Soteria Lomax, 20, sees a pile of trash differently than the average city resident.
Crack vials, used condoms, joint papers and bullet casings ? the unsightly remnants of Baltimore?s woes to the average person ? are a treasure trove of information for Lomax, a revealing inventory of what?s wrong with the neighborhood.
“You see the street differently,” said Lomax, one of the 16 field workers who are canvassing the city, block by block, as part of a long-term environment study of the neighborhoods. Lomax and her fellow workers walk the city?s alleys and sidewalks, day and night, tallying the city?s debris ? one crack pipe at a time.
“It opens your eyes to a lot of things,” Lomax said.
The study, designed and headed by Johns Hopkins graduate and epidemiologist Debra Furr-Holden, measures trash, along with other quality-of-life indicators such as police presence and abandoned homes, as a comprehensive assessment of the city?s health.
Recently funded by the National Institutes of Health and awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers by President Bush, Furr-Holden?s study is now fully funded for five years.
She said her research methodology uses the quantity of drug paraphernalia or empty liquor bottles as evidence of a pattern that reveals the true health of a city block.
“We have a system of counting that allows us to identify symptoms of distress in the neighborhood,” she said.
Furr-Holden, along with field workers such as Lomax, head out to city neighborhoods using PDAs tocount what they see. Along the way, Furr-Holden said they?ve already picked up patterns that shed light on many of the city?s lingering problems.
For example, they have found that whenever there is an alcohol outlet, they find a cluster of violence and drugs around the outlet.
Furr-Holden?s goal is to complete assessments of the entire city, and use the data to identity problems. She said that assessing the health of the city?s neighborhoods by measuring what is on the streets will allow the community to diagnose what it needs to do to heal.
“What people are exposed to is a system of norms,” she said. “And this affects how a community thinks about itself,” she said.
“This is our passion, to help the city understand itself.”
