Growing Up Baltimore – Baltimore’s Economic Decline Leaves Fewer Opportunities For City Youth

A little more than a generation ago, heavy manufacturing dominated Baltimore’s thriving economy. A growing middle class found jobs in steel mills and auto plants, and on the docks.  That Baltimore is no more.

Any discussion about Baltimore’s decline as a industrial powerhouse has to begin in one place, the sprawling, 300-acre complex at the former Bethlehem Steel Plant in Sparrows Point.

“This was the engine at one time was the largest steel mill in the world.”

Bill Barry, labor studies professor at Dundalk Community College, is standing in a large empty, fenced-off parking lot outside the plant.

“At its peak, it employed over 31,000 workers in the bargaining unit and was the huge economic engine for eastern Baltimore County.”

There are fewer than 3,000 workers at the plant now. Gone are the high-paying, union jobs that from the 50s through the 80s paid workers an average of more than 50-thousand dollars-a-year.

The first of the massive lay-offs began,  as Japan and other foreign competitors began to produce steel more cheaply. And a way of life for generations of local residents ended, said Barry.

“For a hundred years, anybody in this area could assume that they could graduate from high school on a Friday, they are getting married on a Saturday and start working at Sparrows Point on Monday. It was a father- son- grandson- even great-grandson type of operation.”

Bethlehem Steel was just the first of a series of manufacturing dominos to fall, including auto plants, assembly plants, shipyards and the port of Baltimore – by far the largest employers in the city.

Since 1970, according to the Census, Baltimore has lost more than 84-percent of its manufacturing jobs.  With a poverty rate of 20-percent, it  ranks as the nation’s 15th poorest major city — in one of the wealthiest states. Baltimore’s overall unemployment rate has held steady at about eight-percent. But the rate for black residents, especially young men, is more than double.

The Labor Department defines chronic unemployment or a depression at 10-percent, and if you use that as measure, than black men have been in a depression for the past 17 years in this country.

Raymond Winbush is the director of the Institute for Urban Research at Morgan State University in Baltimore. In a city where the population is 70-percent African-American, he said high unemployment rates over the long-term have hurt black men hardest of all.

“I’ve rarely see a generation of young men who don’t know how to work, who don’t know how to go about looking for a job, simply don’t understand the labor market, and that doesn’t even count the black men that are exiting out of prison right now- who will be even more crippled by not having a work history.”

“I’ve met men in this city who are 40-years-old who have never worked a legal job.”

That’s David Miller of the Urban Leadership Institute in Baltimore. He emphasizes the word “legal” because many work in the city’s underground economy.

“When you look at a city like Baltimore, where there are low skilled men and women going to work if they cannot find jobs in the traditional sector, then selling drugs becomes an attractive means of employment. Where are low-skilled men and women going to work if they cannot find jobs in the traditional sector, then selling drugs becomes an attractive means of employment.”

Heroin has always been Baltimore’s drug of choice. For decades, it was almost exclusively a drug sold by men to male addicts. But all of that changed when the crack cocaine epidemic hit Baltimore in the mid-1980s, according to Antonia Keane, sociology professor at Loyola College.

”Women were never in hard drugs, except they were packagers;  in the heroin trade. When we have crack hitting, crack is cheap, it doesn’t have to be injected, and all the sudden, women, begin, women and young people, begin to get into the crack, the use of crack, and I think that’s a major devastating and deteriorating factor in the community.”

Keane said the hard times that came with the sharp decline of Baltimore industrial economy and the advent of crack cocaine produced a lethal one-two punch that destroyed countless local families and put thousands of young children at risk.

“If you’ve got a family in difficulty, and typically the father has left, if you had mama, you had a chance. And now, what you’ve got is daddy incarcerated and mama on crack. These children have no one, they’re raising themselves, they’re like feral children.”

And so, with each succeeding generation, it’s become harder to break the cycle.

“What happens is, as those kids grow up in poverty, they end up experiencing less life chances for being successful.”

That’s’ Dunbar Brooks, a demographer of the Baltimore Metropolitan Council, which compiles statistics on the city and its six surrounding counties.

“Whether it’s going to schools that are not performing well, whether they’re getting nourished correctly, whether they’re getting adequate health care – a whole lot of things that can affect their quality of life as a human being. And what happens is they grow up, or get into trouble, and they still remain in poverty. And, guess what? They have kids.”

And those kids are growing up in Baltimore today, with even fewer chances to succeed in an economy suffering from the worst recession since World War II.

I’m Sunni Khalid, reporting in Dundalk and Canton, for 88.1, WYPR.

Our series, “Growing Up Baltimore,” is made possible, in part, Annie E. Casey Foundation and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg Center for the Prevention of Youth Violence. The findings and conclusions presented in our series do not necessarily reflect the opinions of these organizations.

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