Former Maryland governor Martin O'Malley (D) meets with Baltimore residents on April 28, a day after the city’s violent unrest. (Matt Rourke/AP)
When Martin O’Malley announces his bid for the presidency Saturday in Baltimore, he is hoping that backdrop will strengthen his effort to become the leading candidate for progressives.
But the backdrop also could be his albatross.
In preparing to seek the Democratic nomination, he has cast himself as the only candidate with the vision, record and hands-on experience to attack urban problems such as poverty and crime.
But the stubborn urban decay that continues to afflict sizable swaths of Baltimore threatens O’Malley’s pitch. The city drew international attention in April when riots erupted in the same troubled neighborhoods where O’Malley had said conditions were “so much better.”
A challenge for O’Malley, analysts say, is that his numerous initiatives for the city — as mayor for seven years and governor for eight — have yielded mixed results.
The gleaming offices, restaurants and new housing in the Inner Harbor area are a stark contrast to the boarded-up businesses and homes the world saw on television when Baltimore exploded. The sharp reduction in violent crime is offset by the tension with police that was exposed by last month’s looting.
Given his desire to run as an urban champion, it’s no wonder that O’Malley is quick to object when anyone criticizes Baltimore.
At a public meeting in December, a month before his last day as Maryland’s governor, O’Malley interrupted a fellow Democrat who faulted the city for the thousands of vacant, abandoned buildings that fill its poorest neighborhoods.
“You drive up the streets of Baltimore City, as I do often, and it is just indescribable what we, I guess collectively, have allowed that to become,” Comptroller Peter Franchot said at a Board of Public Works session in Annapolis.
Before Franchot could continue, O’Malley jumped in: “And yet so much better than it was 15 years ago. . . . A lot of people gave their lives [at work] to make it better.” He said Franchot was “30 years late” in sounding an alarm over urban blight.
[O’Malley to launch campaign in Baltimore ]
The mixed results of O’Malley’s tenure can be seen in the frustration he experienced in trying to reclaim the city’s uninhabitable buildings. The city drew applause for acquiring thousands of lots in the hope of promoting their redevelopment.
But the number of vacant and abandoned residential properties increased by 2,570, to more than 15,700, between 2002, when O’Malley’s program began, and 2007, the year he stepped down as mayor to become governor, according to statistics from the Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance.
The alliance said the gain was partly attributable to the city’s success in identifying vacant buildings that it hadn’t known about before. But housing specialists said legal complexities and high costs also stymied efforts by O’Malley and his two successors to fix the problem.
On the plus side, O’Malley won national plaudits for innovative leadership as both mayor and governor, such as for his early adoption of data-driven management. He points to accomplishments such as slashing violent crime, reducing children’s exposure to lead paint, increasing spending on drug treatment and drawing young people back to redeveloped neighborhoods downtown.
But the renaissance of prosperity in some Baltimore communities, principally around the harbor, has not spread to many of the city’s poorer sections. The city’s overall poverty and unemployment rates have remained high — not nearly as bad as in Detroit, but worse than in the District, Pittsburgh, Boston and New York.
A survey released this month by two Harvard economists found that among the nation’s 100 largest cities and counties, Baltimore ranked at the bottom as the jurisdiction where children face the worst odds of escaping poverty.
“Any city has pockets of poverty; it’s really a matter of the depth and scale,” said Jennifer S. Vey, a fellow at the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program. “The lows are low in Baltimore. . . . You have deep distress in certain pockets.”
O’Malley contends that Baltimore was making better progress than most comparable cities until the 2008 recession.
But his defense of his urban record also poses some political risks. He says the shortcomings arise not from his programs but from national economic policies that foster inequality and from a lack of support from the federal government.
“We haven’t had an agenda for America’s cities for at least two decades . . . probably since Jimmy Carter,” O’Malley said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on May 3.
Taking a robust liberal position, O’Malley has urged increased spending on cities. He wants to raise the minimum wage, as Maryland did with his encouragement as governor.
“We need big investments in affordable housing,” O’Malley said at a forum May 5 in Redlands, Calif. “We need investments in infrastructure, especially mass transit. We also need to target job training.”
That approach could help O’Malley in the Democratic primaries, where he has positioned himself to the left of front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton. O’Malley is competing with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a socialist, for support from liberal activists who see Clinton as too moderate.
But it would face a more skeptical audience in the general election.
“The problem is that it is politically unsalable,” said Donald F. Norris, director of the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. “We are a nation of suburbs, and suburban residents and elected officials do not care a whit about declining central cities.”
O’Malley hasn’t said how much he thinks his proposed investments would cost or where he would find the money. Haley Morris, an O’Malley spokeswoman, said this week that such questions are premature because O’Malley won’t unveil a comprehensive agenda for cities until several weeks from now.
Since the riots, O’Malley’s record has drawn attention mainly for the aggressive police policies he implemented as mayor. They led to a substantial decline in homicides and other violent crime, but also resulted in a sharp increase in arrests for minor offenses, which alienated poor communities.
O’Malley’s successor as mayor, Sheila Dixon (D), abandoned the “zero tolerance” arrests, and critics noted that homicides continued to decline. Still, O’Malley’s defenders credit him with helping to start the trend, especially by shutting down many of the city’s open-air drug markets
“On one hand, more people got arrest records; on the other hand, murders went down,” said Robert C. Embry, president of the Abell Foundation, which works to reduce Baltimore poverty.
O’Malley also drew mixed reviews for his economic development strategy. As mayor, he directed money and government support toward middle-tier neighborhoods, which he thought offered the best chance of recovery, or toward ones that had access to job centers.
Many urban experts praised the approach as a smart use of scarce resources. But critics said it diverted aid from communities most in need of help.
O’Malley played a key role in pushing forward the redevelopment of a poor neighborhood near the Johns Hopkins medical complex in East Baltimore. He did so partly to keep Hopkins, the city’s largest private employer, from taking its expansion plans outside the city. He also targeted that community because it had a relatively good chance to prosper, owing to its proximity to hospital jobs.
O’Malley also supported Healthy Neighborhoods, a community development effort sponsored by financial and philanthropic organizations that has been credited with helping to stabilize middle- and working-class neighborhoods that were at risk of declining.
“O’Malley recognized that improving neighborhoods is about finding their assets,” said Mark Sissman, president of Healthy Neighborhoods Inc. “He and others at the same time said, ‘Let’s figure out what works and build from those strengths.’ . . . Is there a college that’s important? Is there good public transportation? Are there historic buildings?”
But that progress came with a cost, according to some community activists and business people in the city’s poorest neighborhoods.
“O’Malley did well by the harbor, but my community didn’t benefit,” said Doni Glover, a community activist and journalist who lives in Sandtown-
Winchester. “My understanding is that for poor, inner-city black neighborhoods in West Baltimore and East Baltimore, his method, his strategy, was just let them rot.”
Sandtown-Winchester was the center of the April protests in Baltimore, which were triggered by the death of Sandtown resident Freddie Gray a week after he suffered a severe spinal injury in police custody.
Perhaps the biggest problem for poor neighborhoods in Baltimore and comparable cities is the shortage of jobs for low-skill workers.
Here, O’Malley drew praise for good management of federal job programs and for protecting funding for public schools. But Baltimore schools remain the worst in the state, by most measures, and it’s still a challenge for job-seekers without automobiles to get to jobs in upscale parts of the city or the suburbs.
“He did a good job of managing the agencies,” said Peter Beilenson, chief executive of the Evergreen Health Cooperative, who served as O’Malley’s city health commissioner. “I don’t think a huge amount was done to make jobs accessible in the neighborhoods, which is truly essential if you’re going to deal with the Sandtown-Winchesters of the world.”
O’Malley strongly backed building the light-rail Red Line, which would improve transit for residents of poor neighborhoods in West Baltimore. But Gov. Larry Hogan (R), who succeeded O’Malley in Annapolis, is considering killing the Red Line on grounds that its price tag of at least $2.6 billion is too high.
In his Project 5000 effort to reduce urban blight as mayor, O’Malley sought for the city to take over 5,000 abandoned properties and prepare to donate or sell them so they could be redeveloped.
The city exceeded the target in gaining control of buildings but then had difficulties disposing of them.
Dixon proposed instead to create a quasi-governmental “land bank” to deal with the issue, but it never got off the ground. The current mayor, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake (D), has embraced a third approach, called “Vacants to Value.” It uses a broad array of methods, including increased demolition funding, infrastructure repairs and housing reinvestment.
None of the efforts have reduced the backlog. The reported total of vacant and abandoned residential properties has continued to creep up and was above 16,100 in 2013.
At the December hearing, Franchot said it was “utterly, totally unacceptable” for Baltimore to have “block after block after block” of homes shuttered with boards or cinder blocks.
O’Malley instead stressed the “great opportunities . . . to repopulate the City of Baltimore.” He added: “It could happen even more quickly with some more capital dollars.”
Jennifer Jenkins contributed to this report.
