BALTIMORE, MD -- Back in the mid-1990s, the Clinton Administration, with much fanfare, set-up Empowerment Zones in a few select cities across the country. After a frenzied and ruthlessly competitive bidding process, Baltimore was one of six cities chosen as an Empowerment Zone. (It didn't hurt, by the way, that the then-Schmoke administration had close ties with the Clinton White House and HUD officials, like Henry Cisneros and Andrew Coumo.)

What was an Empowerment Zone? Well, think of your run-of-the-mill urban renewal grant - but on steroids. Under the Empowerment Zone, massive influxes of cash were to be allocated to several "distressed" areas, therefore allowing neighborhoods in crisis to bound back from the brink of no return. Thanks to this aggressive, multi-faceted attack on poverty and decay, job programs would be funded, new houses built, homeownership increased, and new employers lured by generous tax breaks. In the somewhat overheated visions of social engineers and statist technocrats like Cisneros and Coumo, manna from heaven was destined to rain down on the soon to-be anointed Sandtown and East Baltimore, miraculously washing away the sins accumulated from decades of neglect (1).

What actually happened? Well, it seems as the old saying goes, "not much of nuffin'", really. According to the SUN, "Although poverty has dropped, unemployment has increased. And far from creating promised 'neighborhoods of choice', the empowerment zone lost population during the 1990s at twice the rate of the city as a whole." Proving that anyone can re-arrange deck chairs on a Titanic if they try hard enough, one official of the Empower Baltimore Management Corporation professed the rise in unemployment was actually a sign of SUCCESS, because the figures suggested that more people were enrolled on drug treatment programs and therefore not working. Another more cautious supporter, (after noting, in a tactful understatement, that "it doesn't look good, does it?"), borrowed Miss Cleo's crystal ball, predicting, "it may be we're not at the long term yet." The not-so subtle message being that just keep your fingers crossed, somewhere, somehow, in the mists of the distant future, "Things Will Be Different.": a stirring display of the sort of blind, unwarranted faith in the city's future worthy of the "Baltimore Believe" Campaign itself.

With the numbers in and the verdict out, the real question is why is the Empowerment Zone producing such dismal results?

The Big Picture: "What Goes Around, Comes Around"

To understand a major reason why the Empowerment Zone is failing, you have to step back and look at the bigger picture. Twenty years ago, the Reagan administration (with the groveling acquiescence of the Democrats) dismantled much of the social safety net. Unions were smashed, and with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the free market unleashed triumphant. All types of collectivity were now suspect; instead, as Margaret Thatcher infamously put it at the time, "there is no such thing as society, there are only individuals."

But instead of free and self-confident individuals newly liberated to compete in the newly unfettered market, instead the opposite happened.. As collective institutions withered on the vine, little remained but isolated, privatized, and vulnerable individuals. Inadvertently, the baby had gotten thrown out with the bathwater. The multiple informal ties that people had were frayed, the social glue came unstuck. But, in fact, it turned out that these fragile and permeable ties were necessary to keeping the system flowing. This decline in public life and public involvement, resulting from the erosion of collectivity, ended up boomeranging on the advocates of the free market themselves. (2)

Paradoxically, at the very time the State was supposed to be rolled back, instead, there was . . . more need for services. After all, how could you cut services and expect families and neighborhoods to pick up the slack if there were no more intermediate institutions - or even, in many cases, intact families? You couldn't ask, for example, people to care for elderly relatives at home, (instead of relying on the state to do so), if everyone in the household had to be a wage-earner working several jobs to stay afloat. Nor could parents get involved in voluntary after-school programs, substituting for formerly state-funded ones, with the mounting time pressures parents faced. Relevant examples are legion.

But the desire to transfer services back to the "community" never got anywhere - or at least as far as it was hoped it would. Because for a long time and on many levels, people had been discouraged from getting involved in anything significantly affecting their lives, what emerged from the wreckage was a state of what could best be called "entrenched apathetic realism." (3) In every contact with the system, people were always in the passive role of a "client" or "consumer" needing services of one sort or another from professional experts. On the job, in a welfare office, in school, and indeed, all throughout society, no one asked nor particularly cared what you thought.

Along these lines, one example (out of many) comes to mind. I remember going to welfare appointments at different times with several acquaintances in the early 90s. Like most poor people, each knew far more about how the welfare system worked than any social worker ever did. The "clients" were incredibly resourceful, entrepreneurial scammers, capable of pinpointing any vulnerability in the system (or in the individual social worker) with the accuracy of heat-seeking missles, extracting maximum benefit for themselves out of an unfairly stacked situation. Despite showing all the praiseworthy symptoms of "empowerment", in every face-to-face contact with a social worker, people went limp and pretended they couldn't do anything at all for themselves. Why? Because they correctly calculated that if they showed too much initiative, i.e. weren't playing the helpless, pathetic "client" role, they wouldn't get much aid from the social worker. Multiply this sort of example by countless similar experiences and a pattern emerges. You learn it all at a very early age the lower down the class scale you are: evade, play dumb, don't confront, don't show initiative. Taken collectively, these trends today are so widespread that it's difficult to remember it was ever different.

In the hard-core poor areas, (like, well, most of Baltimore), all these tendencies were even more pronounced because these areas simply had less to start with in the first place. The prevailing mood of mass apathy and cynicism in the neighborhoods helps explain why the failure of the Empowerment Zone is really just the flip side of the failure of the Baltimore Believe Campaign as well. Because even to minimally function in an ordinary, run-of-the-mill way, the gears of the system need to be well-oiled with people's tacit consent. This consent doesn't have to be active or out-in-the-open, mind you - but it does have to be there. Without consent, the whole thing grinds to a halt. As the old song goes, "Money can't buy no love" and contrary to na? liberal's views, even the influx of millions of dollars into the Empowerment Zones won't correct the problem of engagement if people refuse to make any effort to be "improved.". In the case of the Empowerment Zones, one example of this came out in the refusal of neighborhood people, (except for a few aspiring "grassroots leaders"), to participate in the so-called "Village Meetings" set-up by urban renewal missionaries to solicit native input

Hence, the implicit rationale behind the Baltimore Believe Campaign, which, from another angle, is supposed to rekindle engagement and "empowerment" again by shamelessly exploiting, as Wilhelm Reich put it, all too many people's socialized modesty and ingrained tendencies to blame themselves for problems they had no hand in making. - Curtis P.

(1) Of course, in time-honored Baltimore tradition whenever city officials get a hold of federal funds, some of these funds were shifted into subsidies for new hotels (like local bakery magnate Paterakis's Marriot on the east fringes of the Inner Harbor), since Fells Point was conveniently included in the East Baltimore Empowerment Zone. See "Spending on the Waterfront", a report by Good Jobs First (June 2002), for details.

(2) To point this out is not to fall into the trap of "communitarianism" or a dim nostalgia for a romanticized, small-town past, the mainstay of a thousand ads currently making rounds on the airwaves. As Richard Sennett once pointed out, one of the strengths of capitalism a hundred years ago was precisely the fact that capitalism broke up old communities. But that's a separate discussion.

(3) To identify this entrenched apathetic realism is not to gung-ho glorify it as some sort of incipient radical awareness either. People refuse to vote - but they also refuse to join leftist causes or do anything to defend their interests also. The crisis is much deeper and transcends a simple left-right dichotomy.