« Mayor, rich friends need to conserve money, too! | Main | Ratner announces financing for 80 DeKalb »
August 21, 2008
Baltimore: What The NYT Didn’t See Fit to Print
Rooflines [National Housing Institute, blog]
By Matthew Schwarzfeld
Last week, we pointed out that a NY Times article about the Johns Hopkins project being developed by Forest City in East Baltimore danced around the subject of eminent domain by using curious euphemisms and code words that would be unfamiliar to those who have not been closely following the issue of eminent domain.
Judging from this Rooflines article, the Times piece, covering the "largest urban renewal project in the nation" by the paper's own development partner, was more of a snow job than we initially thought.
Johns Hopkins has a complex and mixed relationship with the mostly black residents of the east Baltimore neighborhood in which the main campus is located, but a recent article in The New York Times on the university’s $1.8 billion expansion plan largely ignores the issue. Though the university expansion will result in the dislocation of thousands of low-income residents, The Times looks almost entirely at the positive business impact.
Johns Hopkins’ expansion is the largest urban renewal project in the country. The university, through a nonprofit partnership, the East Baltimore Development Inc., has acquired 88 acres, much of it through eminent domain. The project will raze a large part of East Baltimore—an infamously crime-ridden area with high vacancy rates—and replace it with office buildings, university lab facilities, and mixed-income housing.
The Times article, which ran in the real estate section, sees the project as nothing but a positive. It describes EBPI’s work as “turning what had become an urban wasteland into a vibrant, 88-acre community” and “demolish[ing] a neighborhood to save it.” (A June 2007 article that ran in The Times national section presents a more-balanced view).
...
The article’s discussion of Forest City, Hopkins’ development partner, has also caught the attention of opponents of eminent domain outside of Baltimore. The blog NoLandGrab, a strong opponent of Forest City Ratner’s Atlantic Yards project (Forest City Ratner is a subsidiary of Forest City), blasted the Baltimore article in a recent post. Opponents of Atlantic Yards have called the papers coverage into question, noting that the Times Company and Forest City have a series of business collaborations.“I’ve long commented that, while I don’t think there’s any directive in the newsroom to go easy on Forest City Ratner (or its parent company, Forest City Enterprises), the business relationship means that the newspaper has an obligation to be exacting in its coverage—and, in the case of Atlantic Yards, it has too often failed to do so,” said Norman Oder, editor of the Atlantic Yards Report. “The omission of eminent domain in this article [about East Baltimore] strikes me as another example of that failure.”
NoLandGrab: Of course there's no "directive in the newsroom to go easy on Forest City Ratner (or its parent company, Forest City Enterprises)," and the serious lack of critical analysis is just an odd coincidence.
This is where some of us think that Norman Oder is being a little too considerate. There need not be a "directive" when cozy business relationships and a publisher's personal predilections are often enough to quell the appetite for critical reportage.
Posted by lumi at August 21, 2008 4:40 AM