People’s Park, across from the county’s Arundel Center in Annapolis, is sacred ground. It is where Black Annapolis lived, traded, entertained, and thrived until fifty years ago. That’s when the bulldozers arrived. The county wanted parking for its government employees, so the city used its urban renewal authority to tear down the buildings and move residents into public housing on the outskirts of town.
The white folks who made the decisions described the Old Fourth Ward as a slum and said that demolishing it was progress.
The people who lived there called it urban removal. In the words of 91-year old Eliza Mae Robinson, “It was a rip-off.”
People’s Park was called Whitmore Park until we renamed it in 2020. The new name was the result of a community visioning process organized by Anne Arundel County Recreation and Parks. The full name is People Park: Dedicated to the People of the Old Fourth Ward.
On Saturday, we gathered at People’s Park for moving testimonials from residents, the unveiling of three prominent storyboards, and the launch of a new historical web site. People like Ms. Robinson won’t be around to tell the stories forever, so what we did Saturday was important.
Knowing history is a powerful antidote to repeating the worst of it, but what happened to the Old Fourth Ward gets repeated over and over again. We see the buildings but not the people, and call it progress.
I don’t oppose redevelopment. In fact, I support it if the result improves the quality of life for impacted people. But we can’t deny the data. If the new housing units sell for our county’s median single family price of $495k, or rent for the two-bedroom average of $1,932/month, we know exactly the income that it takes for a family to live there, and it’s a lot more than that of a teacher, a firefighter, a janitor, or a cashier. The vast and growing gap between housing costs and the wages of essential workers has created our primary portal to poverty.
Developers on their own cannot solve this problem. They can’t build units that meet our code requirements and house our essential workers without a level of public subsidy that is hard to come by. The people priced out of the market rarely speak up, but homeowners who feel threatened by growth and diversity often do, in opposition to inclusionary zoning and subsidies that create opportunity.
Politicians in jurisdictions like ours where median household incomes are north of $100k per year don't often focus on the housing crisis, for obvious political reasons. But our businesses and local institutions are feeling the pinch. Their leaders are feeling the pinch. They can’t hire enough essential workers because those workers can’t afford to live here.
So this is where we may have an opportunity.
The politicians, regardless of their philosophical leanings, all rely on campaign contributions to get re-elected. The largest donors by far are business owners, the employers in need of housing for their workers. Maybe, just maybe, this tight labor market will wake up these political donors, and they will stop funding politicians who oppose the creation of affordable housing in our county.
Maybe, just maybe, the County Council members who voted no on our workforce housing bill, our fair housing bill, and continuing our practice of tax relief for some of our workforce housing developments, will vote yes when we bring them a plan to create a dedicated funding source for our Affordable Housing Trust Fund. Maybe they’ll support a plan similar to what our neighboring counties have that requires a small percentage of the new units in certain developments to be affordable for essential workers.
If these politicians don’t come around, and instead continue opposing solutions to our housing affordability crisis, I suspect that many good people will gladly join forces with essential workers and the businesses that employ them to elect new leaders, and will do it in tribute to the people of the Old Fourth Ward.
Until next week…
Steuart Pittman
Anne Arundel County Executive