A Loyola College professor believes Baltimore’s overuse of eminent domain, coupled with exorbitant property taxes, are the major factors contributing to the decline of the city that began in the 1960s.

Stephen Walters’ study, Baltimore’s Flawed Renaissance, was recently published by a libertarian law firm, Institute for Justice. He paints Baltimore as a tale of two cities: one is a thriving waterfront, while the rest has been abandoned by residents fleeing the city for the suburbs over the past fifty years.

In the study, Walters essentially dismisses high crime rates and bad schools as the reasons for the exodus from the city to the suburbs. Instead, he says: “The city’s lack of progress on so many fronts is a direct by-product of its failure to understand and treat the real source of its problems: hostility to private property rights and a resulting flight of capital that largely drained the city of its economic lifeblood.”

Crime and other ills are thus a result of the government’s flawed redevelopment strategy for blighted neighborhoods, according to Walters — strategies that included bulldozing entire neighborhoods to build highways. (Highways that sometimes went nowhere, it must be added.)

I haven’t had time yet today to read the entirety of Walters’ 25-page study, but what I have skimmed so far offers an interesting perspective on our city. However, as noted in the Sun article by another local economist, the study may be “wrong on its face” as it ignores a number of other factors, including the suburbanization of jobs.

Anyway, if you have some time to kill this afternoon, you can download the study here as a PDF and share your reactions.

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