Baltimore Drive-By: The Bridge, the City, and Infra-Structural Racism

Let’s also mourn the people who die every day from structural violence.

Baltimore’s mayor was the target of racist social media attacks after he spoke to reporters about the collapse of the Key Bridge. That’s disgusting, but it’s hardly surprising. Racism is carved into the city’s very infrastructure. It has reshaped its neighborhoods, highways, and mass transit.

The destruction of the Francis Scott Key Bridge was tragic. But the bridge’s primary purpose wasn’t to serve Baltimore; it was to get around it.  It certainly wasn’t built for Baltimore’s low-income residents, many of whom don’t even have cars. What good is a bridge to people who don’t own an automobile?

The numbers are startling on that score. Nationally, only 8.3 percent of American households don’t have a car. But in Baltimore’s Sandtown neighborhood, that figure is 58.4 percent.  It’s 48.9 percent in Southwest Baltimore and 47.9 percent in Upton/Druid Heights.

These neighborhoods are under siege. In Upton/Druid Heights, for example, 58 percent of children live in poverty. That’s nearly six times higher than the overall state of Maryland.

People are dying in Baltimore — not from the drive-by shootings you see in the news from time to time, which have a relatively low body count. The large-scale dying comes from the city’s structural drive-by, reflected in the bridges, tunnels, and highways that let interstate travelers bypass Baltimore as if it wasn’t even there.

That’s not to say infrastructure isn’t a good investment. The structural drive-by is seen in the investments that don’t happen.

Although the Key Bridge carried local traffic, its essential function was to move passengers and cargo along the interstate highway system.  But another infrastructure project, which never got the green light, would have helped Baltimore’s lower-income neighborhoods more.

The Red Line, a proposed addition to the city’s rail system, would have linked lower-income, majority Black neighborhoods to jobs in other parts of the city –– in Camden Yards, the Inner Harbor, and the universities, medical centers, and corporations on the east side of town. But the Red Line was never built. After a string of delays, Republican Governor Larry Hogan — now, puzzlingly, the leading candidate for senator in this predominantly Democratic state — killed the project for good.

Journalist Alon Levy put it succinctly in his article on the decision, headlined “How You Can Tell Larry Hogan’s Decision to Kill the Red Line Was Racially Discriminatory.” Here’s how:  Hogan killed Baltimore’s Red Line but promoted the Purple Line in richer, whiter Montgomery County. That led to a Title VI civil rights lawsuit and a federal investigation at the close of the Obama administration. But the investigation was killed after Trump took office, and the lawsuit lost momentum.

Transportation infrastructure has a long segregationist history, in Baltimore and across the country. The mid-twentieth century highway construction boom fueled white flight from urban centers. But white flight began even earlier in Baltimore, as journalist Alec MacGillis explains, with the construction of a pioneering streetcar system in the early twentieth century. That gave rise to white “streetcar suburbs” like Catonsville and Oakenshawe.

White flight made it easier to systematically neglect a city’s remaining, Black neighborhoods. So did the real-estate practice of “blockbusting,” which lowered the value of working-class white homes by preying on racist fears over integration. As University of Maryland Prof. W. Edward Orser documents, “blockbusting” in Baltimore allowed real estate companies to buy White homes at a loss and then sell them to Black families at inflated prices. Working-class Whites were robbed of an asset, Black families were robbed through overcharging, and segregation got worse.

Not that housing discrimination was anything new in Baltimore. It pioneered residential segregation in 1910, when the City Council passed a law designating city blocks as White or Black. (It was later struck down by the Supreme Court.)

People forget that Maryland is below the Mason-Dixon line and slavery was legal there until 1864. Advertisements for the “sale” of enslaved people were once common in the Baltimore Sun.

Today, as in the past, structural violence kills. Life expectancy in Upton/Druid Heights is 62.9 years, but it’s 83.1 years in Roland Park, the city’s richest neighborhood – where most households have more than one car.  That’s a twenty-year gap in life expectancy.

The Maryland Transportation Authority (MTA), which operated the Key Bridge, often neglects the needs of lower-income people. An electronic EZ-Pass is required to pay tolls, for example, and they are difficult to obtain without a bank account. (The Federal Reserve reports that 13 percent of Black households are unbanked.)

The MTA’s floundering “traffic relief plan,” crafted under Hogan, would have increased traffic in parts of the DC area and raised tolls for many drivers through a “public-private investment” that would have siphoned off highway revenue for private profit and imposed “dynamic pricing” –surge pricing that could change as often as every five minutes, driving tolls out of the reach of many area residents. It would also have given a private company control over more than 100 miles of the DC area’s high-speed lanes.

Fortunately, Hogan’s privatization scheme floundered after pushback from local officials and his Democratic successor. So has his other “public-private partnership,” the Purple Line. But the intent was clear — and it was not to serve the Black, Brown, and White lower-income people of Maryland.

Transportation was even used against high school students during the 2015 protests over the police killing of Freddie Gray. As MacGillis writes,

“Just after Freddie Gray’s memorial service had concluded, and headed for Mondawmin Mall, the transit hub for some 5,000 of them, they found several hundred police waiting ... They also found that the bus lines through the hub were suspended, as was service at the Mondawmin subway station ...”

“It was almost as if authorities were trying to engineer the confrontation that ensued between the growing mass of stranded youths and the outnumbered cops,” MacGillis adds.

But these are merely the latest battles in a war that has lasted for four hundred years. The Susquehannock people were hunting in what is now Baltimore when Europeans declared the Province of Maryland in 1634. They soon became refugees in their own native land. The scattered bands that survived eventually merged into other tribes – which were also driven from the region.

Call it the first drive-by.

As we remember those who lost their lives in the bridge disaster, let’s not forget the people who are killed by structural violence every day in Baltimore.