Retain them.
Grow them.
Attract them.
These are the efforts a new partnership launched Thursday hopes to do with Baltimore?s middle-class black families. The leadership of the initiative, called More in the Middle, hopes accomplishing those three tasks will spark a renaissance among that population and continue the city?s growth in coming years.
“If we allow them to leave, we are throwing away the economic stability of our city and region,” said Diane Bell McKoy, president and CEO of Associated Black Charities, which heads the partnership.
She said the initiative would benefit the city “not because the [target] group is African-American but because the city is predominately African-American, so any effort to target this group will have the greatest effect on the city and the region.”
According to data from the Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance at the University of Baltimore, 64 percent of Baltimore City residents are black, but 11 percent of city residents are middle-class blacks, defined as making $35,000 to $75,000 per year. Nearly 60,000 blacks left Baltimore from 1995 to 2000, according to BNIA data, 42 percent of them middle-class residents.
The partnership will have to advance its agenda on many fronts, said Bell McKoy, including boosting homeownership rates and values, increasing educational attainment, and cutting into unemployment rates, which run at 14 percent among the city?s black population and 5 percent among whites.
“It is not going to be done through one piece of legislation, a single program, an infusion of cash, through lofty rhetoric,” said Tony Cipollone, vice president for assessment and advocacy with the Annie E. Casey Fund.
Michael Scott, principal with commercial real estate merchant bank Quantum Capital, said a lack of generationalwealth being passed on through black families had contributed to the decline of the community?s middle class. Just 1 percent of blacks in Baltimore City earn more than $75,000 per year, according to BNIA data.
“I don?t look to the public sector to do everything,” Scott said. “These are largely private-sector issues.”
City Council President Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said she was raised in a middle-class neighborhood, and she praised the new effort to bring those families back to the city.
“It?s like teeth ? if you don?t pay attention to them, they?ll go away, and that?s what happened to the African-American middle class,” Rawlings-Blake said. “It?s time to start flossing.”
By the numbers
Blacks in Baltimore City:
» 64 percent of Baltimore City residents are black; 11 percent of city residents are middle-class blacks.
» The per capita income for a black resident is $13,123 (white resident: $25,139).
» 1 percent of blacks and 5 percent of whites earn more than $75,000 in Baltimore City.
» Between 1995 and 2000, nearly 60,000 blacks left Baltimore, 42 percent of them middle-class.
Source: Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance, University of Baltimore?s Jacob France Institute
