Xanny

Xanny t1_j7q6scy wrote

Yes? Look at the demographics of the county. its going to flip minority white by the next census, a drop from like 80% white in 1980 or so. Blacks that could went right where the whites did a half century earlier once they had the chance.

> poverty is largely unbreakable

I bet if you go back 5 generations in your family you had someone working as a subsistence farmer living in a shack they didn't even own, and today you are probably well educated middle class and white collar. News flash, people do actually get out of poverty. My grandmother was daughter to a tenant farmer and died owning her own suburban house with no material wants, all the cars and vacations she wanted, having worked as a university secretary for 30 years.

A lot of why she did that though was from racism. She was on the winning side of the post war suburban sprawl movement, her husband was a veteran, they had all the opportunity handed to them if they were willing to take it and did.

By comparison the "irredeemable" poor people you are describing have been here for 80+ years in the same cycle of disinvestment. They have lived the same lifestyle for generations with no opportunities offered. And like I said, those that did find opportunity largely took it and left. Go find me a anywhere in the county with the kind of total abandonment that the butterfly has.

Its often as simple as if you can get a bank loan on if you can escape generational poverty or not. My family exists as it does today on the back of guaranteed low rate mortgages for veterans and whites after WW2.

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Xanny t1_j7q53wq wrote

The poor parts of Baltimore have been naturally depopulating for half a century. If you look at the census data all the areas you would describe as blighted are all losing double digit population per decade. Anyone that can get out does, and anyone that can't probably has a poor life expectancy.

If literally the status quo continues, the city will keep leveling vacant blocks, until all the depressed parts of the city are empty fields. It will just take another century. Simultaneously, gentrification pushes back into these areas on a lot of fronts, and as people find they can sell their run down crumbling houses for enough to move elsewhere with better opportunity they usually will.

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Xanny t1_j7pohvg wrote

We could even build them their own communities, we can call them "projects", and have their housing subsidized. I'm sure that would work great.

The US tried this shit. You have to break the cycle. It isn't "economically" profitable in the short term to do it. Nothing else works, people will still exist even if you wish they didn't, and we know from history if you just try to leave all the poor people on their own in a corner somewhere their living conditions deteriorate until it takes the whole city down.

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Xanny t1_j65numm wrote

> Incentivizing market entry for more providers would likely result in the same outcome for customers with very little stress to the city.

Lol, ISPs are the most hated companies in the country. Its infrastructure capture to give a private corporation exclusivity in your conduits, cough cough Comcast. No, hell no. If the city wants to lay fiber, it should be our fiber, publicly owned, and the only private entity should be the backbone connection. The city does our water and our trash, it can do our Internet. Like, sometimes city services suck, but do you know what suck way more? Private water and trash cos literally everywhere.

The city could always get a... leasing program, rather than ya know, giving away infrastructure to private corporations again, when that always goes so well every time it happens.

The government being shit isn't made better by giving away the city to private companies to also run like shit. You really can't get out of fixing a shit government if you want anything to get better.

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Xanny t1_j64loel wrote

This would make sense in a city and state totally bereft of funds to support its own infrastructure, maybe, and even then it would be horrificially shortsighted.

Baltimore and Maryland are honestly awash in cash. The city claims to have no money but that is after they earmark over a billion dollars for the schools and the cops. In truth priorities are just horribly misaligned, and selling off public infrastructure for what amounts to a drop in a bucket of corruption is just throwing away the cities future.

The conduit division is underfunded and understaffed not because there is no money left, but because politicians deprioritized it. How about we fund the conduit division and actually build a fiber network so we can get off fucking Comcast.

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Xanny t1_j61lxxx wrote

Most of the extreme incarcerations that ruined neighborhoods were drug related in the last 40 years, not violent crime related.

We can be hard on violence and decriminalize drugs and stop the racist drug war.

Drugs right now only overlap so hugely with violent crime because both are heavily criminalized. And while hard drugs like heroin will never be good, we can approach them as a health problem rather than a crime problem and reduce violence along the way.

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Xanny t1_j5uv1df wrote

Reply to comment by bmore in Bus Lane Laws by siwel3

I was thinking about this but there is no real good way to have carbrains do right turns across bus / bike lanes that act as straight thrus that works well. They never check their right to yield to thru traffic.

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Xanny t1_j4s2gft wrote

We already have Lexington Market like 3 mintues away as a food hall though. And federal hill and fells point have dozens of restaraunts. I don't feel like there is room for the inner harbor to be a foodie destination.

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Xanny t1_j4862zb wrote

There is a CSX tunnel from Camden to Penn, it follows the exact same alignment as the light rail. Nothing ever stopped MTA from using the portal entrances on either end CSX already has, widening them, and connecting the light rail to the subway tunnel.

If they buried the damn thing it would be a night and day difference and improvement.

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Xanny t1_j27a6lz wrote

The county is definitionally suburby because all its growth in the last century was for white flight from the city. There is almost no mixed use development and where it is its usually insanely expensive to live there. If its walkable, its like a single road of shops surrounded by parking lots with limited access highways abound.

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