The Baltimore Plan

From the Baltimore City Paper:

Called “The Baltimore Plan,” this 20-minute Encyclopaedia Britannica film from 1953 describes an urban renewal plan of the same name, initiated in 1945. Once a blighted area was identified, a cadre of city agencies (housing, sanitation, police, etc.) would conduct inspections and rigorously enforce code violations, forcing the owners to either vacate or fix up their properties. A housing court, the first in the country, was set up as the final arbiter for stubborn cases. Another outcome of the plan was the Fight Blight fund, which issued long-term, low-interest loans to homeowners wishing to make repairs on their houses.

In the film’s stagy retelling, an intrepid young social worker braves the “urban jungle” of Baltimore in order to alert citizens and public officials to the city’s poor housing conditions. She comes across horrors such as flat rats and vacant houses but forges on. Her report caught the attention of The Baltimore Sun, which published stories in her wake. City agencies and private citizens eventually pull together—hammering, laying concrete, and building walls to jaunty Leave It to Beaver-esque music—to rebuild and renew 27 blocks in East Baltimore that served as a pilot project. At the end of the film, children frolic in clean, rat-free playgrounds, and women water verdant gardens.

The Housing Court is one enduring legacy of the plan, but the city’s crumbling housing stock—and the flat rats—are obviously still with us. Some now take a cynical view of the Baltimore Plan, or at least of some of its proponents: “[S]lum dwellers saw only minor improvements,” historian Nicholas Dagen Bloom writes, “[but] those involved with the plan caught professional fire and gained national prominence.” The plan promoted the idea of improving neighborhoods without expanding the social welfare system, he says, and thus appealed to certain interested parties. The National Association of Real Estate Boards, the National Association of Home Builders, and the Mortgage Bankers’ Association all latched onto it in an attempt to reduce efforts to build more public housing.

Despite its Pollyanna, paternalistic tone—or, perhaps, because of it—the film is a fascinating cultural artifact. The scenes, while clearly staged, provide glimpses of a bygone Baltimore. (Note the gas lamps and the arabber at the beginning.) But some footage—like an alley strewn with debris that serves as a neighborhood playground—is not as unfamiliar as it should be. “Plans have only a pencil and paper reality,” the social worker says at one point. Sadly, that much and more remains true.

We Are All Workers: The Town behind the Levi's commercial

From Fast Company:

You've probably seen the Levi's commercials. The cinematic spot with color-saturated scenes of a rundown town, and a girl off-camera musing about how "things got broken here" how "frontiers are all around us." Or the shorter, more upbeat ad (same town and people) declaring that "there's work to be done" and "reinvention is our only option" over a jazzy version of "Heigh-Ho." The ads are partly about the joys of work, work wear, and wearing jeans (not necessarily in that order), but it's their eerie location, Braddock, PA, that's the real star.

Why Braddock? For one thing, it's the story. A once-prosperous town that once had 20,000 people in the 1940s is trying to recover from the long industrial decline (and the poverty, the crime, the drugs) that have turned it into a near–ghost town today, with a population of just 3,000.

Levi's involvement with the town extends far beyond just shooting a couple of commercials there. Levi's paid over $1.5 million to turn an abandoned church into a new community center and to expand an urban farm program, and it shot the commercial using real people from town, paying them standard rates for a commercial appearance.

Gentrification and New Urbanism

The Daily Kos ran an article this week called A Tale of Two (Segregated) Exurbs which was a critique of an article titled A Tale of of Two Exurbs which was published in The American Prospect Magazine. The Daily Kos goes one step beyond The American Prospect article in explaining the difference between the two exurbs, one which is sprawling exurb and the other a compact exurb designed by the founder of New Urbanism, Andres Duany.

The issue the article has with the Duany developed New Urbanist exurb is it's susceptibility toward the big "G" word, gentrification. The author feels like I often feel that the theory of New Urbanism is a great but the implementation often results in displacement of the lower class or rapidly increasing property values. Although I do have to say that I dont necessarily agree with this for the article's specific example of Gaithersburg, Maryland which I do feel is economically and socially diverse.

While I think the article's example is flawed I do believe it's message and intent is worth discussing. Here's a swipe from the article:

"Gaithersburg was designed by Duany Plater-Zyrbek, the nation’s leading firm in New Urbanist urban design. New Urbanism is kind of like a good, liberal-minded person’s vision of an urban utopia: mixed-use land zoning, local neighborhood stores and shops, extreme walkability, eco-friendly, and on and on. In short, New Urbanism is the urban planning/urban design alternative to suburban sprawl. A pretty good alternative, at least in theory.

The dirty little secret about Duany and New Urbanism is the design’s susceptibility to gentrification. A quaint little town with a thriving local economy is undoubtedly a hot commodity among young, affluent white folks. An influx in affluent folks typically precipitates raises in rents and property values, often resulting in lower-class displacement. Such is the potential effect of New Urbanism. It’s actually a little more than mere susceptibility to gentrification—Duany has been quoted in interviews pondering "What’s so bad with gentrification?" He even argued that the arrival of higher-income residents is what some urban communities need.

But there’s something peculiar—or, suspicious—about a discussion of New Urbanism (an urban design susceptible to gentrification) that fails to mention racial or class diversity (a major casualty of gentrification). In our quest for walkable, eco-friendly built environments, are we willing to concede racial diversity?"

Now I know this will look like I'm beating up on the theory of New Urbanism...again. I really want to like New Urbanism, I really, really do but all of it's greatest examples seem economically exclusionary and not very diverse. As you can tell from looking at this blog, I love cities and urban places because of their diversity, hodgepodge of ideas and it's quilted layers of history. New Urbanism seems like a whitewash of that. As for Duany's quote about importing wealth and not creating wealth in cities, I'll get to that in another post.

I have scratched my head over this issue several times but keep drawing blanks. Is there any way to create a New Urbanist project in an urban area while mixing low income residents with higher-income residents. Or can the goal of new Urbanist project help reconnect or foster growth from within the community without having to lure some outside force to "improve" the neighborhood.

Maybe New Urbanist projects are a victim of their own success. The problem with gentrification is that you can not stop it. Once a neighborhood tips towards being trendy the escalation of newcomers as well as the character of the neighborhood is dramatic. The only neighborhoods where an outside culture comes in that does not create instant gentrification are artist communities. While these communities eventually become gentrified it may take decades before long time residents feel pressured out by property values and the character of the neighborhood is never fully erased...in fact artists often enhance the positive qualities of neighborhoods.

Whatever the solution is we can see that there is a trend between New Urbanist projects and gentrification. Let's hope New Urbanism does not become our generation's new Urban Renewal projects.

A Historic Baltimore Relic - Old Town Mall

Despite many proposals within the last 40 years to save this mall and it's historical crossroads Old Town Mall continues to crumble. The community which was founded in the 1660’s and intersected the historic travel routes and commercial corridors of Greenmount/York Road and Gay Street/Harford Road was a vital commercial and industrial hub through the mid 20th century. In the 1960's under the guise of Urban Renewal, Old Town became the first mall next to public housing projects. In the 1970's, an interstate was constructed leaving the mall in shadows and in the 1990's, the public housing projects were razed leaving the mall with no residents. The history of inner city Baltimore can certainly be told through the history of Old Town Mall.

All pictures courtesy of the Baltimore Examiner

The historic neighborhood borders the city’s downtown and has long been a highly dense community that once was one of the city’s hubs for industry and commerce due to it’s close proximity to downtown. There are still several existing structures in the community that date back to the 19th and early 20th century that reflect the community’s once industrial character as evident with historic Shot Tower. The Old Town Mall stands on the site of the Old Town neighborhood which almost predates the city itself. The site of the Old Town Mall formed as a food market in 1813 which sparked the neighborhood’s growth and became a pedestrian mall under Hope XI in 1968. At that time, Old Town mall was the only mall in America to be located in an impoverished neighborhood as the site was almost completely surrounded by housing projects.

Almost like no other neighborhood in the city, the current condition of the Old Town community is a reflection of deep scars of failed urban policy locally and nationally which this community took the brunt of those failures. From two notorious housing projects which were eventually tore down in the mid 1990’s to the continued construction of I-83 in the 1970’s which further isolated the neighborhood from downtown, the community to many people was a blighted eyesore. An eyesore that stood in stark contrast to downtown Baltimore’s reemergence and new skyscrapers which were just blocks away from the crime ridden neighborhood.
.
This community has undergone significant changes within the last ten years from the State’s new Juvenile Justice Complex to the major redevelopment of the Lafayette Court and Flagstaff housing projects into low scale townhouse styled apartments. Unfortunately, there are still very visible vestiges of the community’s past struggle. The community is still home to public housing or public assisted housing and Old Town Mall is at the intersection of a very heavily traveled intersection is more blighted than ever and is a virtual ghost town surrounded by blighted buildings, empty parking lots and dirt lots.

The community’s decay and blight was not hidden or intertwined through a mass of interior city blocks but where on full display on the cris-crossing of several major arterial streets. The community quickly became a collection of unwanted land uses from acres of surface parking lots, the constant activity of the central post office, an expressway, a Juvenile Justice center, a homeless shelter and of course a concentration of public housing. Whatever that was unwanted somehow settled into that neighborhood at some point in time. This can be seen by the tent camps of homeless people who live in the community under the I-83 Expressway. Perhaps the neighborhood’s greatest weakness was not that it was decaying and impoverished but that it did not decay quietly. The neighborhood decayed before everyone to see who came downtown…and did so violently.

But perhaps the neighborhood’s greatest weakness can soon become it’s greatest strength. There is no reason that a neighborhood adjacent a downtown, a regional expressway, two subway stops and that is located on major arterial roads some of which are just blocks from region’s largest employer can not turn itself around.

1964 Towson Redevelopment Plan

The Redevelopment Plan

The images that you are about to see below are scans of an old 1964 Towson Redevelopment and Rehabilitation Commission Plan for a vision of Towson in 1975. The plan included a reconfiguration of streets, land uses and public spaces with some spectacularly bad 1960's International-style designed architecture.

.

Overall, the plan is very bold and there are some good features to the plan. Fortunately this planning vision did not take hold but I do have to say after viewing other redevelopment plans for Towson, a lot of times the planners proposed great plans that would have positively impacted the Towson core if the political will was there. Unfortunately, as planners we are proposing the same common sense plans as the planners before us had did in the previous decade. However the plan your about to see below is not a plan that we wish to duplicate.

.

I remember an Urban Studies professor I had was grilled by one of my classmates to name one positive, concrete thing he did when he was a city planner. He paused and then stated..."I stopped a lot of bad plans."

.

Existing Land Use of Towson in 1962

.

Proposed Land use map. As you can see from the map, the vision for Towsontowne Boulevard (minus the bridges) and Bosley Avenue came from this plan.

A close-up map of the core.

.

A transect of proposed buildings in the core

View of the plaza east of York Road

Image of what would be Towson Circle today

View of York Road from the south. Notice the tunnels for York Road going toward the Towson Circle. The tunnel is reminiscent of the tunnel found in downtown Rockville, MD.

View of Pennsylvania Avenue

View of retail shops. This picture is pretty accurate to what Towson looks like today.

View of the proposed government complex and public plaza

View of proposed moderate income housing. The plan sought to eliminate the neighborhood of East Towson due to blight. East Towson is currently a Nationally registered historic district which is comprised of descendants of the enslaved people of the nearby Hampton Mansion.

Proposed Towson skyline looking from the south

Hip Hop & City Planning Series

How Urban Renewal programs birthed the conditions that created Hip Hop.

Urban Renewal programs which sought to rid American cities of blight often times created more blight by displacing thousands of city residents, expedited white flight into the suburbs, created the modern housing project, and created “hyper-ghettos” that isolated the poor and disconnected them from jobs. All of these factors led to the poverty, despair and disenfranchisement found in the crumbling neighborhoods of the South Bronx and other inner-city ghettos that helped create the culture and music of Hip Hop. Hip Hop was born in the 1970’s after the death and failures of President Lyndon Johnson’s, War on Poverty, the Civil Rights era and lastly from the programs that created the modern day ghetto, Urban Renewal.

To give some background of how Urban Renewal programs started, we have to look back to what caused the Federal Government to initiate “blight removal” aka Urban Renewal. Many American cities before World War II, were major Industrial hubs which were defined by major industry and workforce housing for factory workers. During World War II, which was America’s industrial peak, hundreds of thousands southern Blacks migrated to northern cities to find work in factories. While some were fortunate and were able to find work, many did not and still faced discrimination. Without jobs, many southern blacks were forced into existing segregated black neighborhoods which quickly became overcrowded. When soldiers returned back home, the over crowdedness in cities became more dire and the effects of America’s largest baby boom were beginning to be felt.

While many black neighborhoods were often in distress at the time when urban renewals programs began in the 1940’s, not all black inner city neighborhoods were slums. During Urban Renewal many middle class black neighborhoods were targeted for city civic projects or highway construction through their neighborhoods for the supposed greater good of the city. The targeting of black neighborhoods for highways created a two folded problem for cities, the first was that it destroyed viable neighborhoods and the second is that highways allowed whites to funnel out into the suburbs (which blacks were excluded from) and still easily connect back to city’s downtown without having to interact with inner city.

While some neighborhoods were cleared for highways other neighborhoods were cleared for the construction of public housing and some were rehabbed for wealthy neighborhoods (Society Hill in Philadelphia). The clearing of neighborhoods for urban renewal often times gave very little acknowledgement toe the displacement of thousands of people whose homes were being destroyed. The displaced residents of urban renewal were forced to move into what they could afford which were adjoining distressed poor neighborhoods which often times sank further into poverty.

Black families that had the capital to move, sought houses outside the black community which sadly triggered the irrational fears of the white community (fueled by real estate developers) that blacks moving in would quickly turn their neighborhoods into slums. Whites afraid of lower property values as well as other fears fled their neighborhoods if not the city. On top of this White G.I.’s returning from World War II were often given generous FHA loans to houses away from blighted cities, however black soldiers were often denied FHA loans. This domino effect led to quick disinvestments of the city’s tax base and a sudden shift in the socio-economic and demographic make-up of the city.

To rid cities of outdated slum housing, city planners sought to construct clean, well-run public housing high-rises with modern amenities in replace of existing slums. (Note: A previous post called, Great Planning Documentaries, included a film “A Place to Live” which covered the slum clearance of a North Philadelphia neighborhood for the infamous and later dangerous Housing project known as The Richard Allen Projects, which Bill Cosby grew up in and were the inspiration fro the cartoon series, Fat Albert.) Unfortunately, the construction of public housing ultimately caused more problems then it aimed to solve.

One of the many problems that public housing caused during the urban renewal era was compacting highly dense impoverished populations in poverty. Housing projects lacked access to jobs in their own neighborhoods and continued a downward spiral with the economic opportunity or any type of economic advancement within their community. This downward spiral into further poverty allowed public housing projects to become a magnet to crime and other social ills that plague cities. Ultimately the idea of housing the poor in isolated housing project towers was viewed as a mistake as most of the housing projects across the nation were tore down in the 1980’s and 1990’s.

Although, many housing project were tore down in the 1990’s, by the early 1970’s the damage that these public housing projects had caused by concentrating poverty as economic investment had funneled out of the city, leaving the poor more and more isolated had already been done. In the early 1970’s the funding to many urban renewal projects was being cut off which included the federal funding to cities to help maintain various city renewal projects including public housing. As maintenance for public housing all but ceased, public housing projects quickly deteriorated and repelled any economic development which caused even more blight to surrounding neighborhoods.

By the mid 1970s, desegregation was beginning to take off that allowed more middle class blacks to move away from blighted neighborhoods which further led to the isolation of blacks in housing projects and run-down blocks. Property owners in these neighborhoods, who could not find anyone to buy their abandoned or half vacant properties, often set arson to their buildings so that they could collect on some money through insurance. These acts of arson left an even more scarring image to inner-cities, especially major cities in the east. In the South Bronx, the undisputed birth place of Hip Hop it is estimated that the Bronx borough lost 40% of its housing stock by the late 1970’s. During his 1980 Presidential campaign, then California Governor made a campaign stop in the Bronx and had remarked that the Bronx looked like London after the Blitz in World War II.

All of the conditions that were either caused or triggered by Urban Renewal programs had laid down the many problems of today’s modern inner-city. While many of today’s problems would have existed without Urban Renewal, there is no doubt that these blight removal programs exacerbated the problem.

These impoverished conditions left the children growing up in these neighborhoods with no voice and no outlets. The economic conditions of these kids made them improvise to let their expressions be heard. While they had no instruments, local Dee Jay’s would take the breakbeat of soul records and make a sampled sound that was uniquely their own. Kids who did not have a dance floor would often use pieces of cardboard boxes and use that as their dance floor as they danced to the breakbeat. These breakbeat dancers would later be called B-Boys. As the B-Boys danced, the Dj would make simple rhymes about who he was, how nice is skills were and where he was from. This eventually laid the basis to what we know as rapping today. The kids, who grew up in these neighborhoods that looked like war zones, could not afford art utensils so they made their world a canvas. The kids, known as graffiti bombers would “bomb” walls, trains or any other visible piece of infrastructure and spray-paint their names as tags on buildings to let the world know who they were…or more importantly let the world know they exist. Eventually graffiti bombing took off into intricate designs of their own style which became the neighborhood’s public art.

Once you combine the Dj, the B-Boys, the rappers, and the graffiti bombers you have all the major elements of hip hop. An art form and culture that is uniquely American and was uniquely born out of ghettos of America’s inner-cities that were shaped by the failures of Urban Renewal programs.

All of these conditions can be illustrated in Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five’s song, The Message. Filmed in the Bronx, the music video was the first early hits in Hip Hop and was the first to talk about the social conditions of the ghetto that created their art.
Excerpts from the song:

First verse –
Broken glass everywhere
People pissing on the stairs, you know they just don’t care
I can't take the smell, I can't take the noise
Got no money to move out, I guess I got no choice
Rats in the front room, roaches in the back
Junkies in the alley with the baseball bat
I tried to get away, but I couldn't get far
Cause a man with a tow-truck repossessed my car

Last Verse:
A child is born with no state of mind
Blind to the ways of mankind
God is smiling on you but he's frowning too
Because only God knows what you’ll go through
You’ll grow in the ghetto, living second rate
And your eyes will sing a song of deep hate
The places you’re playin’, where you stay
Looks like one great big alley way...

Hip Hop & City Planning Series

Like no other music before or after it, Hip Hop intrinsically belongs to the city. Hip Hop was birthed in the city, lives in the city and could not have been started anywhere else but the city.
Other musical genres have their meccas of their musical art, be it Jazz from New Orleans, Country in Nashville, the Blues of Memphis or the Rhythm of Motown...but while these cities that drew in artists from all over the map to help spread their genre's music, HIP HOP was started purely by city residents, for city residents with out any outside influences.

In short, Hip Hop is a product of the city. Similarly to the Blues, Hip Hop begun from the spirit of the havenots and the burdened. The economic conditions of people from both genres helped inspire the melodies, songs and messages of their plight, glory and spirit. However, Hip Hop as a genre itself was created from it's own economic conditions. The lack of money for instruments, music training or even music programs in city schools inspired city youth to come up with their own music and their own sound without instruments.

Hip Hop began when DJ's took the drum solo or break beat of a record from another genre and began scratching the record back and forth to extend the break beat into a grove. Once the beat was sampled, people began to make simple rhymes to them while the kids who danced to the break beats, who were called B-Boys created their own dance that we know of as Breakdancing. Along with graffiti, all the elements of the Hip Hop culture formed creating a new genre of music straight from the city.

What this series will look at is the influence that city planning and government programs had on cities that created the conditions that Hip Hop was created from. This series will look all the way back to Urban Renewal, and the affect that these programs had in creating housing projects as well as "Blight Removal" programs which targeted minority neighborhoods. This series will look back to the effects that "Reagonomics" had on cities and the poor. The dramatic impact of the crack cocaine era and its affects on Hip Hip will be explored and lastly the series will look at gentrification in cities today.

This should be an interesting series and as always we would love to hear people's responses and comments.