Canaries in the Coal Mine
This 6-part blog is about Southern Park Heights, a large, impoverished, African American urban community, which has been neglected for decades. As a result, the community sustains dramatically high rates of vacant houses, unemployment, street violence, drug addiction, incarceration, and HIV. Dr. Beane explores the evidence of neglect as well as the numerous guardian angels, performing artists, teachers, and activists who are committed to equity and revitalization.
“Two Faces” by Alma Roberts
Canaries in the Coal Mine - Part 1
Baltimore is not your run-of-the-mill American tale of two cities in which a white, socially and economically thriving public face contrasts with a minority, impov- erished, and underreported underbelly that shoulders the gamut of problems common to urban poverty. Believe me, there is nothing run-of-the-mill about…
Canaries in the Coal Mine - Part 2
This ongoing blog isn’t a diatribe against Baltimore; it’s a diatribe against the longstanding moral lassitude that has allowed the living conditions in African American ghettos all across our country to dip below survivability. I focus on Baltimore, not just because it’s always best for a writer to stick to what she knows…
Canaries in the Coal Mine - Part 3
In the early 2000s, the Baltimore City Department of Planning hired a Boston-based architectural and urban planning firm named Goody Clancy to produce a master plan for the southern Park Heights community in northwest Baltimore. Early drafts of this Plan failed to mention how the entrenched issues of poverty, population decline and the resultant (dramatic) gender imbalance…
Canaries in the Coal Mine - Part 4
Baltimore consistently ranks among the top ten cities across the country for homicide, drug overdose, and HIV. We have an extreme 80% drop-out rate among African American boys (with the girls catching up)—some of them dropping out of elementary school. Their lack of education, lack of adult guidance, lack of exposure to positive life trajectories, and lack of critical thinking manifest…
Canaries in the Coal Mine - Part 5
By 2010, funding support from the now organized and burgeoning philanthropic sector, combined with the invaluable training support of Maryland Nonprofits, led to a major growth spurt and subsequent maturation of the human service sector. Thousands of individuals and organizations set about to address Charm City’s considerable list of woes. Today, Baltimore now boasts a booming business of halfway houses, drug treatment programs, soup kitchens…
Canaries in the Coal Mine - Part 6
I’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand the massive disconnect in Baltimore between good intentions and industrious effort, and the pitifully slow and small progress in our poor neighborhoods. Someone stated at a hearing the other night that these neighborhoods are the same as they were 20 years ago. I stood up and retorted, “No, they’re not. They’re not the same. They’re worse!” What I have concluded is that the sad end result throughout so much of Baltimore City…