They Act Like They Know

A Reflection on the Past Demise of a Great American City’s Street Car Network, the Current Developer Land Grab on the Eastside, and the Ongoing Failures of Baltimore’s Misleadership Class

In a recent editorial, Baltimore Sun columnist Jacques Kelly (“Who killed Baltimore’s street car system” 9/12/20) points directly to the Greater Baltimore Committee (GBC), as well as the generally wrong and selfish downtown businessmen, for killing Baltimore’s once impressive streetcar network. The GBC, like similar business lobbies in cities across the country, has done so much harm to Baltimore that developers and other corporations do not sound completely absurd when they claim they can only accomplish major new development projects with massive public sector subsidies like Tax Increment Financing, Special Tax Zones, “Opportunity Zones”, corporate tax breaks, private bus lines, and a host of other funding mechanisms that rob municipal budgets to pad developers’ pockets. It’s a lie they have made more convincing by their own past failures and mistakes.

This is happening right now, in East Baltimore, and because they have money, MBAs, and top dollar A/B tested talking points, they sound like they know what they are talking about. But they don’t. The business crowd has been wrong many, many times and are more privileged than most to be able to cover their tracks.

Kelly and others with platforms should also point the finger not just at business lobby organizations like the GBC, but also at specific multi-millionaires and billionaires like Harry Weinberg, who made a grip dismantling highly functional streetcar networks and selling them off for parts (especially lucrative: property owned by the private trolley companies along the routes). But if criticizing the GBC is a brave thing for Kelly to do, criticizing Weinberg, whose descendents wield massive influence over advocacy and reform efforts through a Foundation established in their forebears’ names, may have been a bridge too far.

It’s clear that one business group, and one businessman in particular, killed Baltimore’s streetcar network, which unlike other cities like Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York was not converted from private holdings to public control. But who let them get away with murder?

Democratic Party Mayors Thomas D’Alessandro Jr. (1947–59), J. Harold Grady (1959–62), and Phillip H. Goodman (1962–63) governed during a time of widespread prosperity, nationally and locally, and sat on their hands as Baltimore’s rail network was systematically dismantled for short-term profit justified by racist, climate destroying, and plain wrong business and planning theories. They built parking lots and widened car-centric roads atop the corpse of a transit network that served working class people on a regional level.

Some kvetching that Republican Governor Larry Hogan killed the Red Line rail project in 2015, despite widespread agreement, by those that know, that the Baltimore Delegation to the Maryland General Assembly for the most part didn’t prioritize it, is genuine. But much of it is a long-standing and poorly executed partisan attack by Democrats in Baltimore who have failed to generate results related to our region’s anemic public transit — the worst of any comparable city in the U.S. — and seek to concentrate the blame, much of it well-deserved, within Hogan’s disastrous decision to cancel the Red Line.

When Democrats make their poorly framed attack on Hogan that he killed the Red Line, remind them that Democratic Mayors D’Alesandro, Grady, and Goodman aided and abetted the slaughter of the Baltimore streetcar network, which got us to the point of needing the Owings Mills-Hopkins metro line, former Governor William Donald Schaefer’s White L Light rail, and the proposed Red Line in the first place.

Since the 1995 extension of the Metro 1.6 miles from Charles Center to Hopkins, no rail has been added in Baltimore City under five Democratic Mayors and four Governors (2 Democrats and 2 Republicans) and far too little bike and rapid bus infrastructure has been developed. The failure to provide reliable transit for working class city dwellers and inner ring suburbanites is in part a reflection of what Johns Hopkins University Professor Lester Spence describes nationally as the “neoliberal turn” that sprouted in the last decades of the 20th Century and blossomed in the first decades of the 21st. But it is also evidence of a uniquely local anti-Black, anti-worker governing praxis by Baltimore and Maryland’s rulers, public and private.

Hogan and Republicans deserve almost all the blame we can hurl at them, but for our aim to be truer, we should aim it less narrowly. Don’t let Democrats off the hook for their governance failures. Fight for something better.