Urban Problems

Druid Hill Park will be the sylvan setting next week for a combined religious revival and picnic for families seeking answers to the urban problems of crime, drug addiction, unemployment, poverty and homelessness.The Rev. Marvin N. Evans hopes to have many attend the "praise and worship, preaching and singing" scheduled to begin at noon Sept. 2 and continue until 8 p.m. near the park's Chinese Pavilion.Mr. Evans is president of the sponsoring organization, United Brethren in Christ Inc. at 535 N. Pulaski St."

It's not the Rolling Stones tour, but Baltimore City Council President Lawrence A. Bell III has begun visiting a half dozen other U.S. cities to explore ways to attack mutual urban problems such as violent crime, drug addiction and unemployment.Last month, Bell visited Atlanta to see how city managers operate and to inspect a successful program through which a private company was hired to handle city water and wastewater services.Bell, who has said he wants to be mayor, plans to visit six cities -- Boston, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Indianapolis, New York and Washington.

Why do politicians talk so much trash? The conversation is universal, from small-town U.S.A. to Paris, where 33 mayors from across the globe gathered last week to talk about city life. And for all the troubles facing the world's urban areas, trash topped the list. "Being a mayor is all about picking up trash, cleaning the streets, keeping them lighted and safe," Washington, D.C., Mayor Anthony A. Williams told a reporter at the Paris Summit of World Mayors. Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley has turned trash cleanup into a campaign.

SUBURBAN SCHOOLS lead relatively sheltered existences in comparison with their urban counterparts. But the problems of individual schools don't always fit into neat stereotypes.Take Talbott Springs Elementary School in east Columbia.Principal Orrester Shaw Jr. juxtaposes his school's woes with those many inner-city schools face. He and other Howard County school officials deserve credit for the way they are dealing with the challenges that confront Talbott Springs.It is plagued by low test scores and high turnover.

As the population of the Baltimore region continues to move farther into the outlying suburban counties, crime, poverty and bad schools will follow, says a new report touting regional cooperation and controlled growth."

THOUGH REDISTRICTING has spread Maryland's 7th Congressional District well into suburban Baltimore County, its core is in those areas of inner-city Baltimore that struggle daily against crime, poor schools and the lack of opportunity to retain some semblance of better days.This is a historic district. In 1970, it sent to Washington Maryland's first black member of Congress -- Parren J. Mitchell. Kweisi Mfume succeeded Mr. Mitchell in 1986 and easily won re-election five times.The seat is now open, due to Mr. Mfume's decision to take over the financially struggling National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

While in his 20s, Brian Le Gette and a friend at The Wharton School got the idea to create a pair of earmuffs that wraps around the back of the head, does not mess up a person's hair and has pockets to hold stereo headphones. Le Gette and his friend managed to turn a profit out of that idea. They co-own Big Bang Products, a Canton-based company that designs, manufactures and markets consumer goods. Recently, Le Gette, 35, began using his knack for entrepreneurship in another arena - philanthropy.

EAST ST. LOUIS, Ill. -- In this Mississippi River city populated mostly by welfare mothers and their children, government is a lifeline, not a bad word.For a generation, East St. Louis has been a postmark of urban blight. To conservatives who live outside its borders, it serves as a shorthand for everything wrong with liberal solutions. Socially concerned liberals come here periodically to use the city as a canvas to paint stark pictures of the inequities of American life.Half the people in East St. Louis live in government housing, so federal bureaucrats are their landlords.

A PERSON LOOKING at predominantly black Cleveland now might wrongly discount the significance of the election of Carl B. Stokes as its first African-American mayor. But that Ohio city today isn't the same one that Mr. Stokes was elected to lead in 1967. Then, just as it was in most of America's big cities, the overwhelming majority of Cleveland's citizens were white.To become the nation's first black mayor of a major city, Mr. Stokes ran a race-neutral campaign that spotlighted his ability to run a big city.

A North Carolina nonprofit group launched an ambitious affordable housing program Friday to rehabilitate 500 vacant or foreclosed homes in Baltimore near Johns Hopkins Hospital — an area with desolate stretches in the shadow of the world-renowned institution that the city has long sought to redevelop. Builders of Hope and its partners announced plans to invest up to $50 million in Baltimore and Atlanta in a pilot program to repopulate blighted neighborhoods. The group expects to acquire and begin renovating 500 properties in each city into affordable and energy-efficient homes over the next year and a half.