One of Baltimore’s favorite daughters, novelist Laura Lippmann, has said that her city “suffers from nostalgia” that “keeps us from being honest in talking about what really happened here.” And when we do talk about our city’s tragic decline, we’re often in denial about what happened. Though Baltimore has embraced progressive policies for generations—creating a public-housing authority before many other cities, electing only Democrats for over a half-century, and hiking property taxes 19 times between 1950 and 1975—the city’s political and opinion leaders almost invariably point to “a history of inequity” when assigning responsibility for its failures. That omits other contributors to the city’s population loss, homicide rate, and failing schools, such as an unfavorable tax environment.
Baltimore’s latest idea to treat its resident-flight problem commits the same error. Presiding over a city with more than 16,000 vacant structures, city officials are proposing a nostalgia-inspired revival of the 1970s-era “dollar houses” program. Back then, the city sold abandoned properties for a buck to buyers who promised to fix them up and live in them a while. The fondly remembered program is often credited with starting a renaissance, but that’s an illusion: fewer than 200 houses were actually sold through the program, which did little to stem the city’s 13 percent population loss during that decade.
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