President Trump’s recent criticism of Baltimore has been lobbed at an odd remove: The city’s problems, he has seemed to suggest, are the responsibility of other people, not the president.
But the city has been shaped by decades of federal policies, decisions that helped concentrate poverty, segregate neighborhoods, increase homelessness and incarceration, and starve cities of the resources to respond.
And if the president wanted to address those problems in Baltimore, there are plenty of things he could do. He controls the federal agencies with the power to oversee police departments and housing programs. He has say over resources Baltimore badly needs — money that could be spent razing vacant properties, or building new schools.
Many of the problems in Baltimore “have a lot to do with lead poisoning,” said Lawrence Brown, a professor at Morgan State University who researches community health. “If you want to address crime or violence, you’ve got to address lead poisoning. If you want to improve academic school performance, you’ve got to tackle lead poisoning.”
Local officials could declare a state of emergency around toxic lead exposure, he argues, and the president could send the federal dollars needed to fix it in the historically redlined, predominantly black communities most affected by it. Federal funding went to Flint, Mich., to address its water crisis, for example. (Such a campaign in Baltimore would also be a natural cause for Ben Carson, the secretary of Housing and Urban Development, who spent much of his career in the city as a neurosurgeon.)
Urban problems on this scale can rarely be solved without federal intervention. Federal-scale policies helped created them. And some of those same federal policies also depleted the ability of cities to respond to current crises.
Starting in the 1930s, the federal government stigmatized predominantly black neighborhoods as unsuitable for mortgage lending, creating the redlined neighborhoods Mr. Brown refers to. Those lines had lasting effects, and their traces today remain particularly visible in Baltimore.
The federal government later spent billions on “urban renewal” projects that bulldozed many urban neighborhoods and on highways that were paved through them. Those highways disproportionately harmed inner-city communities, while their benefits went to the suburbs.
Highways, along with mortgage guarantees for white homeowners in the suburbs and a Supreme Court ruling that protected white families from school desegregation there, also encouraged the flight of taxpayers out of cities.
“When our public policy at really every level — including federal — abandoned these cities, they took the wealth with them and left them with the costs,” said Barbara Samuels, a fair housing attorney with the A.C.L.U. in Baltimore. “It drives me crazy when white people sit smugly in their suburban houses and say, ‘Oh, the Democrats, or black people, or whoever, are running cities into the ground.’”
Baltimore today has thousands of vacant homes left behind by this process, but lacks money to tear them down. Ms. Samuels would like to see the federal government invest more to help shrinking postindustrial cities, just as the federal government’s Hardest Hit Fund has directed resources to the places most affected by the housing crash.
In many other ways, particularly since the 1980s, the federal government has pulled back aid to cities. It allowed public housing to deteriorate, and stopped building new public housing projects. It ended other programs supporting private development of subsidized housing. It rolled sewer and water funds into Community Development Block Grants, which have fallen in value by 80 percent since their peak in 1979.
Now Baltimore has sinkholes opening on city streets. It needs new school buildings. Its Police Department needs computers in police cars.
“The result of all this is we spend almost nothing on parks and recreation,” Ms. Samuels said. “While that sounds like it might be a frill, it’s not, because it’s what keeps kids busy and active. We do basically nothing for the youth of Baltimore, and that’s our biggest problem.”
There are other policies the president could pursue today that don’t require vast infrastructure money.
“Help us actually reform the Baltimore Police Department,” said Lawrence Lanahan, a longtime Baltimore journalist and the author of a new book, “The Lines Between Us,” tracing the city’s history of segregation. “No crime plan is going to reduce crime here in Baltimore if people in poor segregated neighborhoods expect crime out of the police themselves.”
The Department of Justice under the Obama administration reached a consent decree with the Baltimore Police Department after the government found systemic racial bias on the force. Jeff Sessions, Mr. Trump’s first attorney general, tried to stall the agreement and later limited the use of police department consent decrees (he also previously withheld police assistance from Baltimore because of its sanctuary-city status).
In 2015, Baltimore was poised to receive federal funding for a light rail line that would have connected predominantly lower-income, black neighborhoods to jobs. Maryland’s governor, the Republican Larry Hogan, canceled the project (prioritizing instead exurban and rural highways).
The N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund filed a civil rights complaint with the Department of Transportation over the project’s cancellation, but the Trump administration closed the complaint.
The Trump administration has also retreated from federal policy that would require local communities to address racial segregation, and it tried to block another program that would make it easier for Housing Choice Voucher holders to move to neighborhoods with stronger schools and less crime.
Different positions on any of these issues could potentially help Baltimore. And the president could deploy his bully pulpit, too: He could say that police and communities must work together, that integrated neighborhoods are worth building, that past federal policies have hurt cities.
Baltimore does have severe problems, Mr. Brown said. But they are the president’s problems, too.
“It is a shame and it is an embarrassment that Baltimore — which has this logo on our benches ‘A great American city’ — that we don’t have the type of equity and justice here for everybody,” Mr. Brown said. “That is a shame. It’s America’s shame. It’s his shame and it’s our local officials’ shame as well. There’s blame to go around for everybody.”