Xanny t1_j7q53wq wrote on February 8, 2023 at 4:55 PM

Reply to comment by MedicalSpecializer in 23 Baltimore schools have zero students proficient in math, per state test results by bobbyw24

The poor parts of Baltimore have been naturally depopulating for half a century. If you look at the census data all the areas you would describe as blighted are all losing double digit population per decade. Anyone that can get out does, and anyone that can't probably has a poor life expectancy.

If literally the status quo continues, the city will keep leveling vacant blocks, until all the depressed parts of the city are empty fields. It will just take another century. Simultaneously, gentrification pushes back into these areas on a lot of fronts, and as people find they can sell their run down crumbling houses for enough to move elsewhere with better opportunity they usually will.

MedicalSpecializer t1_j7q5t52 wrote on February 8, 2023 at 4:59 PM

do the people that get out have meaningfully better outcomes (after adjusting for assumed better income due to being in a more economically vibrant area), or are they still income-adjusted, just as sick and unproductive? additionally, since we’re talking cyclical, are their children better off than they were, or are they actually worse off because poverty is largely unbreakable, it just moved around

Xanny t1_j7q6scy wrote on February 8, 2023 at 5:06 PM

Yes? Look at the demographics of the county. its going to flip minority white by the next census, a drop from like 80% white in 1980 or so. Blacks that could went right where the whites did a half century earlier once they had the chance.

> poverty is largely unbreakable

I bet if you go back 5 generations in your family you had someone working as a subsistence farmer living in a shack they didn't even own, and today you are probably well educated middle class and white collar. News flash, people do actually get out of poverty. My grandmother was daughter to a tenant farmer and died owning her own suburban house with no material wants, all the cars and vacations she wanted, having worked as a university secretary for 30 years.

A lot of why she did that though was from racism. She was on the winning side of the post war suburban sprawl movement, her husband was a veteran, they had all the opportunity handed to them if they were willing to take it and did.

By comparison the "irredeemable" poor people you are describing have been here for 80+ years in the same cycle of disinvestment. They have lived the same lifestyle for generations with no opportunities offered. And like I said, those that did find opportunity largely took it and left. Go find me a anywhere in the county with the kind of total abandonment that the butterfly has.

Its often as simple as if you can get a bank loan on if you can escape generational poverty or not. My family exists as it does today on the back of guaranteed low rate mortgages for veterans and whites after WW2.

z3mcs t1_j7qb3ze wrote on February 8, 2023 at 5:33 PM

I've been looking to see a comment like this online since the 1990s. Bless you for posting it. If I had awards to give I'd give you all of them.

MedicalSpecializer t1_j7q7mh9 wrote on February 8, 2023 at 5:11 PM

You know, this is a good perspective. I’ll go do more research.

Xanny t1_j7qxrp5 wrote on February 8, 2023 at 7:57 PM

If you want something else to research look into how many dead towns there are throughout the Rustbelt now. They look exactly like the black butterfly of Baltimore and have similar rates of drug use and crime, just they are smaller and more dispersed so its not as concentrated a problem. Those places had the exact same pattern of white flight as resource extraction and factory labor dried up and left, the difference is they were isolated enough to just be abandoned and forgotten for the most part.

The people that lived there had kids that took opportunity to leave like my grandma did, and nobody else wanted to go there as opportunity dried up, so they turned into ruins too. Like they often still have a few people living there, just like the butterfly, but thats because the erosion of a place with capital flight is slow and drawn out.

Its why the opioid epidemic got so bad for white people. It basically took these dying rural areas and towns and beat them to death bluntly with overdosing. Entire states like Kentucky are scarred by it.

jdl12358 t1_j7qe7xb wrote on February 8, 2023 at 5:53 PM

I'm sorry but where did you get the idea that the county became majority black in 2020?? Not only is it not majority black, it is still majority white at 55%. Even Howard County has dipped below 50% white. Black people don't even make up 1/3rd of the county population. Not to mention that the majority black parts of the county have probably been majority or plurality black at this point for 30 years. I agree with what you are saying because the original guy commenting is talking eugenics, but the county is still majority white.