CityLab Baltimore: Business can drive solutions to city’s problems

Listen to this article

Confronting the challenges facing Baltimore will require investment in and from the city’s business community, leaders said Wednesday at the CityLab Baltimore event at the Parkway Theater.

Businesses and the jobs they bring can help tackle Baltimore’s problems with crime, education and health, speakers said at the event meant to spur conversations about those issues.

“Helping small businesses succeed is one of the most important things we can do to help cities grow,” said Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire businessman and former New York City mayor. “Whether it’s a university, a business, a foundation or a nonprofit, I’ve always believed that private organizations can solve some of the biggest problems we have.”

Bloomberg, who graduated from Johns Hopkins, welcomed a gathered crowd for an afternoon of discussions about the challenges that face Baltimore, in conversation with other cities that have also experienced some of those challenges.

Housing officials from Detroit and New Orleans joined Baltimore City Housing Director Michael Braverman to talk about removing or rebuilding blighted properties in cities that have experienced dramatic population declines.

Another panel focused on tackling the opioid epidemic with health officials and experts from Baltimore, Boston and Rhode Island.

“Today is a chance to accelerate progress here in Baltimore and to help ideas spread across the world,” Bloomberg said. His Bloomberg Philanthropies foundation co-sponsored the event and has provided millions of dollars to cities to tackle some of their problems.

“(Small businesses) are the backbone of thriving communities,” he said. “There’s a lot cities and mayors can do to help them grow. … Cities are where people live. People need jobs. There’s a natural connection between businesses and government.”

Mayor Catherine Pugh said Baltimore’s anchor institutions, the hospitals and universities, are forces for the potential growth of the city and and places where innovation that can help Baltimore attack its challenges can grow.

Pugh cited Johns Hopkins’ incentives for employees to live in the city and at the Eager Park development and Morgan State University’s Morgan Mile project as examples of these anchor institutions lifting up their neighboring communities.

“We have the responsibility to harness that innovation, in terms of city government and the many problems we’re facing,” Pugh said. “They are our partners.”

Among the problems facing the city, Pugh acknowledged, is the city’s violent crime. But rather than attack crime specifically, she said, the problem has to be viewed in a larger context. By improving schools, health and housing, the city can begin to confront the roots of its problems.

Those solutions include jobs she stressed.

“The police don’t create crime. We have to solve the problems in our neighborhoods,” Pugh said. “Everybody wants the same thing, they want a job. …We’re working with our institutions to create jobs for individuals in our communities.”

Pugh also blanched at the idea of gentrification. She said she doesn’t want to see a redevelopment that pushes the city’s least advantaged citizens out of their homes.

“We must invest in the neighborhoods that have been neglected for decades,” she said. “Everybody is valuable. No single citizen in our city is not valuable.”

Fresh off of graduation from the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses graduation event, Chrystal Boykins introduced Bloomberg.

Boykins, along with her sister, co-founded a small business in the city, a women’s clothing boutique. She said her company wants to buy and hire in Baltimore.

“I’m a small-business owner here in Baltimore,” she said. “We know our city needs us to be successful too.”