By Caroline Flannery
Baltimore Watchdog Staff Writer
Former Baltimore Sun reporter Antero Pietila told students and faculty at Morgan State University last week that Baltimore is “staring into the unknown” as the city moves toward an uncertain future.
Pietila, who spent 35 years covering city neighborhoods, politics and government for the newspaper, said Baltimore needs more jobs and better transportation if the city hopes to grow and improve its economy.
He criticized Gov. Larry Hogan’s decision in June 2015 to kill the proposed $2.9 billion Red Line, a light rail system that would have connected the city with Baltimore County.
He said that much of the city’s problems rests with its poor transportation network.
“Transportation is a very, very crucial thing in this city that unless that can be resolved the city has a very difficult future,” Pietila said in his speech last Thursday. “This is something that housing experts are starting to realize. Many of the problems with Baltimore’s neighborhoods and housing are not housing related largely at all. Those things are transportation related.”
To illustrate his point about transportation, Pietila said he met a young lady while doing research for a book he wrote who was selling drugs on a corner in Baltimore.
He said the woman told him she had been enrolled in a painter’s union program but had to drop out when the training course was moved too far away from her home.
“Everything was going well until one day she was told the rest of the training would take place is Sykesville, 35 miles from here, no public transport. At that point she quit the course and went back to the corner,” Pietila said.
Pietela said that just like in 1969 when he first arrived in the city, Baltimore today has the feel of being a “de-spirited, de-moralized city.”
“Mayor Stephanie Rawlings wanted to start increasing the city’s population. I don’t think that has happened. There is very little evidence that has happened,” Pietela said.
In addition to his work at the Sun, Pietela wrote the book, “Not In My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped A Great American City,” which told the story of the redlining, blockbusting, racism and anti-Semitism that shaped the Baltimore that exists today.
The book exposed how Eugenics, racial thinking and white supremacy influenced development in Baltimore, including the federal government’s housing policy.
Pietila expressed skepticism about the city’s recent decision to approve a $660 million public financing plan to help Under Armour CEO Kevin Plank redevelop the Port Covington area.
“Baltimore City has always been a gambling city,” Pietila said. “As early as in John Hopkins’ lifetime, the city and the state vacuously gambled with taxpayer’s money.
“The question that I don’t have an answer to is, has the city made adequate preparations for recouping some of the benefits if, as I think, Port Covington is a success, because Port Covington as planned today is just the beginning,” Pietila said.
Pietela warned the audience that racism is here to stay – at least in the short term.
“Prejudices and bigotry are going to continue, not perhaps in the same form that it did in the early years, but they are with us,” Pietela said. “Class, economy and race-based entities are going to continue in various neighborhoods.”
Pietela encouraged people to take advantage of the resources that have been made available to make research and information gathering an easy task. He said students should make use of public and university libraries … and newspapers.
Pietela is working on a second book that will dive deep into the roots of the Johns Hopkins University, hospitals, and their relationship to race in Baltimore.