From The Guardian: Gentrify or die? Inside a university’s controversial plan for Baltimore

The minivan is passing through a scene that typifies urban decay, Baltimore-style: blocks of modest rowhouses, where some dwellings are inhabited, others are boarded up or abandoned to the elements, and some blocks are entirely vacant, studded with empty lots.

“This was east Baltimore,” says Ron Daniels, an affable scholar of law and political science whose accent betrays his Canadian roots, and who since 2009 has been the president of Johns Hopkins University. “Block after block after block. It was either boarded-up vacant housing or just fields strewn with rubble.”

Read more in The Guardian.

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