Study criticizes city’s redevelopment, says practices have created ‘two cities’

BALTIMORE (Map, News) - A new study on Baltimore’s redevelopment history imagines what could have been.

Baltimore City’s long-standing “plan, control and subsidize” development practice might have resulted in Charles Center and the Inner Harbor, but the process forced city bureaucracy into almost every major development in Baltimore and led to the favoring of large-scale projects downtown over other areas of the city, according to “Baltimore’s Flawed Renaissance,” an Institute for Justice report released Monday.

Doing so, rather than cutting property taxes to encourage private investment throughout Baltimore, has slowed city revitalization as some neighborhoods go ignored, said Stephen Walters, a Loyola College economics professor who co-wrote the study.

“The city knew the property tax was killing development,” Walters said. “The city said, ‘We need to buy properties high and sell low,’ and they’ve been doing it for 50 or so years.”

Bill Struever, president and chief executive officer of Struever Bros. Eccles and Rouse, said cities for a long time have tried to encourage economic redevelopment and investment.

“Baltimore is very aggressive in terms of public-private partnerships,” Struever said. “It’s about leveling the playing field. We really need to build a tax base in the city.”

With Baltimore City’s property tax rate significantly higher than rates in surrounding counties, city officials in the 1950s opted to encourage development by taking control of land through eminent domain, selling the land to a developer for a discounted price and then offering development subsidies and tax breaks, according to the study.

“Developers would have been all over the city,” Walters said. “But the short-term political costs would have been too high.” Cutting rates would have meant cutting city government expenditures and creating smaller budgets, at least in the short run — something the city didn’t want to do, Walters said.

The choice for eminent domain, then, has created “two cities” in Baltimore, as undeveloped areas in the city struggle with “dilapidated housing, crumbling infrastructure, pervasive poverty, unsafe streets and a stagnant economy,” Walters wrote.

M.J. “Jay” Brodie, president of the Baltimore Development Corp., the city’s economic development arm, declined to comment on the study Monday, saying he hadn’t yet read the paper.

Struever disagreed with the claim that Baltimore’s redevelopment hasn’t extended past the waterfront, pointing to development projects like EBDI’s New East Side in East Baltimore and Maryland Medical Center in West Baltimore.

“It’s not just the waterfront,” Struever said. “It’s about revitalizing the economy of the whole city.”

acannarsa@baltimoreexaminer.com

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