BmoreArt

Editor’s Note: This essay was originally published on Substack on Jan. 19, 2025.

People ask me about “The Baltimore Renaissance” all the time. When did it start? How is it manifesting? What productive changes are forthcoming? How will we know when Baltimore has “arrived”? Publications, both local and global, often crow about Baltimore’s burgeoning potential. This week, Baltimore was featured in Le Figaro, France’s oldest newspaper, in their full color weekend magazine. It’s gratifying to see familiar faces and places looking so sharp, but this idea of a Baltimore Renaissance? It’s a comfortable but tired cliché.

Politicians, business leaders, real estate developers, artists, and crusaders of all kinds can see that Baltimore has much to offer that has not yet been fully realized. However – the Baltimore where I live and work is NOT having a renaissance, so much as existing in a perpetual state of becoming.

Is it terrible if “almost there” is Baltimore’s modus operandi? It’s not the worst, but I think we can do better. It’s time to move on.

I have lived in Baltimore for twenty-five years, after growing up in rural Maryland, and I love this weird-ass beautiful city. Every single day, I work to champion the excellent creative people and projects that exist here with a dedicated team at BmoreArt.com. When other publications reach out, such as Le Figaro, through writer Marine Sanclemente and photographer Eric Martin, I will always say yes if given the opportunity to talk about Baltimore’s art and culture – because it’s deserving and the world should know it.

But the idea of the “Renaissance” or the P-word (potential)? It’s time to let go of these tired ideas. They’re convenient and offer a simple narrative that is vaguely positive, but they’re dangerous because they suggest an inevitability and momentum that does not currently exist. It offers an excuse for short-term thinking and planning, not just for individuals but at a civic and corporate level.

Baltimore is a city that attracts new residents who see its potential. It’s a “city of artists,” a phrase we coined in our book of the same title, and it’s an apt a description of our city as any other slogan or campaign (which our city has paid millions to achieve! The City That Reads? Greatest City in America? Really? that’s the best we could buy? Ugh. More on that later…). Baltimore is a place where creatives of all kinds can dream and build upon that vision, at least in a short term way. It’s important to celebrate these accomplishments in order to rally much-needed support around them, which is why I do the work that I do – but after two decades, it sometimes feels like shouting into an abyss.

I can remember another publication that branded itself entirely around the “Baltimore Renaissance” a decade ago–it was an online culture blog called What Weekly that featured beautiful photos and feel-good, shallow content from 2010-2017. It racked up international attention and effectively “sold” a concept to a rapt audience, but to what end? The creators of the blog ended up generating the concept for Light City, a popular but short-lived (and prohibitively expensive) outdoor light festival that BOPA purchased from the founding couple – and then there was that lawsuit when the sales agreement went awry.

After the recent implosion and reset of BOPA, the Light City festival – which to its’ credit paid artists a fair wage to create ambitious projects in 2018-19 – was named as one main cause of the organization’s financial downfall, putting it into a debt cycle that ballooned each year thereafter.

I am not sure how accurate that is but one thing is clear – Light City and What Weekly successfully sold Baltimore on the concept of a renaissance well over a decade ago – and it has not yet materialized. We are still waiting. The people who sold us the idea? They’re doing just fine, living in California and successfully sell branding concepts to other cities.

So if this Baltimore revival idea is appealing, marketable, yet false – what can we do with this information? What does Baltimore actually need to finally arrive and deliver on its potential?

It’s not as if we are NOT making progress, but a simple visit to any of our “Arts & Entertainment” districts reveals blight, a lack of day-to-day traffic, and a need for cohesive organization, communication, and support – as well as a way to boot derelict landlords out of arts districts and put these properties into responsible ownership.

When people who live in Baltimore are asked what they love best about their city, the most popular answer is their neighborhood. This is wonderful, but also speaks to the fractured nature of the city which exists in tiny pockets of investment, but lacks an overarching civic and economic strategy to connect and support success.

It’s easy to start a new business, launch a new product, create a new space in Baltimore – and we celebrate these new ideas with gusto, within the modest media ecosystem we have left that largely relies on WYPR, the Baltimore Banner, and other smaller independent publications. However, once your business or organization reaches a moderate level of success, it’s challenging to find the funding necessary to staff up and grow sustainably, despite Maryland being the wealthiest state in the nation. Baltimore’s glass ceiling is prohibitively low, which is why businesses and organizations that reach a mid-level of success typically close in exhaustion or leave.

The money is here, but it’s not being concentrated in the right areas.

What is needed are strategic investments into real estate and businesses, aligned with public policy and solid urban planning. We need successful businesses to exist in the city, to hire employees, to create not just jobs but desirable parts of town where retail, food, and appealing public spaces exist. We need inspired, visionary economic development, a city that creates the conditions for significant investment across neighborhoods. We do not need more luxury condos, more false promises of an impending revolution, or news media owned by the super wealthy. And for god’s sake, please put something in the giant hole in the ground that was once the Morris Mechanic Theatre downtown!

Rather than waiting for a renaissance, Baltimore’s leadership should pay attention to what is already here. The reality is we have everything we need to build a safe, healthy, creative city, but with a lack of institutional history, essentially a new churn of starry-eyed new leaders, we are doomed to make the same mistakes, over and over.

There are so many organizations and small businesses creating value and stability here who have never received a dime in public support, and struggle to stay afloat. What if our taxpayer dollars invested in them in a modest but regular way instead of building new baseball stadiums for owners who sell off their best players?

The “Baltimore Renaissance” is is cute concept, but it’s not real. There is no wave of success that will inevitably save us! We have to do it ourselves. We have to demand that our leaders make changes to the way resources are used and that our publications create the conditions for all of us to learn from past mistakes and assumptions.

What Baltimore needs are more opportunities for longterm investment. We need programs that help creative visionaries to buy buildings – homes, live/work, light industrial – in order to foster the conditions for businesses to succeed, for crime to continue to decrease, for neighborhoods to expand. We need to lean into our identity as a “city of artists” to actually support these individuals, organizations, and businesses in an intentional way. This has never happened before, as arts dollars have been used towards festivals and tourism – not longterm solutions for stability.

We need political leaders who can use our taxpayer dollars to fund businesses that create good jobs, reasons to visit and spend money in the city, and for these entities to stay here permanently. Baltimore deserves a better future, one grounded in research and the belief that we can build a solidarity economy, scaled at a fit for our city’s unique advantages and needs.

Once these conditions are put into place, and once resources are diverted to intentionally foster sustainable growth – we will know we have arrived.