Front-page news (Baltimore, Essex, Middle River: fit in, credit, taxi)

[barante]

This is vey important news:
A new Port Covington -- baltimoresun.com
Let me give my interpretation: The Struever Bros./Tidewater deal is a done deal, because Struever has an ownership interest in Tidwater (which the paper does not mention).
Struever and Sam Zell, the new owner of The Sun's parent, The Tribune Co., are likely to get together and redevelop the newspaper property. With its declining circulation, The Sun can be printed anywhere and does not need a printing plant. In fact, The Examiner, with about as big a press run, is printed by a commercial outfit in Harford County.
The Walmart-anchored shopping center will be redone, as the article suggested, as mixed use.
Another article in today's Sun underscores the zig-zag nature of all this:
Locust Point development scaled back -- baltimoresun.com (http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/local/baltimore_city/bal-md.locust20jun20,0,5351319.story - broken link)
The bottom line: The Middle Branch is on the treshhold of redevelopment from industrial to residential mixed use. And interestingly, the Struever Bros. firm has all kinds of waterfront land there, including huge areas that are now used by a car importer in Fairfield. More immediately, it owns huge acreage next to the District Court on Patapsco Avenue, an old industrial plant is ripe for redevelopment.

[Woodlands]

I agree that if this ever gets built it could be huge for Baltimore. It ties in nicely with the Westport Development and if slots are approved and a facility is built on the City's property near I-95 and the Gateway Development... Baltimore will have a nice entertainment district to greet visitors coming in from the south, particuliarly if all of the "towers" are built. Also, with the Cruise Ship Terminal being down there it only makes sense to have this type of development near by. I noticed in the concept the idea of a "trolley" was thrown in... I know that it is all conceptual at this point, but I would hope that any talk of mass transit would be placed in the the larger conversation of the whole and not just for one or two development projects.. You would now have three "trolley" projects under consideration.. the Red Line, the Charles Street Trolley, and now Port Covington.

[barante]

The article made a mention of possible water taxi service. Perhaps as part of a bigger tour package for cruise passengers. Overall, though, it makes no economic sense at this stage. The distance from the Middle Branch to Fort McHenry and beyond is too long and expensive to run. It also would be a time-consuming run, meaning that commuters would not use it, except on a couple of nice days.

[Woodlands]

Below is a report that was recently published that discusses the "success" and the "cost" for Baltimore's redevelopment efforts. The author raises some interesting points on the city's historic and liberal use of eminent domain for economic development and how some of these activities have have shaped the city.



http://www.castlecoalition.org/image...sbaltimore.pdf

[krakenten]

Lots to think about, here.

I lived through most of this, and right in the areas considered, and damned if I can see any flaws in this.

Another example of "Too Much Like Right!" in action.

[krakenten]

I had to read this essay a second time.

CORRUPTION!!!!!!!!!!!!

The ruin and shame of Baltimore.

(Barrante, I respect your knowledge, and your love of the City, but even you must agree, something is very,very wrong.)

[barante]

I will read this paper with care later tonight. My first take, after glancing through it, is that it is a hodgepodge of libertarian academic thumbsucking.
Baltimore County almost never exercised eminent domain. It's voters revolted against urban renewal in 1964 so strongly that no subsequent executive even dares to use the word. Yet the county's redevelopment record, particularly in old areas, has been quite miserable.
How many times have there been attempts to redo Essex/Middle River? Something is happening there now. One reason is that Jim Smith's government finally figured out a way to get redevelopment going. Another, probably much more important reason, is that waterfront land has become so desirable that any community with water is likely to thrive.
I'll return to this tomorrow. So far, I am not that impressed.

[jonjj]

Originally Posted by barante

I will read this paper with care later tonight. My first take, after glancing through it, is that it is a hodgepodge of libertarian academic thumbsucking.
Baltimore County almost never exercised eminent domain. It's voters revolted against urban renewal in 1964 so strongly that no subsequent executive even dares to use the word. Yet the county's redevelopment record, particularly in old areas, has been quite miserable.
How many times have there been attempts to redo Essex/Middle River? Something is happening there now. One reason is that Jim Smith's government finally figured out a way to get redevelopment going. Another, probably much more important reason, is that waterfront land has become so desirable that any community with water is likely to thrive.
I'll return to this tomorrow. So far, I am not that impressed.

Today's Sun had an article on this piece. Many economisits in the area were not to impressed with it. Flawed. Also, notice the website that sponsored it.

[barante]

My second read of this paper took place during a WYPR concert in Patterson Park tonight. Excellent swing sounds by Blue Sky Five. A mostly young audience of professionals. So rumors of the city's death could not be more wrong.
The second read confirmed my initial view that this is a hodgepodge. It throws together all kinds of stuff, some interesting and significant. Remarkably, for a paper that pretends to address the question of taxes and development policies, the issue of race is never raised. How can one even start comparing Baltimore to San Francisco without including that factor? Also, neither San Francisco nor Boston, the other comparison city, were the dumping grounds for their respective state's impoverished and dysfunctional populations to the degree that Baltimore was, due to a total disregard by the counties of their responsibilities toward the needy.
It is a pity that no real history of Baltimore's decline exists. The Walters/Miserendino paper deals with that to some extent, but without delving into the root causes of downtown decay. One key cause in my mind was the 1944 cross-town expressway study by Robert Moses. He proposed a tunneled expressway that would have cut through Howard and Charles Streets, the city's premier retail thoroughfares. Some 200 blocks would have been demolished, 19,000 people displaced. That was the genesis of all other disruptive expressway planning. Coming just before the Baltimore Transit Co. went to hell, the Moses plan also signaled to all downtown property owners, including department stores, that they better move to the suburbs while the going was good.
The Walters/Miserendino paper is an interesting libertarian argument but not a significant urban economic study. I'll leave it at that.
Incidentally, I bumped into an old friend at the concert. She and her husband rehabbed a vacant old rowhouse in Butchers Hill. With only three more years to go on their rehab tax credit, they will not be able to afford its $8,000-a-year tax bill and are looking to move to some relatively undiscovered area.
I am certainly for an overhaul of the property tax system. But that is a state issue, not a city responsibility. Even any city tax credit program requires approval by the state. So much of what the Walters/Miserendino paper discusses is even more complicated than they acknowledge.

[krakenten]

I noticed that, too, certainly not an objective look.

But the facts are as I remember them-and I worked those projects, they were just as bad as stated.

Harborplace was widely derided by the toney set as, "The Inner Horror" or "Mondawmin by the Sea'', but at least it worked, replacing the largely defunct downtown department stores.

And the Aquarium is bloody magnificent.

But remember the now mostly demolished Skywalks? Or the ''pedestrian promenade at the State Office Complex?

Charles Center was still fairly new when I arrived in Baltimore-1974, just in time for the Garbage and Police Strikes, went onto the street in a training uniform, with the rest of my recruit class.

There used to be a lot more of it-remember?

It largely failed to function.

I recently visited York, PA, I live close, don't go often, and was surprised by how nice downtown had become-and without the benefit of grandiose, hare-brained and corrupt schemes.

Not all the failures in Baltimore can be laid at the feet of her ''leaders''-for example, the Subway was built just as Federal Money dried up, it was planned to be as extensive as the DC Metro.

The Light Rail was planned as an elevated system, like Chicago-but a deadline was missed, and funding would have been withdrawn had the project not been completed (at least according to the story I heard, at MTA HQ) so, the bitter pill was swallowed.

But the Road to Nowhere is a hard one to explain away.

All in all, the facts are there-I don't think Eminent Domain is the cause of the mess, but the Hysterical Society's mad lust to preserve tumbledown properties and micromanage everything they could lay hold of didn't help.

Nearly insane planning(Jaysus, did yer see the sketches?)combined with inept and corrupt execution did the harm.

Who knows what might have happened is the Ray-Gun Gothic plans of the demented few had come to pass?

Bet it wouldn't have been pretty!