Dare to compare

Well, now.  Which of these seems like a more thorough take on the root causes of Baltimore's current ills?

E.J. Dionne at WaPo asserts that it's a matter of "the costs of globalization and technological change [being] borne almost entirely by the least advantaged people in our society."

Baltimore and its inner suburbs were once home to the vast manufacturing facilities operated by Bethlehem Steel, General Motors and Martin Marietta, notes Thomas J. Vicino, author of "Transforming Race and Class in Suburbia: Decline in Metropolitan Baltimore." In 1970, about a third of the labor force in Baltimore and its first-tier suburbs was employed in manufacturing. By 2000, only 7 percent of city residents had manufacturing jobs, and the losses have continued since. An awareness of this, Vicino says, should shape our understanding of what's happening in the city now.

He goes on to say that, while blue-collar whites have been affected by this de-industrialization, blue-collar blacks had the additional challenge of less opportunity for mobility due to housing discrimination.  Excuse me, E.J., but housing discrimination was dealt with a half-century ago.

He also cites a brainy Harvard prof who makes the self-evident point that, without the a anchoring effect of a steady job in one's daily life, the other stabilizing aspects of that life, such as family, lose coherence.

Got it.

But why did Baltimore de-industrialize and lose its economic vitality?

Let us consult Ian Tuttle at NRO:

The city and its partners somehow failed to take into account that Baltimore’s population was not growing, but shrinking — and, in fact, had been shrinking, sometimes rapidly, since 1950. Between 1970 and 1980, a staggering 13 percent of the city’s population moved away. Frustrated by an increasingly hostile business climate, employers left. And, exhausted by rising crime, so did residents. By 1999, 10 percent of the city’s population was drug-addicted, and there had been almost a murder a day through much of the 1990s. In the 2000s, the trend continued.

 It didn't help that the city's you-know-which-party overlords looked to Alinsky-ism for a remedy:

Throughout the early 1990s, Sandtown was Ground Zero of one of the largest, most closely watched urban-reinvestment projects in the country. Having done much to help revamp Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, mayor Kurt Schmoke, elected in 1987, turned his attention to Sandtown. The neighborhood was the preoccupation of one of his campaign’s key organizational supporters, Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development (BUILD), a West Baltimore–based community-action group under the umbrella of Saul Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation. Schmoke raised almost $30 million in federal and state grants and private funds to construct 210 new housing units and overhaul 17 others. For a nonprofit partner, Schmoke hit on the Enterprise Foundation (now Enterprise Community Partners), founded by real-estate magnate and Marylander James Rouse, who created Baltimore’s Harborplace and had turned his attention to low-income housing needs. With the help of significant subsidies, those 200-plus houses, which each cost $83,000 to build, were sold at $37,000 apiece. Three hundred more units were planned for a federally funded “Homeownership Zone” nearby. In 1997, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) awarded the city $5.2 million for that purpose.

HUD and the overlords of Baltimore had a cozy relationship, but the result was a bit like those huge empty cities you read about dotting the land mass of Red China:

By 1998, Schmoke had channeled approximately $60 million into revitalizing Sandtown, but almost all of it was devoted to housing construction and rehabilitation. And, as Barry Yeoman wrote in a 1998 article for City Limits, “Left Behind in Sandtown,” there was a problem with that strategy: “Nobody . . . was looking at demographic trends to see if they could fill 600 additional units of housing.” The city and its partners somehow failed to take into account that Baltimore’s population was not growing, but shrinking — and, in fact, had been shrinking, sometimes rapidly, since 1950. Between 1970 and 1980, a staggering 13 percent of the city’s population moved away. Frustrated by an increasingly hostile business climate, employers left. And, exhausted by rising crime, so did residents. By 1999, 10 percent of the city’s population was drug-addicted, and there had been almost a murder a day through much of the 1990s. In the 2000s, the trend continued.

All dressed up with no place to go, it would seem.

Sure can't go to see the Orioles at Camden Yards.

What a pathetic symbol of the state of post-America.  America's game being played to no one, because of . . . well, decades of morally rotten rule by America-hating overlords.