What is the future of the Baltimore region? Will a resurgent Baltimore City prosper as the employment, cultural, and civic heart of urban Maryland — a great place to work, to visit, and to live? Or will a slowly foundering Baltimore City become a second Detroit — a once great metropolis now treated as a giant public housing project — and pull down the whole Baltimore region down with it?
This is the choice that the governor and the Maryland General Assembly face. The city and the state have carried out exemplary (if traditional) revitalization efforts. Unfortunately, Charles Center, the Inner Harbor, Oriole Park at Camden Yards, and the hundreds of millions of state subsidies have slowed but not reversed Baltimore City’s steady erosion as a place to live.