Throw some $20.00 bills in the street and they will vacate.
Via The Guardian:
In the Baltimore neighborhood that became a nationwide symbol of racial inequality after protests turned to riot over Freddie Gray’s death, small signs of community resurgence have started to emerge.
Across the street from the spot Gray was arrested, a once-vacant row house has been painted with a mural of Harriet Tubman, garden beds have been raised out back, and desks and books populate the inside, in a new community center dubbed the Tubman House.
“I’m a resident of Gilmor and we need this,” said Janet Cottrell, describing the house as a “safe zone” in a neighborhood where homicides have only increased since Gray’s death.
But the city has nothing to do with the development. In fact, residents of the neighborhood have developed the center by illegally occupying the city-owned property slated for demolition – a detail that was not lost on the one mayoral candidate who visited the site for its opening ceremony.
“All the cameras are back in Baltimore and they’re going to want to know what we did differently in the last year in the neighborhood that was ground zero for everything,” said Baltimore city councilman Carl Stokes.
“The truth is we’ve done less than nothing – in terms of Baltimore’s government and larger nonprofits,” Stokes said.
The two-story Tubman House is one of the city’s 16,000 vacants. Just a block from Tubman House, another of those vacants collapsed in the wind a few days earlier, leaving a pile of rubble. It was one of five to fall that weekend. One fell on a Cadillac, crushing the man inside and killing him.
The median income in Gilmor Homes, the public housing complex just adjacent to Tubman House, is just $12,000, in a city where the unemployment rate for black men ages 25 to 54 is 41% and even higher for younger men.
To Lawrence Grandpre, an organizer with Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, one of the groups that makes up the coalition along with Friend of a Friend and Communities United, the Tubman House points to other possibilities.
“We need to have alternatives for people to be able to see something beyond what they see on the corner,” Grandpre said. “And that only happens when you have an actual rooted presence on the space. So that’s why we took the step of taking this city-owned vacant and trying to reclaim it as Tubman House.”