Baltimore urban renewal often goes ‘Nowhere’

Kudos to Jean Marbella for her splendid review of one of Baltimore’s most destructive public policies of the late 1960s and early 1970s (“Baltimore’s ‘Highway to Nowhere’ took the homes of thousands,” Jan. 18).

The planners and politicians who relied on eminent domain property seizures to build “big footprint” projects (for public housing, transportation and sometimes just for well-connected private developers) might well have had good intentions, but history shows their grand plans were abject failures. These projects did not eliminate blight but spread it; they did not fuel investment but repelled it.

Along the route of the “Highway to Nowhere,” of course, the bulldozers devastated neighborhoods and destroyed social capital (the networks of friends and neighbors Marbella highlighted in her piece) rather quickly and dramatically. But that was just one of the city’s many policy blunders of that era. When city leaders raised property taxes 19 times over the 25 years from 1950 to 1975, they guaranteed a slower-paced but equally damaging and persistent disinvestment crisis.

The sad thing is that contemporary city leaders continue to bank on large-scale renewal projects won by subsidizing favored developers with tax-increment-financing and they fight tooth and nail to defend the city’s non-competitive property tax rate against reform efforts. Until they learn the key lessons of the city’s history, they will find that disinvestment and flight continue.

— Stephen J.K. Walters, Baltimore

DC statehood pitch just a Democratic power grab

U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen is pushing for Washington, D.C. to become a state and the only reason for that is because it would give the Democrats more power (“A Marylander leads push for DC statehood even as state vies with Washington for NFL’s Commanders,” Jan. 15). He hasn’t said that but anyone can figure that out.

I don’t agree with this at all. It’s always been Washington, D.C. so leave it that way. If Senator Van Hollen wants to change that then let Maryland give Montgomery and Prince George’s counties to the District of Columbia. Their views are more in line with those of D.C. residents.

Senators Van Hollen and Angela Alsobrooks only represent what Montgomery and Prince George’s counties want anyway. They don’t care about Baltimore, Harford and other Maryland counties.

— Judy Francis, Towson

Who apologizes for today’s history-making ignorance?

Issuing a public apology for Marylanders executed for witchcraft 400 years ago might seem a ridiculous waste of legislative time in these enlightened times (“Proposed witchcraft legislation can’t be serious,” Jan. 16). But I wouldn’t be so fast to consider the here and now as so enlightened. Not when members of Congress believe that Jewish space lasers cause California’s wildfires in order to build high speed rail and a physician who is a member of Congress from Maryland prescribed ivermectin, a medication commonly used to treat parasites in livestock and humans, for COVID-19.

A legislative apology for hanging witches is not any more ridiculous and certainly less destructive than legislation criminalizing emergency physicians, warranting childhood separations of immigrant children, or fighting culture wars by enacting bathroom bills including a recent edict by the U.S. House of Representatives to prevent transgender student athletes from women’s sports.

Particularly since the same poisonous influences that brutalized mostly peculiar women 400 years ago are alive and well today. I speak of the resurgence of religious fundamentalism and authoritarian government worldwide. The same Cromwellian brutes that persecuted witches in the English village of Warboys in 1589 are alive and well today to bully LGBTQ folks, immigrants, physicians trying to save lives of pregnant women and even scientists like Dr. Anthony Fauci.

I hope someone will be apologizing for these aberrant beliefs 400 years later.

— Paul R. Schlitz Jr., Baltimore