Baltimore, Maryland, April 2008

"Baltimore's brick rows, marble steps, and tarred roofs are a diagram of social forces." (Olson, 1979, p. 574). "The social and geographic reorganization of Baltimore over the years 1865-1878 has provided an example of what happened in each building cycle in Baltimore history. It resembles a well-known model from ancient Egypt. Joseph interpreted Pharaoh's dream of the seven fat cows and seven lean cows emerging from the Nile as a warning of seven fat years and seven lean years to come. The expectation of a sequence of abundance and famine permitted Pharaoh and Joseph to perform a vast operation of social redistribution, and to acquire rights in land and power over other social classes and ethnic groups. They manipulated the migration of peoples and movable wealth between regions and from the countryside to the city. As in the Middle Kingdom, so in Baltimore in each long swing strong social differentials were regenerated, and a basic structure of inequalities of social welfare was maintained. Each run of fat years cast up a few millionaires and successful managers, larger numbers of upwardly mobile and hopeful people, and attracted large numbers of newcomers, many of them poor and vulnerable. In each run of lean years which followed, the poor became visible and their vulnerability was revealed." (Olson, 1979, p. 567).

"Blacks ... regarded themselves as exploited and paying 'the black tax,' which was nothing more nor less than class-monopoly rent realized by speculators as they took advantage of a particular mix of financial and governmental policies compounded by problems of racial discrimination." (Harvey, 1974, p. 264).

"Demanding fair access to capital involves the risk," as Kathe Newman reminds us, "of being targeted by capital ... with no guarantee of greater individual or community security to enjoy the social use values of homes, neighbourhoods," and what Chester Hartman famously described as "the 'right to stay put.' ... Home 'ownership' has been capitalized to a level exceeding two-thirds of the American economy. But the meaning of ownership becomes ambiguous or precarious for millions of working-class people -- many but not all of them racially marginalized -- who seek places to live but who face pressures to use the home as an expensive ATM or a long-shot lottery ticket. ... the housing sector cannot compensate for the systematic widening of class divisions in employment, education and financial wealth. Predatory lending demonstrates that the reversal of old forms of exploitation -- replacing denial and exclusion with a flood of capital into marginalized communities -- can worsen the situation. ...the turbocharged speculative capitalization of today's housing bubble cannot last. We need to prepare now to protect the fundamental social use values of home, security, and community from the devalorization that will hit when the bubble bursts." (Wyly et al., 2006, pp. 126-127).

References

Harvey, David (1974). "Class-Monopoly Rent, Finance Capital, and the Urban Revolution." Regional Studies 8, reprinted in Robert W. Lake, ed. (198). Readings in Urban Analysis: Perspectives on Urban Form and Structure. New Brunswick, NJ: Center for Urban Policy Research, 250-277.

Olson, Sherry H. (1979). "Baltimore Imitates the Spider." Annals of the Association of American Geographers 69(4), 557-574.

Wyly, Elvin K., Mona Atia, Holly Foxcroft, Daniel J. Hammel, and Kelly Phillips-Watts. "American Home: Predatory Mortgage Capital and Spaces of Race and Class Exploitation in the United States." Geografiska Annaler B 88(1), 105-132.