Homeless shelter location: ‘good fences,’ or ‘gated community?’
Proposed homeless shelter, east of JFX, near prison buildings, Our Daily Bread soup kitchen.
The real reason why one of Baltimore’s toniest neighborhoods is okay with a homeless shelter nearby.
By Gerald Neily
Mount Vernon is actually supporting a city-run homeless shelter on the edge of their neighborhood, contrary to recent experience in Butcher’s Hill and elsewhere in the the city. A front-page story in the Sun yesterday and an editorial trumpet this atypical occurrence, without revealing the main reason for the community’s compliance. That would be spelled JFX.
The JFX, also known as the Jones Falls Expressway, separates “one of the city’s most prestigious neighborhoods” (as the Sun describes Mount Vernon) from the proposed homeless shelter at Monument and Fallsway. The JFX also separates Mount Vernon from all the prisons and social service facilities that line the east side of the elevated highway from Eager Street southward. If good fences make good neighbors, then it apparently follows that a massive elevated highway makes a great neighbor.
Others have dreamt differently. Walter Sondheim, one of Downtown Baltimore’s all-time leading boosters, had a vision of tearing down the expressway and replacing it with a grand boulevard that would run along the Jones Falls stream, which had been submerged underground to make way for city growth even before the expressway was built in the 1960s. Such a boulevard would run right through the new homeless shelter, and it isn’t likely that such a grandiose and expensive vision would be pursued just to provide a more elegant front door address for the adjacent prisons.
Some people will find the idea of the-JFX-as-dividing-line depressing. (My Bolshevik editor.) I think it’s just sort of how the world works and in this case, I think it allowed the parties to come up with a good pragmatic solution to a tough problem of where to put the social services that nobody wants. The deal resulted in some housing relief for the homeless and some traffic relief for Mount Vernon. (One of the concessions they won from the city was the removal of rush-hour “no parking” signs on major arteries, which will encourage rush hour traffic to use the JFX instead of the local streets.)