Sandtown-Winchester is crumbling, and there is little to suggest that two decades ago visionary developer James Rouse and city officials injected more than $130 million into the community in a failed effort to transform it. Instead there are block after block of boarded-up houses and too many people with little hope.It is a long article with a lot of examples of things going wrong in people's lives. Elsewhere it is reported that on any given school day, half of Sandtown's high school students are absent.
A key issue is the disappearance of jobs high school dropouts can take and do well - auto assembly and the like. Those jobs aren't coming back, and nothing much is replacing them.
Criminal drug sales and distribution was probably the only employment available to many, and they took it. It got them criminal records that make them even more unemployable than formerly.
How soon will someone in authority conclude the Sandtowns of this country (and our prisons) fulfill the same role for humans that Animal Shelters fulfill for our pets, places to store unneeded, unwanted creatures. Isn't that grim? Is it accurate? It sure sounds bad.
