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Jan
15

Baltimore: City of Shit

Whenever friends from Pittsburgh ask me how I’m adapting to Baltimore, I tell them the truth: Baltimore and Pittsburgh are so similar on so many levels that “adapting” hasn’t been necessary.  It’s more like I’ve just moved to an extremely remote Pittsburgh neighborhood, and now it takes me 4 hours to get to the nearest Crazy Mocha instead of 15 minutes.  (Also, people wear a lot more purple here.)

But there are significant differences between the cities, and it’s those “little things” that add up to one big problem: Baltimore has a negative self-image that impacts the way I, a new resident, choose to invest myself (or, more specifically, not invest myself) in my new home.

What Your Labrador Retriever Has to Do with the City’s Murder Rate

The most obvious difference between Pittsburgh and Baltimore is the latter’s epic homicide rate.  In 2009, Pittsburgh had 38 homicides (as of December 21), down from 73 in 2008.  In the same year, Baltimore had 239, up from 234 in 2008.  That’s 6 times as many murders in a city that’s barely double the size of Pittsburgh.

So what makes people kill other people?  And why are Baltimoreans so much more likely — or more willing, or more accepting of other people’s homicidal inclinations — to kill each other?

According to at least one analyst, it all boils down to Baltimore’s lack of a shared citywide identity.

The current issue of Baltimore’s Urbanite magazine includes an excerpt from Ohio State history professor Randolph Roth‘s American Homicide, which suggests that murder rates escalate when citizens lose faith in their social and political hierarchies.   If we no longer feel like the system we live in is fair, we don’t believe that respecting even the most basic rules will in any way improve our quality of life, so we’re more inclined to institute our own “survival of the fittest” mentality, pursuing what we believe is achievable rather than striving to “succeed” in a corrupt system.

All of which means that solving Baltimore’s homicide problem requires more than “just” tackling the issues of poverty, education or politics.  It requires that the people care enough about themselves and their city to redefine their own accessible future, together, and shape new politics and polemics around their own unified identity.

So what does all of this have to do with dog shit?

For Want of a Poop Bag, the Battle Was Lost…

I live in a neighborhood rife with dog owners, including me.  I walk my dog at least 5 times a day, and those jaunts give me lots of face time with the area’s sidewalks and tree boxes.

And they are, invariably, covered in shit.

As a random sample, I walked Rufus on Sunday afternoon and counted no fewer than 20 piles of dog shit left along the sidewalk in a 6 block radius.  Included among these roadside treats were deposits made in all but one of the tree boxes outside a nearby elementary school.  That’s right: out of nearly a dozen tree boxes located at the entrance to a gradeschool, all but one was home to a pile of shit.  Not one.  Not two.  All but one.

It says a lot about the character of a city when its people can’t be bothered to NOT leave steaming piles of dog shit at the doorway to their children’s schools.

Baltimore: Get Your Shit Together

Maybe I’m expecting too much of people.  Maybe because I clean up after my dog (and because it’s a law), I presume everyone else is naturally as interested in keeping their own neighborhood aesthetically pleasing (and free of health hazards).

Maybe I’m also being too reductive.  Surely a city’s societal woes can’t be encapsulated in the respect it shows to its own streets?  Perhaps I should look at other statistics, like Baltimore’s impeccable driving record.

Oh.  Never mind.

But don’t worry.  I get it.  I know life is hard and people are busy.  And maybe expecting you to take responsibility for what you do is elitist.  There is a recession, after all.  If it comes down to affording food or poop bags, I understand that feeding your kids trumps scraping your dog’s shit off your neighbor’s front steps.  We all have priorities.

But if you can’t clean up after your dog, don’t own a dog.  It’s that simple.  It’s about responsibility, accountability, leadership, good stewardship and being an adult.  It’s about understanding what you can handle vs. what’s beyond your grasp.

Most importantly, it’s about how you see yourself.

And as long as Baltimore continues to be a city that doesn’t mind being covered in shit, I’ll continue to be a resident who refrains from investing emotionally in a city that refuses to love itself.

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Posted by Justin Sociology Subscribe to RSS feed
  • I have only recently discovered the city of Baltimore through watching The Wire, which is a depressing series set in a really grim place. Baltimore weather seems grey, the projects are absolutely horrible, the people are rough, rough - a hodge-podge of black, white and yellow misfits. Grim, indeed. I love Dexter. I think that is set in Florida. It reminds me of home - whenever I watch Dexter - but better - because there is a fantastic Salsa feel to the place. I love their accents, and dress. Very few suits and ties there. I was at a Fair Work Legislation Seminar a few days ago with about 30 other people both male and female, and at one point the presenter was talking about whether you should hire someone who has numerous ear-piercings and so on, and he suddenly pointed to a guy on the back row, and said "why are you wearing a tie? - You are the only person in this room wearing a tie.." and he was right. Suits and ties have practically died out in hot towns; in Baltimore they seem to be everywhere. When people wear suits and ties, they get uptight and edgy. But why purple??
  • Hey Justin,

    Wow, didn't know you moved to Baltimore!

    South Philly has a similar dog feces problem (can't vouch for the rest of Philly), but I feel like it's in transition. I feel like 2/3 of the people do pick up their dog excrement, so I'm seeing the bag half full, not half empty. But that 1/3 does make it yucky for everyone else.

    How about a "Baltimore, Get Your Shit Together" campaign?

    There are some good people in B-more, and they just added 1 more to their ranks when you moved there. Welcome to the Mid Atlantic.
  • Justin - thanks for the response. You're echoing the "broken window" theory of Giuliani et al, which I think is mostly correct. Once people see that others care, they start to care too.

    I do think that it all boils down to shared story, though, because until we all share a common mental model about how we all relate to one another, we will be lost. We need to be working towards the same goals, even if we occupy different roles in the system.

    City politicians are mostly an impediment at the moment. That could change. The bigger issue is getting the state and the feds to start to think strategically about investment in cities, and stop subsidizing suburban sprawl. We need to wait for some of the current elder leadership to shuffle off, in some cases, because their worldview about cities is so shaped by the past.

    Winnipeg, like Baltimore, is a city of flux. Winnipeg was pretty unruly 100 years ago and was a gateway to the west and other mining and speculative enterprises in Canada. A member of my wife's family got mixed up in a criminal conspiracy in Winnipeg in 1912 and studying that has been very interesting. He was run out of town and went to Baltimore (to Govans, in fact).

    Baltimore is somewhat schizophrenic partially because we sit on the fall line between the piedmont and the Atlantic coastal plain. That led to the development of manufacturing as well as coastal industries like shipbuilding. The B&O and other railroads were also other early cataracts that shaped the city. Our peculiar geography has had a lot to do with how the city has developed. Particularly the dysfunctions surrounding the Jones Falls, Gwynns Falls, and the railroad infrastructure. We've never been about just one thing, and it's constantly changing with difficult geographic constraints.

    It's no wonder we do not yet have a shared story. When we do, I'll be there'll be less shit on the streets. And by the way Justin, emotionally invest. It matters that you do, and yes, others are paying attention.
  • We've got a number of unique problems I may go into discourse over soon - one of them is non-illicit drugs. When I lived in Northern Manitoba, one of the big issues (and this is in the 80's) was huffing. People were advised not to keep cans of gas in their garages, or even in their cars as spares, because derelicts would break in, steal the gas - even syphon it - and sniff it til they turned stupid. The fallout from this trend is still being documented.

    One of the biggest problems in Winnipeg has been the meth society. I could not appropriately address this without writing a book. Which, sadly, I could do easily.

    The laws aren't harsh here, it's just that the culture of these areas - northern, remote communities, and their exports into the bigger metros - is ripe for anything that makes people feel, even temporarily, powerful in their own lives. Some of us are doing work to change this, but it's never - ever - enough. Not yet, anyway.
  • Ian: I had no idea Winnipeg was the murder capital of Canada. Are your drug laws as strict as ours are in the States? Because I've long thought that legalizing drugs (and making them a taxable industry) would alleviate a lot of problems, including the need to kill for what you can buy at competitive prices.

    Dave: I'm sure the dog shit and the murders aren't directly linked, but it all scales back to perception and intent. People who care about their environment also preserve it. People who don't care about their environment, or who resent it openly but don't have the funds or gumption to leave, allow it to erode or destroy it outright. That's as true for the sanctity of the sidewalks as it is for the sanctity of life.

    As for convincing our politicians of anything, I'm less faithful that our politicians will ever be anything more than obstacles to Baltimore's future success. That's not a Baltimore problem, that's a failure of the system. If we *really* want to convince the politicians of anything, we'd do better to jump-start the economy ourselves, individually, and use our independent success as leverage against the lobbyists who can currently out-buy our votes.
  • Justin - glad to see your blog and your analysis. I'd suggest that Paris, and other cities, have had a problem much like you describe, without the accompanying murder rate, so I am not sure that those two particular variables are causally related.

    However, I do think that you hit on an important point. First, Randolph Roth's comment about the lack of a "shared story about how we all hang together" is spot on. There are at least three different Baltimores, all equally real. There's rich/professional Baltimore, which is doing quite nicely. There's poor working class Baltimore, which has been in decline for years. And then there's shadow economy Baltimore, built around the drug game. And each of those groups has different ideas about how and why we got to where we are. The conflict between the reality of the first and last group is the most stark, and the machinations of the last group leads to 99% of the violence we see.

    To go back to Paris, however, they are facing many of the same issues, only with less guns. Arab youth in the suburbs feel disenfranchised and excluded from the bourgois wealth so celebrated in the city center. So they burn cars, destroy bicycles, and act out their aggression. Precious little difference from what we see here, just different gameboard and pieces.

    This all comes back around to urban design. Cities are efficient and if we want to get serious about competing in the world, we need to fix ours. Design is a reflection of perception, and that means if we want to have an effective urban design in Baltimore or anywhere else, we need to get all of our stakeholders onto the same page (or at least into the same book) and agree on a mental model (or a shared story, if you will) of what our city is about. About how we got here, and where we're going. Once that is achieved, and we can convince the politicians that our cities really are our best hope for renewed economic strength, we can achieve anything.

    Baltimore is well situated, has countless assets, and is ideally suited for competing in the 21st century. We just need to get the fools and charlatans out of the way.
  • It's an attitude thing, for sure.

    I live in an are of Winnipeg mostly devoted to hipsters, Osborne Village. You want to talk oppressively beautiful? In much of the city, there's a sense of either pride or scrutiny. Here? Tolerance. Sadly, it's a negative tolerance that means this is, sadly, the most highly drug trafficked thirty blocks in North America. Should we wonder why Winnipeg was the murder capital of Canada three out of the last ten years?

    I couldn't say word one about dogs, though. Deathly allergic.
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