The natives call it "Bawlamer" and favor steamed crabs. Roughly 250 years ago, Baltimore was an Eighteenth Century colonial seaport created by the merger of Baltimore, Jones Town, and Fells Point. That consolidated Port of Baltimore was 150 miles up the Chesapeake Bay from Norfolk and the Atlantic Ocean sea lanes that Baltimore Clipper Ships roamed to serve, among others, the spice trade.
An entrepreneurial Nineteenth Century Baltimore launched the B&O Railroad to compete with canals. In the ensuing boom-times, Baltimore used water-and-steam technologies of the day to power mass manufacturing.1 (Brodie,1998) The city also adapted to emerging telegraph, telephone, and trolley technologies as Baltimore's early entrepreneurs built a firm infrastructure base, soon making the city one of the nation's top ten urban centers.
During the first half of the Twentieth Century, Baltimore was a major industrial center making steel and ships, transatlantic cable, automobiles and airplanes, soap, sugar, and spices. A high school diploma was more than enough to gain entry to the work force at Bethlehem Steel, Western Electric, General Motors, Proctor & Gamble, Domino Sugar, or McCormick. Those jobs provided a "living wage" and a reasonable quality of life. Virtually all urban development -- and surely the preponderance of jobs -- was inside Baltimore's city limits. That, in turn, created a reasonable mix of incomes and a workable tax base.
In 1950, Baltimore was a manufacturing city of 950,000 people and 350,000 jobs. The dominant downtown employment core was served by radial roads and trolley lines. Urban sprawl was just reaching into the suburbs, aided by higher incomes, better highways, and affordable FHA and VA mortgages. Still, in most respects, the city seemed workable.
The century's second half brought the end of an extensive migration of unemployed people from Appalachia and the rural south. Many of those migrants were displaced farm workers. And many had limited urban job skills and were frequently ill at ease with city life. But, until the 1960's, many of them were able to find low-skill manufacturing jobs.
From the 1970's onward, manufacturing employment began to decline. For example, Bethlehem Steel's Sparrows Point work force peaked at 30,000 in the late 1950's. Today about 5,000 workers make two-thirds as many tons of higher quality steel. Many lost manufacturing jobs were only partly replaced, often by lower paying service jobs, in an upheaval only slowly offset by adaptation to fit today's global markets.
As 2000 unfolds, The Baltimore Area is a multi-centered Beltway Metropolis with 2,500,000 people and 1,400,000 jobs. The city is in distress. There is extensive low-density suburban sprawl. And there is, perhaps, a growing sense of need for regional cohesion.
Fifty years from now -- in 2050 -- Metropolitan Baltimore will surely be different. It may simply be a bigger version of today's Beltway Metropolis. Or it might have a more compact land use pattern with transit-linked outlying New Towns. Whatever happens, it may be instructive to look toward the region's prospective future in terms of land and labor market adaptations.
Beltway Baltimore 2000 evolved from 1900's single-centered radial city into a spread out, multi-centered metropolis economically defined by:
That urban pattern has spread out over roughly 400 of the region's 2,200 square miles and extends well beyond the city's 80 square miles into all five surrounding counties. But their boundaries bear little relation to the economic, social, or geographic character of urban development. On any given day, this mismatch of boundaries and economic reality is evident in the traffic flowing on the region's expressways largely in the form of trips from center to center in a sprawling array of trips across the overall regional development pattern. 2
Some Year 2000 demographic highlights describing Metropolitan Baltimore's urbanized characteristics are presented below:
These demographics are the product of fifty years of increasingly dispersed urban sprawl. Contributing factors are scattered, low-density housing development and strong edge city employment growth resulting in an ever-increasing volume of traffic. City job expansion is less robust while housing development is extremely limited.3
The ''engine'' driving Metropolitan Baltimore's growing and adapting regional economy has several components concentrated in such sectors as:
1 Urbanization comments draw on a presentation by M. J. Brodie, President of the Baltimore Development Corporation, at a Johns Hopkins University non-credit course on Baltimore urbanization issues (4/16/98)
2 This estimate of the extent of Metropolitan Baltimore's urbanization is based on visual inspection of the Year 2000 land use map in BMC's 1999 booklet entitled There Are No Boundaries (p. 12). Technically, the metropolitan area also includes Queen Anne's County across the Bay Bridge on Maryland's Eastern Shore because a good many of its employed residents drive to work across the bridge. But, for this report, the tenuous linkage of Queen Anne's County to the metropolitan area has been set aside.
3 Demographic data for this report is from Forecasts of Population, Households, Labor Force, and Employment : Round 5-A (Baltimore Metropolitan Council, October,1997). Occupied housing units were estimated by the Maryland Office of Planning.