June 14, 2004
High real estate prices in Fells Point -- and social tension
This is pretty amazing -- $700,000 loft homes to be built in Fells Point.
A discussion on the Baltimore Sun's local news forum presents two themes. Theme One, Who wants to spend that much to live in noisy, no-parking Baltimore? Fumes posts:
For that much cash, I want the driveway, a big house, and a cemetary quiet neighborhood.
LonelyDove adds:
Who can afford that much money to live in the city? I don't care if it's Canton, Fells Point, Butchers Hill etc, there is no house in the city worth that kind of money. For the money I would want a hugh house in the county with a built in pool, deck, big big flower bed, lots of trees, central a/c and at least five bedrooms for my brood to run and hide in. My husband and I both work and we could never afford those kind of prices.
Theme Two: What are the rich folk in their $700,000 loft homes going to do when local Welcome Wagon, the punks, gang-bangers and hoodlums, come a'calling from rotten neighborhoods and public housing a short stroll away? mj posts:
... these little regentrification enclaves may be nice, they don't mean a thing if you have a forgotten area located two blocks away or hoodlums from the hellholes crossing over into the "chosen areas"... And that is why he [the mayor] gets so defensive and almost irrational because many people know that all the cosmetic improvements etc do not mean a thing if you cannot get the basics right. Rome is burning and MOM wants to measure his success (and the City's) on whether Fells Point gets a Starbuck francise.
Bingo! A precious geographic insight. One more time: "... these little regentrification enclaves may be nice, they don't mean a thing if you have a forgotten area located two blocks away or hoodlums from the hellholes crossing over into the 'chosen areas.' "
What is interesting to me is to see how quickly forum posters pounce on the mayor (MOM = Martin O'Malley) and his attempt to get more Starbucks for Baltimore. You can't see right away why the mayor would have a problem when a developer decides to build $700,000 loft homes.
But perceptive residents immediate make the real-world connection on the tensions between Baltimore's booming neighborhoods to the south and east of the harbor with poorer, more inland neighborhoods literally half-blocks away.
I dealt with this dichotomy an earlier blog, Baltimore's Upper Fells Point: Worst of all worlds. Who wants both Starbucks yuppies AND your car windows busted in? How does one deal with streams of transient trouble-makers drawn to the magnet of your corner store, open to all hours with a gracious reception to the local dealers, on what should be one of the nicest residential streets in Baltimore, Ann Street?
We had problems Saturday night/Sunday morning, when a Latin gang rolled on to Ann Street. A vehicle double-parked in front of our house and 10 guys in wifebeater T-shirts got out. They started screaming and swinging baseball bats around a black SUV, then went and banged on a door on Pratt Street. Parked in front of the Pratt Street house they found a second black SUV, apparently the target of their gang activity. They started breaking the windows with their bats and clambering over the hoods of other cars before driving away!
Rehabbers and developers are trying to get close to $400,000 for houses in Upper Fells Point, no doubt from Starbucks customers, amid gang violence?
And poster Bud notes:
700K for a house. Then, the liberal city government will force you to financially support those in other areas of the city that have no desire to fend for themselves. ... and people living in certain areas of the city feel they are somehow "entitled" to your money.
Baltimore lacks buffers between many of its war zones and its expensive, let alone middle-class housing. It's a geographic curiosity compared to Washington, D.C., where Rock Creek Park (less so now) used to clearly divide rich and poor. I am not advocating economic or geographic apartheid, only noting as someone that tends to analyze social issues in a geographic and spatial manner, that the middle class and the rich will not stay in areas that are not safe, and protection has not changed much since the days of castle keeps and moats. Hence the huge popularity of gated communities in Florida and California.
In urban Baltimore, we have the perfect opposite of gated communities.
There is a beauty to our chaos for the amateur sociologist. David Simon had to drive from home to write his book 
The Corner, about a drug area in West Baltimore. I just have to sit in my office in the front of my house and turn my neck to look out the window.
For those who aren't amateur sociologists, or writers or moviemakers, however, the endless stream of transients and problems gets old, and eventually people close out the neighborhood, shutting out friend and enemy alike, or move.
Baltimore City puts public housing in prime, desirable areas (between downtown and Fells Point, for example, around Johns Hopkins hopsital, and formerly right beside Little Italy) in such a way as to maximize friction and minimize the chance for a truly healthy, propering middle-class district to coalesce around all sides of the waterfront, and lift all boats.
A realtor once reluctantly pointed out to me, to my pestering about why certain blocks stall and die, how food kitchens drag down Mount Vernon and create an abrupt halt to improvements marching through northeast Butchers Hill and the western edge of Fells Point.
In balkanized Baltimore, we have oases that attempt stability despite drug toughs who move in on many a corner. You would think someone sitting on property worth 300 to 700K would protect their investment with a bit of sweat equity -- a baseball bat or shotgun -- but people in certain income brackets spend a lot of their time earning the mortgage money and commuting and don't need a criminal record earned in their rare down time as a result of being goaded by street punks quite wise in the quirks of the legal system.
Hence the unease on the local news forum at seeing a real estate bubble. Hence people that buy an expensive Fells Point home and retreat to live in their back rooms, away from the vagabonding out on the sidewalk.
The reason a local news forum quickly turns from apparent good news for local homeowners (this project might raise my home value!) to negative assessments of the mayor is that no one has any confidence that education, jobs or public safety are coming any time soon to the poor areas of the city.
Various theories are afloat on why our once tough-on-crime mayor, now moved on to trivial concerns such as Starbucks for city yuppies, has fallen so short of his initial promise. The most convincing theory is that he relizes that the job of mayor is a one-way ticket to political oblivion.
Too bad. It'd be nice if the youth who roam down from Chapel and Monument streets were on their way to real jobs, not their posts within the drug economy. Why, the drug runners and dealers are the ambitious strivers, compared to those with no goals at all, except to smash a window or two.
- posted by jbelliveau at 12:23 PM in The Neighborhood
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June 11, 2004
Farewell, Ronald Reagan
Last night, for hours I watched the mourners visiting the late president's casket in the Capitol Rotunda. Isn't C-Span wonderful? No voice-over, just the quiet dignity of the changing of the military honor guard, the mothers shepherding well-dressed children in the line, soldiers offering salutes, Lech Walesa kneeling in private prayer. I found the procession hypnotic and watched it past midnight, riveting despite a lack of anything resembling traditional entertainment values. Just wanted to make sure that Mr. Reagan had company, in person from more than 100,000 people, and electronically from stay-at-homes like myself.
What stood out for me were the thousands of mourners clearly in their mid-20s to mid-30s, some fighting tears. Reagan had a set of values and beliefs that Americans born three generations later have fervently adopted.
It's a remarkable generational transference. When I watch specials on Reagan, such as MSNBC's Headliners and Legends bio, I am struck by the profound innocence on the face of Ron as a young lifeguard and actor. He kept his hair in that antiquated but poignant wavy style hearkening back to Dick Tracy cartoons -- one my little brothers wore as late as the early 1960s.
You would think, no way would anyone under age 90 find Reagan so cool. And nothing is more important to some Baby Boomers than being hip. But Reagan is cool as can be to Boomers and even, apparently, much of Generations X and Y.
To me, Reagan was infinitely hipper than Jimmy Carter -- Reagan wanted our country strong and the world free. He was cutting-edge hip despite that innocent, bygone-era face with the Irish twinkle to the eyes (like my mom's) and modified pompadour and gentle smile, which even now wows young Americans tired of endless sleaze from Madonna and rappers and others who just don't comprehend how much nice and decent this country can be.
I had originally feared (believe it or not) that at the viewings in liberal California and liberal Washington, D.C., that almost no one would come. I know from working at the Washington Post the overwhelming antipathy toward Reagan and conservatives in general among D.C. journalists and residents in general.
Judging from interviews with people waiting in line near the Mall in Washington, Americans from the Midwest, Virginia, and other places, including Northeasterners like myself in the minority of our communities as conservatives, made a yeoman's effort to give the former president a proper, respectful and well-attended sendoff.
Typical of journalist's low-grade but evident hostility are comments such as this from Washington Post associate editor Bob Kaiser, in his online chat, reminding us that AIDS "became an epidemic when [Reagan] was president." Huh? Was it Reagan, or Dionysian gays, who encouraged promiscuous rough-stuff in the bath houses? When will the absurd lack of responsibility for behaviors that spread vile germs (not just HIV and STDs, but amoebas and all sorts of things) stop? From the unintentionally revealing Kaiser:
My gay brother Charles Kaiser, himself a very good writer, wants us all to remember that Reagan really did almost nothing about AIDS, which, sadly, became an epidemic when he was president. Charles is right. But Reagan was far from alone in neglecting this crisis when it first emerged. Indeed, I think it's a measure of how America has changed in 20 years that we look back now at the beginning of the epidemic with some dismay at the way our government and leaders handled it.
Typical of Washington, D.C. and Maryland liberalism is this question posted to Kaiser from Jessup, Md.:
Why isn't the press covering that the legacy of Ronald Reagan's civil rights policies was to divide the nation along racial lines? The lines to see his casket were almost all white, and except for Colin Powell it was hard to see any person of color at this "state funeral." Its a travesty to applaud this type of legacy, and an embarrassment for the nation.Robert G. Kaiser: Referred to this earlier. Thanks for the comment. I too was struck by the crowd in the Cathedral.
Oh, well. Here we have two errors. One, the lines weren't all white, unless one choses to ignore steady numbers of black and Asian mourners, including some ostentatiously proud black servicemen who stood at full height and snapped off powerful salutes.
Two, there is a postmodern assumption that America's white majority cannot be doing anything right unless masses of minority groups lend their stamp of approval. We may have to live with the fact that U.S. minorities, barring what seems to be a "talented tenth" who happily have wandered off the victimology plantation, were not too happy with a president who preached liberty over equality of results, knowing that the latter is both impossible and even if possible would require totalitarian state apparati to achieve.
I haven't ever been able to live surrounded by the American majority that elected Reagan and that quietly paid their respects at his library in Simi Valley and at the Capitol. I've always been marooned in the world of journalists and liberals, in the U.K., Washington and Baltimore. (As Reagan lived surrounded by Hollywood liberals.)
When I worked in suburban London in the early 1980s, on the copy desk of a health magazine, I had a boss named Martin, from the North of England. Like most journalists in the U.K., he was a committed leftist, and loved to mock the president he called "Ronnie Ray-Gun."
Martin viewed the Soviet Union as some sort of benign experiment in collective ownership, and the United States as belligerent, aggressive, irredeemable racist, etc. etc. Nothing Martin said (he had never visited the U.S.) jibed with my extensive life and travels in my home country. Whenever he trotted out his aspersions on the president and displayed warmth toward the Soviets, I tried to point out that if the world is a jungle, you have to be prepared to defend yourself, that the Eastern bloc shot defectors in the back, that the Western way of life was under attack and needed a vigorous defense.
It's two decades later, and I hope that Martin holds a fuller understanding of the way communism had indeed landed on the ash help of history.
Bravo to his compatriot, Prince Charles, who made great effort to remember and honor a fallen American at the National Cathedral today, and to Lady Thatcher for her grand appreciation of the nation that produced Reagan:
Nothing was more typical of Ronald Reagan than that large-hearted magnanimity - and nothing was more American.Therein lies perhaps the final explanation of his achievements. Ronald Reagan carried the American people with him in his great endeavours because there was perfect sympathy between them. He and they loved America and what it stands for - freedom and opportunity for ordinary people.
As an actor in Hollywood's golden age, he helped to make the American dream live for millions all over the globe. His own life was a fulfilment of that dream. He never succumbed to the embarrassment some people feel about an honest expression of love of country.
He was able to say 'God Bless America' with equal fervour in public and in private. And so he was able to call confidently upon his fellow-countrymen to make sacrifices for America - and to make sacrifices for those who looked to America for hope and rescue.
With the lever of American patriotism, he lifted up the world. And so today the world - in Prague, in Budapest, in Warsaw, in Sofia, in Bucharest, in Kiev and in Moscow itself - the world mourns the passing of the Great Liberator and echoes his prayer "God Bless America".
(Incidentally, the vicar who presided at my first wedding at St. Alban's, the tiny church adjacent to the National Cathedral, the Rev. Theodore "Ted" Eastman, performed some of the readings at the funeral.)
- posted by jbelliveau at 6:49 PM in Culture
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June 10, 2004
The Detroit Pistons and defense
What a delight to see one of my sports idols, Bill Russell, pen a column, Victory Begins with Defense, for one of my favorite online sites, OpinionJournal:
I always would rather play in and win a close game with unrelenting defense and a final score of 84-83 than a game where one team scores 120 points and wins by 15. Dunks and great passes are always exciting, and even so-called low-scoring games have their share of them. But nothing compares to the subtle beauty of a winner absolutely taking away the other team's "game."Defense is an action, not a reaction. Great defense attacks an opponent's offense vs. reacting to it.
... Great defensive teams study the offensive patterns of every team and every player they play against. Great defensive teams understand the predictability of their opponents' offensive patterns. All great offensive players are predictable. Still, it's inconceivable that any team can always take away its opponent's first shot option or favorite move or favorite starting offensive position. But in team defense, the core operating principle is to reduce efficiency.
What an eloquent dissection of one of the foundation stones of any successful team.
Can the Detroit Pistons continue to play active, controlling defense against the L.A. Lakers? Certainly.
Will they win the series?
Quite possibly, for the Pistons play an old school, long disappeared version of pro basketball, with a hand in the face of almost every shot. The Pistons are better (but not perfect) at not handing the game to the Lakers, as have other opponents who for years have left Robert Horry, Derek Fisher, Norman Rush and other Laker role players wide open for back-breaking three pointers.
There's been a lot of print analysis of the Piston's theft of the first game on the road in Los Angeles, but the TV commentators said it best, indicating that the Lakers simply are not used to being defended against! What an astounding indictment of the standing around, watching the world go by inactivity of most NBA defenses.
Much has been made of Kobe Bryant's winning shot in game 2, with only two ticks left, and what that will do to the Pistons' psyche. I don't see Ben Wallace and Tayshaun Prince as anything less than lion hearted, and able to come right back and play hard and without intimidation.
The series will really come down, once again, to how much the referees coddle Shaquille O'Neal, who routinely is allowed about 15 fouls per game, of which maybe four are actually called. We watch Ben Wallace get what looked like a dangerous yanking of his neck in Game 1 by Shaq -- no flagrant called, however.
Larry Bird has apparently called for homegrown, white superstars in the NBA (CNN transcript, scroll down):
I think it's good for a fan base because as we all know, the majority of the fans are white America. And if you just had a couple of white guys in there, you might get them a little excited.
The real issue with this fan is a hunger for the day when the coddled giant, his Laker pretty boy colleagues, and Jack Nicholson and other wrinkled star fans meet their match -- when a bigger, stronger and more athletic center comes along OR when the league and its referees decide to favor somebody other than the Lakers.
- posted by jbelliveau at 12:00 PM in Sports
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June 8, 2004
Liberal columnists and Reagan
It is strange to watch TV coverage of the Reagan era and see Dan Rather et al. presented as neutral commentators on the meaning of his presidency.
"These are Reagan's one-time enemies," I think, watching the news anchors.
As much as liberal newscasters and columnists have attempted for the moment to rein in their tendencies to criticize Reagan, events such as the forthcoming funeral once more illustrate the gap between the media and its customers. Remember how Walter Cronkite and all the other anchors seems so personally distressed at the Kennedy assassination? Definitely no catches in the throat or shaky voices in the media this week, though we see thoughtful and weepy visitors to the Reagan Library on the screen.
This morning I saw an amazing trio of links to Reagan commentary on the Washington Post Web site -- Cohen, Ignatius, and Dionne. Not a conservative in the bunch, though Ignatius has some moderate tendencies.
"These are Reagan's one-time enemies," I thought, again.
After weighing the matter, I decided to read the Post columnists. Overall, it was not as bad as I feared (having seen a faintly damning article (now being trashed by readers here) in the Baltimore Sun by ultraliberal Michael Olesker.
My ratings:
Acknowledges Reagan achievements, and writes graciously about a gracious man (one demerit for terming the late president a "fabulist"):
It is the time, though, to acknowledge he was right about the Soviet Union -- it was the "evil empire" -- and about welfare abuses and the occasional arrogant insularity of Big Government. On certain issues, he had been intellectually courageous for breaking with the liberal orthodoxy of Hollywood and his own past.
Very respectful of the president, but Reagan strikes me as anything but Protean; rather, he struck me as guided by firm principles that did not change the form of his decisions.
Reagan was a Protean leader, capable, like the Greek god, of changing form depending on political needs and circumstances. He talked tough but generally acted with restraint. That ability -- to combine an adaptive and often compromising political approach with the reassuring, changeless language of values -- was part of Reagan's political genius.
E.J. Dionne: C+
Acknowledges probably unintentionally how limited his worldview is ("It was the evening of July 17, 1980. A group of friends had gathered at my apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side to watch Ronald Reagan's acceptance speech before the Republican National Convention. There was not a Reagan supporter in the house, and there were occasional catcalls as he spoke") and cannot resist taking a potshot at Bush. But he touches on a point related to my blog yesterday, that is, Reagan's ability as a former liberal to persuade other liberals to become neo-conservatives:
... I was in awe of a gift of the Gipper's that was insufficiently appreciated among his conservative devotees: Reagan had the New Deal bred in his bones and could talk to Democrats like a Democrat, and in a way no Republican has matched since.
For a far higher order of analysis of Reagan's ability to reach Democrats, see this OpinionJournal piece by two writers from Britain's Economist:
Mr. Reagan may not have been an intellectual, but his sort of conservatism, just like the religious upheaval started by Martin Luther (another anti-intellectual populist) 500 years ago, combined renewal with heresy. The established faith that Mr. Reagan's generation of American conservatives reinterpreted was classical conservatism (the conservatism whose most eloquent prophet remains Edmund Burke), and the heresy they introduced was classical liberalism (the creed of the Enlightenment and John Stuart Mill). ...If Reaganism had been merely a more vigorous form of old-style conservatism, then it would have been more predictable. In fact, Mr. Reagan-- who began his political life as a New Deal Democrat--took a resolutely liberal approach to Burke's last three principles: hierarchy, pessimism and elitism.
The heroes of Burke's conservatism were paternalist squires, who knew their place in society and made sure everybody else did as well. Mr. Reagan's heroes were rugged individualists, defined by the fact that they do not know their place. He packed his kitchen cabinet with entrepreneurs who built up businesses out of nothing and he worshipped the cowboy. He kept a bronze saddle in the Oval Office and--rather magnificently--rushed to appoint Malcolm Baldridge as commerce secretary when he discovered that he liked going to rodeos.
- posted by jbelliveau at 1:33 PM in Media
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June 7, 2004
Ronald Reagan, converter of liberals
On the passing of this great former president, may I add that Reagan spoke of why he became a "former Democrat" in his 1964 address in support of Republican nominee Barry Goldwater:
As a former Democrat, I can tell you Norman Thomas isn't the only man who has drawn this parallel to socialism with the present administration. Back in 1936, Mr. Democrat himself, Al Smith, the great American, came before the American people and charged that the leadership of his party was taking the party of Jefferson, Jackson and Cleveland down the road under the banners of Marx, Lenin and Stalin. And he walked away from his party, and he never returned to the day he died, because to this day, the leadership of that party has been taking that party, that honorable party, down the road in the image of the labor socialist party of England.
Sixteen years later, I shocked myself when as a lifelong Democrat whose Boston Irish Catholic aunt had worked for JFK, I pulled the lever for a conservative for president. Like Reagan, I felt the Democratic Party had headed into the realm of fringe politics, while Reagan stood for freedom from tyranny. The suffering of the common person in the Soviet bloc made an impression on me.
On that day in 1980, at the age of 26, I found myself almost trembling in a voting booth in Silver Spring, Maryland. I had first voted eight years earlier, for George McGovern ... talk about liberal and anti-war (but remember, I was only 18 at the time of McGovern's candidacy). By the age of 26, I had traveled to Britain and Continental Europe several times and been negatively impressed with how left-wing policies led to high unemployment, depressed salaries, strikes by groups of workers (nurses, railway and airport workers, newspaper printers) aimed at maximum disruption , economic malaise and accommodation with the Soviet Union. My life experiences led me to a conservative conversion, as Reagan himself experienced.
At the time of my first of two votes for Reagan, I had some residual inclinations towards feminism and environmentalism, but I could not hold myself a hostage to the Democrats when I fully agreed with Reagan on limited government, freedom, tax cutting and a strong national defense.
Now at the age of 50, I have spent more than half my life as a Reagan Democrat. When I voted for Reagan, it was with some anxiety -- would the sky fall in? Over time, Reagan exceeded every possible expectation, along with Pope John Paul II and Margaret Thatcher liberating millions in Europe and bringing prosperity to many.
How many thousands and millions of Americans in their 20s and 30s during the 1980s also were swayed by Reagan? Did he create the neo-conservatives (ex-liberals) who so creatively seek solutions to poverty, terrorism and other issues of today? Did he move a plurality of the United States rightward? Did he strip the romantic patina off Marx, Lenin, Guevara and all the other chi-chi campus darlings, cutting through the fog with plain talk?
I believe the answer to all these questions is yes. Reagan got me and a whole lot of other former Vietnam protestors thinking twice about all the nonsense we picked up in the 1960s. Once you start looking at socialism closely, you get plenty nervous about liberalism's similar emphasis on government solutions to problems, and then voila -- you find yourself a Reagan Democrat and eventually, a conservative, believing in God, human rights derived from the Lord, and government as a tool of national defense rather than social engineering.
What was most interesting to me listening to talk radio yesterday (Michael Graham on WMAL-AM in Washington, D.C.) was how many immigrants from the former Soviet Bloc calling to offer their heartfelt remembrances. You can fool the sociology professors at the University of Maryland and the journalists I've worked with in Britain and the U.S. East Coast and a whole lot of other people about life in the fool's paradise of socialism, but not a Latvian or Czech or Russian. Everyone journalist I ever worked with rolled their eyes at Reagan's "evil empire" on the ash heap of history remark, but prisoners in the Soviet gulag took heart -- Natan Sharansky in the Jerusalem Post via The Corner on National Review Online:
In 1983, I was confined to an eight-by-ten-foot prison cell on the border of Siberia. My Soviet jailers gave me the privilege of reading the latest copy of Pravda. Splashed across the front page was a condemnation of President Ronald Reagan for having the temerity to call the Soviet Union an 'evil empire.' Tapping on walls and talking through toilets, word of Reagan's "provocation" quickly spread throughout the prison. We dissidents were ecstatic. Finally, the leader of the free world had spoken the truth – a truth that burned inside the heart of each and every one of us.
Goodbye to a great patriot and a true freedom fighter of the 20th century.
- posted by jbelliveau at 12:25 PM in Culture
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