If you’ve ever heard of the “white noose” here in Baltimore, here’s another great demonstration.

Pooling local revenue with Baltimore City’s two nearest neighbors results in $3,717 more funding per student for BCPSS students.

If we pooled the whole state, that increase grows to $4,963.

Without including wealthy DC suburbs or the Eastern Shore of Maryland, roughly 75% of the gap in funding for Baltimore City is covered just by stepping across a border designed for segregation.

75% of the gap.

That’s the legacy of state sponsored segregation. That’s what you choose when you live over the border.

Via Ed Build’s Clean Slate

This Baltimore Magazine story on what to do improve the city is spot on with 1 exception– we don’t need Maglev for Baltimore, we just need good conventional high speed rail. We can get to DC in 16 mins & NYC in 1:23 w/o maglev.

Love having Wyman Park so close by.

From today’s “taking it slow being kind of off from work” walk.

A lot of white people in America who don’t support progressive taxes, and don’t support various ways government can redistribute wealth point to one thing: they have earned what is theirs. When we talk about reparations— they didn’t own slaves.

How many of them know the history of their wealth?

This story about two Baltimore neighborhoods is just one small example of how explicit government policy and action created and sustained a racial wealth divide just a generation or two ago.

Because I grew up in the New York City tri-state area, I frequently heard from people whose families, like mine, emigrated to the US with little, long after slavery. These immigrants and their descendants made clear that because they didn’t participate in slavery or the Jim Crow South and they came to the US with little, they had no reason to have to pay taxes that supported black people in America to correct for our original sin. It seemed preposterously unfair.

They were and are blind to the ways their own family wealth in America was created and supported through explicitly racist policy programs that lead to affordable home ownership for their families. They have benefited from white supremacy all the same.

It’s been a week. Hoping this weekend gives me a chance to recharge, so I can rise up and meet the challenges of next week a little more refreshed.

I wish Baltimore looked like the Charm City Night Market every night. #baltimore

The AirBnB Invasion of Barcelona

AirBnB removes a lot of friction in the market. In the past, as a destination became more popular, the growth in tourism was mediated by the pace of approval and construction of new hotel rooms. Now we can activate existing housing stock when demand for tourism increases to keep prices low and space available.

I’m not convinced this is all bad. Cheaper travel is great because more people will do it. Traveling to new places and being exposed to different cultures, people, and geography are both key to building empathy and connectedness. Plus local economies benefit from the influx of money.

On the other hand, inexpensive and increased travel, along with the ease of communication facilitated by the internet, has really caused an urban sameness to settle across the globe. It is definitely true that places are losing their distinctiveness as we descend into a global elite monoculture.

And a final thought about the so-called AirBnB “problem”— every city is different. A small city that has little excess housing capacity and massive tourism has different dynamics compared to a city with declining populations and huge excesses in housing capacity.

Horrifying look at Baltimore Police Department IT, which is still running on decades old systems and custom Lotus Notes applications.