A pervasive ethos of apathy plagues our city. It seems as if we have developed a tolerance for murder, violence, poverty and abandonment. We drive by the same dilapidated communities at the core of our city for decades, without giving them much thought. Every day, we watch the news and hear about another shooting and killing in some of the same areas. In some corridors of the city you can feel the chaos and destabilization in the atmosphere. It is as if nobody really cares or has a strategy to directly address this cyclical, generational and regressive epidemic of enculturated poverty and violence.

What is worse is that we have the institutions, infrastructure and intelligence to revitalize and transform our inner city communities. But we lack the boldness it takes to initiate and implement new policies.

We lack the boldness to address methadone clinics that fail to adhere to public safety and neighborhood values.

We lack the boldness to repurpose our police stations as public safety centers with a more relevant approach to policing. At a conference at the University of Maryland at Baltimore, some of our police friends from Ireland spoke with us about the drastic changes they made to their uniforms and their engagement in the community in the name of public safety rather than policing that caused a huge reduction in violent crimes. But it took bold public policy measures.

We lack the boldness to raze abandoned houses and create new mixed-income development opportunities that make sense in our urban environments. Some of these war-torn communities have remained the same for decades. Why hasn't this changed?

We lack the boldness to rid our communities of nuisance corner liquor stores that have become the epicenter of drug trafficking, loitering and violence.

We lack the boldness to clean up our parks and make them more welcoming and relevant to younger generations, who trace the city streets with dirt bikes.

We lack the boldness to believe that in order for Baltimore to be changed we have to intentionally change it.

I am up for the challenge to change our city. We have to demand more of every citizen, community association and city official.

We have to stop filling the city’s coffers through erroneous water bills, faulty traffic cameras and high property taxes that don’t even address the dilapidated schools, rat-infested communities and environmentally hazardous properties at the center of our neighborhoods.

We have to engage the actual community anchors and those who are in the trenches doing the hard work of planning, planting and producing change in the community.

We have to change the culture and attitude of ambivalence in our city by changing the environmental poverty brought on by abandoned properties owned by the public and private sectors.

We can clean this city up. We can restore people as we rebuild properties. But it takes a vision, a strategy, a public policy and boldness to get it done.

Donte' L. Hickman is pastor of Southern Baptist Church in Baltimore City, Harford and Howard counties. His email is pastorhickman@me.com.