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Opinion: 10 ways to grow Baltimore at little cost and with big benefits

December 9, 2011 at 2:20 pm 35

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Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, in her inaugural address this week, continued the long political tradition of getting the platitudes right – “Baltimore: A Great Place to Grow” was the theme of her speech – but gave few specifics about how she plans to reverse five decades of shrinking population and attract 10,000 new families to the city.

Social problems and crime are difficult nuts to crack, but physical solutions shouldn’t be. That’s exactly what government is supposed to do.

Here’s what could be done to grow Baltimore. Most of the proposals below would cost the government and taxpayer very little. Some would actually add money to the city’s coffers. Others would, once and for all, rid the city of prior bad decisions that continue to haunt its neighborhoods and hurt its economic competitiveness:

• Tax those vacant houses – Put a fire under everyone sitting on underutilized property to bring it into productive use, starting with our plague of vacant houses.

• Open the door to school choice – Political boundaries and zones shouldn’t block the schoolhouse door. Give parents the power to match their responsibility.

• Stop special development deals – All they are is time-consuming, tax-eating red tape benefiting the 1%. End PILOTs that hand developers tax breaks that often stretch out for decades.

• Reform infrastructure financing – TIFs (tax increment financing) should be used only where infrastructure is really necessary to support the development. No more expensive trophy projects.

• Focus on the streets – They are where we perceive the city. Get heavy traffic off local streets and free them up for as much real urban-oriented activity (walking, biking, window-shopping) as possible. Avoid superblocks and fortress developments.

• Fix local transit – Put a fire under the MTA to tear down its happenstance bus system. Convert it into logical community-based short routes, efficient express routes and transit hubs to connect them. No more convoluted routes from Sandtown to Fort McHenry. No more endless slogs from UMBC to White Marsh.

• Expand regional transit – MARC is a huge success story to be nurtured and expanded because it sells Baltimore to the larger region and to affluent Washingtonians. Light- and heavy-rail from downtown to Owings Mills, Hunt Valley and Glen Burnie is a flop because the suburbs are now irrevocably oriented to the Beltway and beyond, not to the city.

• No more diversionary downtown gimmicks – Like 175 mph street race cars. Like Disneyfication of the Inner Harbor.

• Tear down the Franklin-Mulberry expressway – Despite having no functional purpose, the “highway to nowhere” continues to cut like a dagger through West Baltimore.

• Treasure our priceless architectural and historical heritage – It’s what defines our identity and distinguishes Baltimore from the cookie-cutter suburbs.

Gerald Neily was a transportation planner at the Baltimore Department of Planning for 19 years. Since 2005, he has written Baltimore InnerSpace, which was named “Best Urban Planning Blog” of 2008 by Baltimore City Paper.

  • Sherri A.

    Hear, hear and I sure hope the Mayer and her administration read this. Yes, yes, yes, to all 10. Thank you!

  • Jdmohre

    Mayor WDS had the right idea.  Instead of taxing abandoned property, he sold 500 abandoned buildings for $1 apiece to urban homesteaders and hundreds of commercial shells for $100 each to businessmen.

    Forget taxing these properties. Turn them over to those that will invest in them.

    • Gerald Neily

      Since taxes on worthless property are currently near nothing, private owners have little to lose by just sitting on them. They would love for the city to come along and give them good money to add them to the city’s inventory. So it’s a waiting game while the houses just sit there and rot. A hefty land tax would end the waiting game. Owners unwilling to invest would have a strong incentive to sell or even give the properties away. The city’s “Vacants to Value”program is the descendant of the Dollar House program, but it’s difficult to get clear title to many properties. The two most successful of the 1970s dollar house programs in Otterbein and Barre Circle had a unique circumstance – the city had previously acquired all the houses for highways that were never built. But it actually turned out to be an expensive and disruptive process, not unlike the current East Baltimore Development Initiative north of Hopkins Hospital where huge swaths of houses were purchased wholesale. It worked in the 70s mainly because they were great locations.

  • joe

    I’ve got 10 ways as well….#1 transit, #2 transit, #3 transit, #4 transit, #5transit, #6 transit, #7 transit, #8 transit, #9 transit, #10 did i mention transit? If baltimore expands its transit lines everything population growth will follow, it’s happened in portland, boston, denver, minneapolis etc….. its reprehensible that baltimore’s largest suburb (towson) doesn’t have rail access.  baltimore has so much potential.

    • Tim Pula

      More transit would be great.  It however is not the only solution.  I hate to keep mentioning taxes because it gets mis-interpreted and makes me sound like – well a republican.  I don’t tend to care for political labels.  That said, taxes do need to be lowered.  City government needs to be smaller, more nimble, about helping the citizenry.  It needs to be can-do rather than put up roadblocks.  Schools need to be better.  That doesn’t happen overnight and I think Alonso has many things moving in the right direction.  However, in the meantime, he has let the really good schools, City, Poly, Western decline.  While working to make all of the schools good, make a handful of them great so you give the middle class families that value education a choice of living in the City without breaking the bank yet again (after paying property taxes) by having to pay private school tuition. 

  • Ktrueheart

    Good suggestions … Just hope our Mayor understands that there are many low cost options she can employ to Grow BMore and engaging the creative and concerned citizenry will be critical to her success.   Many of US having been hoping for an opportunity to be a part of our home town’s revival into a thriving urban metropolis again … So for our Mayor:  Let’s get busy! 

  • Tim Pula

    PILOT’s wouldn’t be necessary if Baltimore’s property tax structure and delivery of governmental services was anywhere near competitive with that of our surrounding metropolitan counties.  Look at the tremendous flight of businesse and people to Baltimore County.  Much of that could have been kept in Baltimore had Baltimore City’s government kept their prices (taxes) competitive and delivered highly responsive, high quality services.

    Ultimately, PILOT’s benefit the tenants of the buildings/developments granted them as those cost reductions are passed through to them.

    • Anonymous

      I hear people keep saying this, but tell, me, how does a city increase the quality of their services when cutting their income by slashing taxes? If we cut taxes without replacing them, we get less police, less firefighters, and less money to fix the sorry mess that is our streets, let alone schools, transit, and other “luxuries.” I have no idea what the solution is, but it strikes me that cutting property taxes isn’t going to fix baltimore’s population problem. Taxes aren’t what keep Hopkins doctors from living here, its the murder rate, just sayin.

      • Marc

        Sure, just cutting property taxes alone wouldn’t fix Baltimore’s problems, not by a long shot. But the path the city’s on right now – a dwindling middle/upper class paying ever-higher taxes to pay for mediocre city services – can’t continue on forever. The waterfront neighborhoods and North Baltimore can’t keep propping up the rest of the city indefinitely; eventually the city will implode.

        Lower, fairer, simpler property taxes (or a single land tax) are just one incentive out of many that could be used to expand the pool of middle class residents. That is, taxes could be collected from a larger population, reducing the burden on each individual. This was B’more in the 50s: low(er) property taxes distributed over a large middle class population funded the city’s expenditures.

        Of course there are other issues connected to high taxes: as in many other municipalities (and states), the money needed to properly fund B’more pensions and employee benefits has exceeded residents’ ability to pay. A pension wasn’t a big deal when the average civil servant lived less than, say, five years after retiring from City Hall. But now a “second career” of twenty, even thirty years after retirement is possible. The same goes for similar problems like SS: when the program was first set up, most people died before they could ever collect benefits. Now people live off SS for decades. How is all this financially sustainable?

        I would agree that addressing crime is even more important. The two issues go hand-in-hand, though: New York and Boston (two former decrepitating hellholes) didn’t turn themselves around solely via the broken windows theory.

        • Richard

          Marc, before the “Reagan Revolution” high income earners paid upwards of 80 to 90 percent of their income in taxes. The reason we cannot fund pensions, make infrastructure investments, etc. is because we have chosen to tax high income earners at a very low level. If thoughtfully redistributed, the sheer amount of wealth that has been hoarded by the upper 1 percent of our society over the last thirty years could easily pay for municipal pensions, new roads, new bridges,  national health care, etc. etc. High taxes did not create our problems. Low taxes did.

      • Tim Pula

        We don’t need to cut fire or police in order to cut taxes.  Right now, today, Baltimore City employs some 15,000 employees, serving a population of or 650,000.  Baltimore County by comparison has roughly 7,000 employees serving a population of 825,000.  There are a lot of places to cut without cutting the core services that local government was created for.

        Quite a few JHU docs live in the City, one right next to me.  When they do leave the City for a surrounding county, it’s generally b/c of schools and taxes, not the murder rate.  One thing we could stop doing is harming our schools that have been traditionally very strong and competitive – City, Poly, Western.  All of these schools have suffered under the current school administration.  They once were places that attracted the best and the brightest and gave families in B’more who valued education and whose kids performed well and real option.  

      • Mark C.

        Actually, the murder rate may be a factor, but certainly not the most important one.  I’m not a Hopkins Doc, but probably like most professionals in the City, my neighborhood isn’t dangerous.  Sure, sometimes violence strikes close to home, but that happens in the suburbs too.  Property crimes are a much greter concern and frustration.

        What is very real is the monthly cost of living in the city- property taxes and tuitions, difficult even for a Doctor, and these are things we can change.

  • Tim Pula

    What you are missing is reforming city govnerment.  It currently employs 2 people for every 100 citizens while Baltimore County employes 1 for every 100.  Yet services levels and quality are very poor.  As long as City government is simply an employment service that doesn’t hold employs accountable to deliver friendly and high quality services and as long as B’more continues to expect its citizens to pay twice as much as B’more county for this poor service, it will be more difficult to attract new citizens. 

  • Parent

    “Open the door to school choice.  Political boundaries and zones shouldn’t block the schoolhouse door.”

    What a great way to drive peoople out of the city.  People want to live where their kids are guaranteed a good K-12 education (e.g. the rapidly growing Howard County).  If you have school choice in a city in which most of the schools are lousy, there will be too much demand for the few good schools, and some sort of screening system or lottery will need to be implemented to decide who gets a good education and who does not.  That’s way too much risk for most people who care about their kids’ education.  Take a look at Baltimore’s public high schools — terrible schools, despite all of the school choice.  That’s why the only people who live in the city are those who don’t have teenagers, those who can afford private schools, and those who don’t really care about education enough to move out.  School choice drives the best students out of the city, which lowers the qualities of the schools, which drives even more people out, etc.

    Or to put it another way:  do you really think people will leave the surrounding counties, where a good education is guaranteed to everyone who lives in their neighborhood, so that they can roll the dice with their kids’ education in Baltimore City? 

    The right way to fix Baltimore’s schools is to build good neighborhood schools, which will entice people who care about the education of their children to move into the neighborhoods with good schools.  As more young families move into the good neighborhoods and demand for the best neighborhood schools grows, their zones can gradually be expanded to encompass the entire city.

  • Gerald Neily

    We need BETTER transit, Tim, not just more transit. I totally agree with you on lower taxes, of course. That’s why my list has no new big ticket items. But to avoid the MTA’s bad transit lines, the city raised parking taxes to run its severely limited Charm City Circulator, when it should have used parking revenue to lower property taxes.

    Parent, do you really want to prevent high school students from going to Poly and City? Most parents who move out do so long before their kids get to high school age.  

    • Parent

      Gerald, do you want to tell your kid that if they don’t test into Poly, the whole family is going to have to move to a town with good high schools?  Nobody wants to put their kid in that position.

      It’s great to have magnet schools that students can test into.  It’s terrible that there are absolutely no good public neighborhood high schools in the city.  Parents move out as soon as they no longer can guarantee a good education for their children.  In some neighborhoods, that’s by elementary school age.  In others, it’s by middle school.  In the entire city, as you noted, people are gone by the time their kids are of high school age.

  • Richard

    Good ideas, Gerry. But how about we add one more suggestion to the list – taxing non-profit property. Major real estate owned by large institutions like Johns Hopkins, as well as thousands of small properties owned by churches and synagogues, get away without being taxed. We could substantially reduce the residential tax rate if the nonprofit sector contributed its fair share.

    • Parent

      Richard, that would be a great way to drive out the one remaining major employer in Baltimore.  Johns Hopkins owns a lot of land outside of Baltimore, and I’m sure they would steadily move their operations out of the city if you were to tax them more heavily than the surrounding areas would.  That’s what every other large employer has done.

      If you want to bring more people into the city, you should lower taxes, rather than raising them.  It worked wonders for Boston and SF. 

      • Richard

        Sorry, but I don’t agree at all. Are you saying that all of those people who drive to work at Hopkins facilities don’t create a burden on our infrastructure? Are you saying that an institution that pays its executives in the high 6 figures should NOT pay property taxes, but I should??? Sorry, but I doubt Hopkins would pull up stakes and leave the city if they had to pay property taxes. And why should we be bullied by a large employer just because they may threaten to move if we don’t do their bidding? Last thing – there is nothing wrong with taxes. They are essential to a high-functioning society. But if everyone does not pay their fair share then the lowly homeowner gets stuck with the bill.

        • Parent

          If you want to be fair about this, I presume you’re proposing taxes on every non-profit organization in the city, including churches.  And yes, if you make Hopkins pay taxes, they will leave.  Not suddenly  — you’re right in that they can’t.  But there’s simply no way they can remaing competitive if they have to pay taxes and other non-profit universities don’t.  I am sure they would love to expand their DC-area campuses, and I’m sure those areas would be happy to have them. 

          You’re right in that taxes are necessary.  And the people making 6 figures at Hopkins pay taxes just like everyone else.  But instead of going after non-profits who do a lot of public good, why not tax things you don’t want?  Taxing vacant homes is a great idea.  So is raising the tax on alcohol.  The more you tax something, the less of it there will be. 

  • glsever

    I think these are all great ideas; however, is it fair to say that tearing down the highway to nowhere would have “little cost”?  My understanding is that just refilling the pit alone is extremely costly; if you wanted to maintain the rail right of way via a tunnel, then the cost would be staggering, but I don’t know if that’s really necessary.  But yeah, my understanding is that if refilling the pit was not costly, it would have been done by now.

    • Gerald Neily

      The city already took the first step in closing the “Highway to Nowhere” while the end wall was knocked down, and then undid it by pointlessly reopening the highway. Baltimorphosis.com shows how the “ditch” can be redeveloped without an expensive cap or fill, taking advantage of the two levels to create unique redevelopment sites. Just as important is the need to downsize the highway between downtown and the “ditch” in order to redevelop the massive and soon-to-be abandoned Social Security Metro West complex. All this could easily be done incrementally.

  • Richard

    One more comment – I would say that your characterization of heavy rail from Owings Mills as a “flop” is way off base. The most recent ridership statistics for the Baltimore Metro show that it has 58,000 daily riders. That is significantly more than MARC (32,000 daily riders) or the Light Rail (also 32,000 daily riders). If anything, the Metro is the only rail option in the Baltimore area that really works.

    • Gerald Neily

      The first 8-mile stub of heavy rail from Charles Center to Reisterstown Plaza was promised to carry 83,000 per day as soon as it opened in the 80s. And transit oriented development has been a flop (we’re talking about “growing the city” here). But yes, operationally it works great and could potentially be the backbone for a system, except that the MTA and city have decided to avoid it with their proposed Red Line.

      • Richard

        Fair enough, Gerry. I would be the first to agree that bypassing a serious extension of the Metro for the clunky Red Line was a big mistake.

  • Tim Pula

    I doubt that JHU will actually leave.  The cost of their infrastructure is abosulutely astounding and even they and all the grant money they receive could not move it in any realistic time frame.  The bigger concern is that they funnel future expansion to areas outside of B’more City.

    By the way, JHU does pay property taxes on a number of facilities.  It leases a lot of property from private landlords – Legg Mason Building in Harbor East, Stieff Building, Candler Building, Bond Street Warf – just to name a few.  In all of those buildings they pay market rental rates, a part of which pays the proportionate share of property taxes on that space. 

    It may sound like the same old drum beat coming out of the republican camp but there is truth to the fact that if B’more had a more reasonable tax rate and a local government that focussed first on doing its job well (rather than trying to constantly tell the local private sector what to do) there would be more businesses in town helping to pay the freight.

    • http://profiles.google.com/jamiehunt344 James Hunt

      Also, colleges and universities pay taxes on income-generating properties they own, such as dorms and dining halls. They also are major employers and have contributed extensively to the redevelopment of neighborhoods around them.

      The rule of thumb is, the more you tax of something, the less you get of it. Which may be fine in the case of cigarettes. Not so great in the case of higher education.

    • Parent

      I think we’re basically saying the same thing.  Johns Hopkins wouldn’t leave immediately, but their future growth would happen outside the city.  And as their facilities in the city aged, instead of updating or replacing them, they would just sell them off and use the proceeds to build out more of their presence outside Baltimore.  It would be a pretty easy call for them to make.  In addition to the tax savings, I’m sure it would be a lot easier for them to recruit top students and employees if they weren’t located in Baltimore. 

      I wonder how much of the resistance to lower taxes comes from knee-jerk resistance to all things associated with Republicans.  There are some situations where taxes are clearly too low, and they need to go up.  There are other times when they are clearly too high and need to go down.  Baltimore’s taxes are clearly too high, when you compare them to surrounding areas or other cities.  And these high taxes have hurt the city badly.

      • Tim Pula

        I think your point about taxes is right on.  I’m not a republican and not against taxes in a broad sense, but Baltimore’s are clearly too high.  Baltimore has priced itself out of competition with its neighboring counties.  On top of that, you don’t get services in return for the taxes you pay. 

        Batimore’s taxes should come down and frankly some of the surrounding counties should probably increase.

  • Mark C.

    Gerry, excellent suggestions. 
    Your focus on physical items is important, we really should prioritize investments in things actually under our ability to control.  ‘Scarry’ as crime and schools may be, we can not control the behavior of others.  Crime and schools will improve only as a secondary result of other, more tangible investments like you’ve suggested- better roads, better transit, better tax code… laying the foundation for additional jobs and working, law abiding households.

  • Marc

    Richard, those were federal income taxes, not local property taxes. A lot of people have thrown around that 90% figure in recent years, but the reality is few people ever paid that literal percentage. Deductions, exemptions, and credits pretty much reduced the rate to more or less the same level it is today (~35%).

    Before 1939 Maryland had no personal income tax. Before 1937 it had no corporate income tax. Before 1947 it had no sales tax. Not so long ago alcohol and tobacco taxes were lower or nonexistent. The state lottery didn’t exist until 1972. In recent decades Baltimore has been zealously using various local fees, fines, and taxes – parking, sanitation, bottles, permits, etc. – as revenue generators too. Many of these local taxes/fees simply didn’t exist several decades ago (or they were much lower because the city didn’t need to rely on them for revenue), yet the city easily managed to support itself financially. Why is it that both the city and the state keep raising or implementing new taxes, fees, and tolls, but keep finding it harder and harder to balance budgets, meet expenses, and fund infrastructure? What a perverse scenario: more and more taxes, but more and more deficits and spiraling expenses!

    Something is out of control here – spending! I can sympathize with some ever-increasing expenses – an aging urban infrastructure suffering from deferred maintenance will naturally cost more than when it was brand new – but other soaring expenses are often inexcusable. Sorry if that makes me sound like a Tea Partier, but I think they definitely have a point here.

  • Bill M

    Yes, taxes in Baltimore City are too high and physical development activity would be great, but if we don’t create jobs that pay living wages and then fill them with people who live in the city, everything else is not going to help.  We have many neighborhoods that are good places to live and we need to focus on them.  Their population can be maintained and in most cases increased if we really focus available resources on them.  There is clearly not enough money to do everything, but Baltimores’s recovery, like many other cities, has been stymied by a lack of political courage  to prioritize and build from strength.  Our Council district system helps promote policies designed to spread money around.  Every neighborhood gets a little, but not enough to turn the corner.  So, deterioration just keeps advancing. 
    Gerald focuses on the physical infrastucture because that is his background and it is important.  But, I can tell you that my neighborhood has no vacancies because of the elementary school district it is in.  If we were in a neighboring zone, we would lose ten per cent of our households by next September.  Five years ago, every family that had a child reaching four years of age moved out of the city.  No more!    For our neighborhood, the MARC train is probably the most important transportation system.  At least ten per cent of our wage earners are commuting to Washington D.C., three or more days a week. 
    The depature of Social Security was mentioned in passing by someone and didn’t even cause a ripple of conversation.  There is no way that our Congressional delegation and Governor should be allowing this to happen.  Frederick County really doesn’t need  this monstorous facility.  Baltimore City should be jumping up and down in angry protest.  But, not a wimper.

    • Parent

      I agree that many neighborhoods are in need of investment, but there is absolutely no way for the city to provide the required resources. One solution is to keep asking the state and federal government for more help, but it’s hard to build a great city by relying on the charity of others. The best source of investment is the private sector, and if taxes in Baltimore were even close to those of the surrounding areas, private money would come pouring in. That’s why high taxes and lack of investment in neighborhoods are essentially the same issue.

      Washington DC has property taxes that are less than half of Baltimore’s. Private money has been flooding the city, which is how they went from being arguably the worse of the two cities to being clearly the best, and one of the hottest cities in the US. Boston and SF went through similar transformations when they slashed their property taxes. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel, we just have to do what is known to work.

    • Parent

      I agree that many neighborhoods are in need of investment, but there is absolutely no way for the city to provide the required resources. One solution is to keep asking the state and federal government for more help, but it’s hard to build a great city by relying on the charity of others. The best source of investment is the private sector, and if taxes in Baltimore were even close to those of the surrounding areas, private money would come pouring in. That’s why high taxes and lack of investment in neighborhoods are essentially the same issue.

      Washington DC has property taxes that are less than half of Baltimore’s. Private money has been flooding the city, which is how they went from being arguably the worse of the two cities to being clearly the best, and one of the hottest cities in the US. Boston and SF went through similar transformations when they slashed their property taxes. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel, we just have to do what is known to work.

  • Bill M

    Yes, taxes in Baltimore City are too high and physical development activity would be great, but if we don’t create jobs that pay living wages and then fill them with people who live in the city, everything else is not going to help.  We have many neighborhoods that are good places to live and we need to focus on them.  Their population can be maintained and in most cases increased if we really focus available resources on them.  There is clearly not enough money to do everything, but Baltimores’s recovery, like many other cities, has been stymied by a lack of political courage  to prioritize and build from strength.  Our Council district system helps promote policies designed to spread money around.  Every neighborhood gets a little, but not enough to turn the corner.  So, deterioration just keeps advancing. 
    Gerald focuses on the physical infrastucture because that is his background and it is important.  But, I can tell you that my neighborhood has no vacancies because of the elementary school district it is in.  If we were in a neighboring zone, we would lose ten per cent of our households by next September.  Five years ago, every family that had a child reaching four years of age moved out of the city.  No more!    For our neighborhood, the MARC train is probably the most important transportation system.  At least ten per cent of our wage earners are commuting to Washington D.C., three or more days a week. 
    The depature of Social Security was mentioned in passing by someone and didn’t even cause a ripple of conversation.  There is no way that our Congressional delegation and Governor should be allowing this to happen.  Frederick County really doesn’t need  this monstorous facility.  Baltimore City should be jumping up and down in angry protest.  But, not a wimper.

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