ADVERTISEMENT
Continue reading the main story
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/09/opinion/amazon-baltimore-dc.html#after-top>
Opinion <https://www.nytimes.com/section/opinion>
Amazon and the Breaking of Baltimore
Regional inequality has deepened across the country.
ByAlec MacGillis
Mr. MacGillis is the author of a forthcoming book on how Amazon has
changed the economy of American cities. He lives in Baltimore.
* NYT, March 9, 2021
*
<https://www.facebook.com/dialog/feed?app_id=9869919170&link=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2021%2F03%2F09%2Fopinion%2Famazon-baltimore-dc.html%3Fsmid%3Dfb-share&name=Amazon%20and%20the%20Breaking%20of%20Baltimore&redirect_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2F>
*
<https://api.whatsapp.com/send?text=Amazon%20and%20the%20Breaking%20of%20Baltimore%20https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2021%2F03%2F09%2Fopinion%2Famazon-baltimore-dc.html%3Fsmid%3Dwa-share>
*
<https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2021%2F03%2F09%2Fopinion%2Famazon-baltimore-dc.html%3Fsmid%3Dtw-share&text=Amazon%20and%20the%20Breaking%20of%20Baltimore>
*
<mailto:?subject=NYTimes.com%3A%20Amazon%20and%20the%20Breaking%20of%20Baltimore&body=From%20The%20New%20York%20Times%3A%0A%0AAmazon%20and%20the%20Breaking%20of%20Baltimore%0A%0ARegional%20inequality%20has%20deepened%20across%20the%20country.%0A%0Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2021%2F03%2F09%2Fopinion%2Famazon-baltimore-dc.html%3Fsmid%3Dem-share>
*
*
* /700/
Credit...Jim Watson/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
When I set out to report a book on the problem of growing regional
inequality in America, I did not expect that it would involve spending
several hours on a cold winter day standing inside a large dumpster.
But there I was, helping a man named Keith Taylor toss all manner of
trash from a giant receptacle to reach the treasure buried below:
hundreds of bricks from the demolished headquarters of the sprawling
Bethlehem Steel plant on Sparrows Point peninsula outside Baltimore.
Mr. Taylor, who started working at the plant in 1989 and spent the next
11 years there, wanted the bricks as part of his effort to reclaim the
heritage of Sparrows Point. In the 1950s, Beth Steel, as locals call it,
was the largest steel plant in the world, a dense skyline of chimneys
and coal chutes abutted by a company town then home to more than 5,000
people.
Mr. Taylor planned to use the bricks for a new lighted walkway at
Sparrows Point High School. I was there because I had come to see
Sparrows Point as emblematic of the transformation of the U.S. economy
over the past few decades and the gaping regional divides that this
transformation had produced.
ADVERTISEMENT
Continue reading the main story
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/09/opinion/amazon-baltimore-dc.html#after-story-ad-1>
At its peak in 1958, the Beth Steel plant on the Point employed some
30,000; in its final years at the turn of this century — even as
imports, domestic “mini-mills” and feckless management threatened its
existence — veteran workers were still making at least $35 per hour,
with excellent union benefits. The work was strenuous and frequently
dangerous, but also purposeful and well paid enough that many people
spent their whole career there.
Since the plant closed in 2012, the Point has been wiped of virtually
all traces of it. Starting in 2017, a new sort of work filled the void:
logistics. The Point’s new owners leased land to first one and then a
second Amazon fulfillment center, as well as warehouses for Under
Armour, FedEx, Home Depot and Floor & Decor.
The work at Amazon was physically taxing in its own right, and was far
more socially isolating than the foxhole camaraderie that had
characterized Beth Steel, which helped explain why turnover was so much
higher at the warehouse than during the steel years.
“It was a family thing — they looked out for one another,” said Bill
Bodani Jr. of his time at Beth Steel, where he lasted three decades
despite several workplace accidents. By the time he left in 2003 he,
too, was drawing $35 an hour.
Over a decade later he went back to work at the Point, driving a
forklift at Amazon. His pay was around $15 an hour. He lasted only three
years with the company, after clashing with a supervisor over his
bathroom breaks and his encouragement of labor organizing among the
younger workers.
Editors’ Picks
The Pandemic Needs Its Smokey Bear
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/05/business/coronavirus-pandemic-safety-trust.html?action=click&algo=lda_hellinger&block=editors_picks_recirc&fellback=false&imp_id=440512867&impression_id=942c9090-81be-11eb-82f7-e7e3aa9efb1b&index=0&pgtype=Article®ion=ccolumn&req_id=589414361&surface=home-featured&variant=3_lda_hellinger&action=click&module=editorContent&pgtype=Article®ion=CompanionColumn&contentCollection=Trending>
Seth Rogen Is All Fired Up
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/06/style/seth-rogen-pot.html?action=click&algo=lda_hellinger&block=editors_picks_recirc&fellback=false&imp_id=163181201&impression_id=942c9091-81be-11eb-82f7-e7e3aa9efb1b&index=1&pgtype=Article®ion=ccolumn&req_id=589414361&surface=home-featured&variant=3_lda_hellinger&action=click&module=editorContent&pgtype=Article®ion=CompanionColumn&contentCollection=Trending>
Why My Teenage Self Gave Woody Allen a Pass
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/05/nyregion/woody-allen-manhattan.html?action=click&algo=lda_hellinger&block=editors_picks_recirc&fellback=false&imp_id=504250911&impression_id=942c9092-81be-11eb-82f7-e7e3aa9efb1b&index=2&pgtype=Article®ion=ccolumn&req_id=589414361&surface=home-featured&variant=3_lda_hellinger&action=click&module=editorContent&pgtype=Article®ion=CompanionColumn&contentCollection=Trending>
Continue reading the main story
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/09/opinion/amazon-baltimore-dc.html?action=click&module=editorContent&pgtype=Article®ion=CompanionColumn&contentCollection=Trending#after-pp_edpick>
ADVERTISEMENT
Continue reading the main story
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/09/opinion/amazon-baltimore-dc.html#after-story-ad-2>
***
Over the past four decades, deindustrialization, the rise of the tech
economy and the weakening of antitrust enforcement have sorted the
country into a small number of winner-take-all cities and a much larger
number of left-behind cities and towns.
Once, wealth and prosperity were spread out across the country. In the
1960s, the 25 cities with the highest median incomesincluded
<https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novdec-2015/bloom-and-bust/>Cleveland,
Des Moines, Milwaukee and Rockford, Ill. By the middle of the last
decade, virtually all of the top 25 were on the coasts.
Meanwhile, the gap between wealthy and poorer regionshas grown much
wider
<https://equitablegrowth.org/how-national-income-inequality-in-the-united-states-contributes-to-economic-disparities-between-regions/>.
In 1980, only a few sections of the country had median incomes that were
more than 20 percent above or below the national average. Today, big
chunks of the country fall into those extremes.
The imbalance is unhealthy at both ends of the spectrum. In one set of
places, it produces congestion and unaffordability; on the other, blight
and stagnation.
Which brings us back to Beth Steel. When it was riding high, so was its
host city, Baltimore; in 1960, the city’s population was 939,000, the
sixth largest in the country. By 1980, even after two decades of white
flight, the city still boasted a population nearly 150,000 people larger
than its neighbor 40 miles to the south, Washington. Baltimore had the
region’s only baseball team and hosted several major corporate
headquarters, a superior symphony orchestra and three daily newspapers.
Image
Credit...Jim Watson/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
But by the second decade of this century*,*the two cities’ fortunes had
radically diverged. Washington was transformed by the boom in lobbying
and homeland security spending; gentrification flipped neighborhoods,
turning it into a city of trendy restaurants and high-end real estate
that,by one estimate
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2019/03/19/study-dc-has-had-highest-intensity-gentrification-any-us-city/>,
displaced 20,000 African-American residents from 2000 to 2013. Its
population swelled from 570,000 in 2000 to more than 700,000.
Baltimore’s slipped below 600,000. Metro Washington was now home to more
than a dozen Fortune 500 companies. Baltimore, after a series of mergers
and departures, had none.
ADVERTISEMENT
Continue reading the main story
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/09/opinion/amazon-baltimore-dc.html#after-story-ad-3>
By 2014, Baltimore leaders were so desperate for growth that they threw
more than $43 million in state and local subsidies at Amazon to build
its first warehouse in town, at the site of a former General Motors
plant. The Sparrows Point Amazon warehouse followed in 2018, with more
tax breaks.
The city then aimed even higher: In 2017, it made a lavish bid to be
home to Amazon’s second headquarters, HQ2. It didn’t even makethe 20
finalists
<https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/18/technology/cities-amazon-headquarters.html>.
Notably, nor did other postindustrial cities that could desperately use
a boost, including Cleveland, Detroit and St. Louis.
Among the cities that were still in the running for Amazon’s dangled
plum was Washington. Amazon had already developed a conspicuous presence
in the nation’s capital: It had vastly increased its lobbying presence
there, it was doing major business in selling its cloud services to the
federal government and homeland-security industrial complex, and Jeff
Bezos had not only purchased the local newspaper, but he also picked
Washington’s largest private home,a $23 million mansion
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/reliable-source/wp/2017/01/12/jeff-bezos-is-the-anonymous-buyer-of-the-biggest-house-in-washington/>in
the Kalorama neighborhood, to which he added $12 million in renovations.
In late 2018, I attended a gala dinner for Mr. Bezos at the Washington
Hilton, hosted by the Economic Club, a regular gathering of the local
power elite. I looked on as the club’s president, David M. Rubenstein, a
co-founder of the private equity firm the Carlyle
Group,joked<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xv_vkA0jsyo&t=69s>onstage
with Mr. Bezos. “You have become the wealthiest man in the world. Is
that a title that you really wanted?” Mr. Rubenstein said.
“It was fine being the second-wealthiest person in the world,” Mr. Bezos
answered, to audience laughter.
Two months later, Amazon announced that HQ2 would be Arlington, Va.,
just across the Potomac from Washington, with25,000 employees
<https://www.arlingtonva.us/amazon/>and billions in investment. It was
the ultimate example of the winner-take-all, rich-get-richer dynamic of
today’s economy, in which growth and prosperity flow to the handful of
cities that are home to the tech giants that control ever more of daily
commerce.
For those curious about the potential uplift that Amazon could have
provided elsewhere, the company issued a statement toa New York Times
reporter
<https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/30/business/amazon-baltimore.html>in
2019, insisting, “Nowhere did Amazon say HQ2 was a project designed to
help communities in need.”
ADVERTISEMENT
Continue reading the main story
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/09/opinion/amazon-baltimore-dc.html#after-story-ad-4>
A year later, I was back in Baltimore watching workers demolish
rowhouses on the eastern edge of town. Some of the bricks were being
salvaged by an organization called Details Deconstruction that cleaned
them and, through a sister organization called Brick+Board, sold them
for building projects, many of them down the road in Washington.
One day, I accompanied Brick+Board’s director, Max Pollock, as he
inspected the installation of thousands of his bricks in a condo complex
called Chapman Stables, situated in a previously derelict and now
bustling corner of Washington. The developers were using the bricks to
cultivate a faux-historic aura to entice buyers who would be spending up
to $1 million for an apartment.
Standing before a brick wall in one corridor, Mr. Pollock acknowledged
that it was discomfiting to see the building blocks of Baltimore’s glory
years now being used to conjure a fantasy of authenticity for
Washington’s hyperprosperous present. “I have mixed feelings about it,”
he said. “The part of it that is a little ridiculous is all the
marketing around it. ‘Chapman Stables.’ It’s sort of like it’s
ready-made to be ridiculed.”
He was so familiar with Baltimore bricks that he could identify which
streets they had come from. The orange ones were from Chase Street. The
oldest-looking ones were from Federal Street. The ones with vertical
lines were from Fenwick Avenue.
These were streets in East Baltimore that were once home to block after
block of working- and middle-class families, white and Black, including
many who worked at Beth Steel. For the better part of a century, those
jobs, and those homes, had sustained a stable existence for countless
families and undergirded economic vitality for the city as a whole.
Now, like Sparrows Point before it, that segment of Baltimore’s built
landscape, and the history it represented, was slowly disappearing. And
the dismantling of one town was being used to prop up another, with new
residents — some of them likely arriving for high-paid jobs at Amazon’s
HQ2 — blithely purchasing the facade of a past.
Mr. Pollock knew that most everyone living in the complex would never
guess that the bricks were from an entirely different city, just 40
miles up the road.
Alec MacGillis, a reporter for ProPublica, is the author of the
forthcoming “Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America.”
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group.
View/Reply Online (#7154): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/7154
Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/81231737/21656
-=-=-
POSTING RULES & NOTES
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
-=-=-
Group Owner: [email protected]
Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/21656/1316126222/xyzzy
[[email protected]]
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
