposure to lead, Gray fared badly in school and spent several years in jail before his arrest in 2015. He learned masonry skills during his incarceration but found he could not gain access to an apprentice program in construction because of his criminal record. At the time of his death, he was living in the Gilmor Homes in a unit occupied by his sisters. Baltimore’s public housing had itself been the target of a civil rights lawsuit, and Gilmor, it was charged, had been prey to a pattern of abuse as maintenance workers demanded sex in return for repairs.⁹ What had happened to this community during the years Freddie was growing up?

Figure 1. Freddie Gray mural by Nether (Justin Nethercot), at North Mount and Presbury Streets, Sandtown-Winchester, near where Gray was arrested. Gray is flanked by civil rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, and Thurgood Marshall on one side and contemporary protesters under the banner of the Black Lives Matter movement on the other. Jahi Chikwendiu, Washington Post. Getty Images, with