Inner City

Business sage Michael Porter, who made his reputation telling countries and big companies how to muscle up competitively, has shifted his sights toward urban America."

Judith L. Colligan, a Howard County activist whose work included putting an end to human trafficking, aiding city children through Agape House and founding a meditation group, died Jan. 19 of heart failure at her home in Columbia. She was 71. "Judy had lots of energy and was very, very vivacious," said Ruth Ellen Hellyre, a Columbia resident and friend of 35 years. "She was always considerate of other people and very dedicated to acting on what she believed. " "Judy died at the top of her game and with her boots on. And that's what she would have wanted," said Normale Doyle, a retired Social Security Administration computer systems analyst and neighbor.

Take 10 inner-city children in Baltimore. By the time they're 18 years old, five of them will know someone who has been murdered and five will know someone who has been the victim of armed robbery. Two will have witnessed a murder and four a shooting. One of them will have been assaulted with a weapon, one raped and two had their lives threatened.This is the level of violence that inner-city youths are growing up with, a team of researchers led by University of Maryland pediatrician Jack Gladstein has found.

Wouldn't it be great to jog, walk or bike to Fort McHenry directly from the Inner Harbor, Federal Hill and Locust Point on a continuous waterfront parkway? Baltimore has a potentially wonderful, seven-mile stretch around the harbor from Canton to Fort McHenry that should become our city's "central park. " While the Inner Harbor is the center of this, we should be thinking beyond it and taking advantage of greater opportunities. This is more important, on many levels, than just adding more Inner Harbor attractions.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- U.S. banks are discovering they can profit handsomely on loans to homeowners in America's inner cities, according to the Federal Reserve Board's chief proponent of inner-city lending.But Congress, in its rush to stabilize the banking industry, now threatens to stop such loans, Fed Governor Lawrence B. Lindsey said yesterday."It would be unfortunate if we . . . unload an ever-bigger paper-work burden on the banking industry," Mr. Lindsey said at a meeting of bankers organized by the Kansas City Neighborhood Alliance.

MANY OF TODAY'S Southern inner cities are war zones where young men and women get cut down before their lives barely begin. Growing up in Western Heights, a Knoxville, Tenn., public housing project where abrupt violence was commonplace, I quickly learned to avoid certain street corners and the so-called "bad people." I eventually developed my own survival map, which I hoped would guide me to adulthood. My map, however, couldn't help me navigate all inner-city dangers. Severe hazards seeped through bolted doors, barred windows, and corroding pipes.

The stunning rise of lacrosse on the national landscape is evident on weekday mornings in inner-city Baltimore during the spring. "Every morning, on my way to work, there's a kid on every corner or bus stop with a lacrosse stick in his hand," said Donnie Brown, a member of Morgan State's first all-black lacrosse team in 1971. "This stuff has been going on awhile. The numbers are growing." Skyrocketing might be a more apt description. According to US Lacrosse, the governing body for the sport, there was an 11.7 percent increase in the number of players participating in 2006 over 2005.

Rick Levin found the next frontier of retailing not in the wide open spaces of suburbia but amid boarded-up rowhouses and corner liquor stores in a stretch of East Baltimore.In a strip center on North Caroline Street with a supermarket and a Chinese carryout, Levin set out to create an oasis two years ago, putting one of his largest Downtown Locker Room stores in a former drugstore. He stocked it with hooded sweat shirts and Nike basketball shoes, hired local help, lighted the vast space with wall sconces, covered the floor in gleaming hardwood and pumped music through the speakers.

The Rev. Brad R. Braxton calls it an assignment, but really his five-year stint in West Baltimore was a choice. A choice to lead an inner-city church, to jump-start programs for the hungry, to help guide a congregation needing direction - despite a Rhodes scholarship and academic credentials that could have taken him anywhere in the world. Now, after fulfilling what he calls a "covenant" to ignite the spirit at historic Douglas Memorial Community Church on West Madison Avenue, he's leaving to take a teaching position at Wake Forest University in North Carolina.

Can liberal and conservative views of crime, race and the deterioration of poor, inner-city communities over the last 20 years converge sufficiently to make possible a new policy consensus on addressing America's urban crisis? The urgency of such a consensus was dramatically underscored by a recent report which found that 42 percent of black men in the District of Columbia were somehow enmeshed in the criminal justice system on any given day in 1991 -- evidence of a social breakdown in the nation's center cities far more serious than previously acknowledged.

"Baltimore Sons." Wes Moore says that could have been the title of the combined autobiography and biography that he wrote about himself and a different Wes Moore. Both Wes Moores come from Baltimore. But one has become a Johns Hopkins University graduate and global-banking strategist, while the other is serving a life sentence for the murder of a security guard (an off-duty policeman) during the robbery of a Pikesville jewelry store. On December 9, 2000, one Wes Moore was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship.

"The Other Wes Moore" is a book that bridges the gap between Inner Harbor and inner city in the most startling and revelatory ways. The title might suggest the tale of a hidden life. But it's something completely different: the story of two Baltimore men with the same name, roughly similar backgrounds — and wholly opposite journeys. The Wes Moore who was just on "Oprah" became a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the Johns Hopkins University, a Rhodes scholar, a White House Fellow and an Army officer in Afghanistan, as well as the author of this book.

The Sun editorial "Invisible lives" (April 11) discusses the Lamont Davis trial and laments "all these young people have been betrayed by society's indifference and neglect." Perhaps more rightly, the teenagers have been betrayed by their parents' and Democrat-controlled city and state governments' indifference and neglect. Further, according to The Sun, schools, welfare agencies, and the state's broken juvenile justice system have failed them. Thus failure by the Democrat-controlled city and state governments.

Jennifer Williams, a young mother of two, lives in an East Baltimore neighborhood where corner stores and carry-outs are the only places to shop. Yet Williams and other carless residents of inner-city "food deserts" are not as stranded as they might seem. They regularly shop at full-sized supermarkets miles from home by catching rides in hack cabs. "I go all the time - twice a week," she said. Illegal and notoriously dangerous, unlicensed cabs are an unlikely ally in the search for affordable and healthful food.

Since 2001, the government has spent almost $50 billion for national biodefense at sites such as Fort Detrick and other specialty laboratories and universities, and this amount is likely to increase further with ambitious plans to build high-containment laboratories across the country. To be sure, there is an excellent rationale for improving our defense against biological threats. But the diseases that we are preparing against do not currently exist in our country. There is no inhalational anthrax, smallpox or bird flu, and it is unclear whether we are likely to face such biological threats any time soon.

When Andres Alonso "fell" into teaching after ditching his job as a Wall Street lawyer, he took on a special education class in Newark, N.J., and dedicated himself to serving emotionally disturbed children for more than a decade, eventually becoming the legal guardian of one of his former students. To those who have watched Alonso's life evolve from those early days as a classroom teacher to a deputy chancellor of New York's behemoth school system, the man who is the new chief executive officer for Baltimore's schools didn't just switch jobs, he found his calling.

Washington.--Forty percent of America's cities are programmed to fail. Gary, Camden, East St. Louis are already clinically dead. Bridgeport, Newark, Hartford, Cleveland, Detroit are on life-support systems. New York, Baltimore, Chicago, St. Louis, Philadelphia are sinking. Though seemingly healthy, Boston, Minneapolis, Atlanta are already infected.These cities, and a hundred more like them, will fail because they are programmed to be their own suburbs' poorhouses. The burden of black and Latino poverty is crushing these ''inelastic'' cities, which, for many reasons -- bad annexation laws, hostile neighbors, myopic city politics, anti-black prejudice -- have remained trapped within their city limits.

An increasing number of blue-collar jobs are shifting from the city to the suburbs. For many inner-city residents, the toughest challenge in following these entry-level jobs is finding transportation.A number of suburban employers and developers who need such workers and cannot find them in the suburbs are accordingly taking the lead in opening new routes for the outbound city commuter. Some have lobbied public transit for more frequent service to suburbs. A few run private vans or buses to and from the inner city or from suburban pickup points.

The stunning rise of lacrosse on the national landscape is evident on weekday mornings in inner-city Baltimore during the spring. "Every morning, on my way to work, there's a kid on every corner or bus stop with a lacrosse stick in his hand," said Donnie Brown, a member of Morgan State's first all-black lacrosse team in 1971. "This stuff has been going on awhile. The numbers are growing." Skyrocketing might be a more apt description. According to US Lacrosse, the governing body for the sport, there was an 11.7 percent increase in the number of players participating in 2006 over 2005.