[gentle music]
- [President Franklin D. Roosevelt] Let me make it clear
that the banks will take care of all needs.
We have provided the machinery
to restore our financial system.
- [Nneka N'namdi] Baltimore looks like it does explicitly
and specifically because of racist housing
and community development policy.
- [President Franklin D. Roosevelt] Together, we cannot fail.
- Restrictive covenants, contract lending, redlining,
subprime lending, tax sales,
the war on drugs, deindustrialization—
all of these things are connected
to why Baltimore has the level of vacancy,
why it has the level of dilapidation,
why it has all of these things that, you know,
we come to know as blight.
[gentle music continues]
Blight is the conditional state of property
in community when it's not being used to its fullest
or its highest use for the people who live in community.
- [narrator] In Baltimore, blight is most prevalent
in a collection of neighborhoods known locally
as the Black Butterfly.
These sections of the city, which look
like the wings of a butterfly, are predominantly Black.
- Blight can look like a empty school building.
It can look like the presence of five, or six,
or 10 liquor stores In a neighborhood where
there's no full-service grocery store.
It can look like a building that is
what we call a blue sky house, which means when you look
at the top floor of the building, you can see the sky
because the roof is gone.
It can look like a property that is simply boarded up
and not being used for whatever its zoned purpose is.
- [narrator] This is Nneka N'namdi, the founder
and COO of Fight Blight Bmore.
Her fight against blight began on Mother's Day
in 2016, when she was on her way home and saw something
that worried her.
- I noticed two children on foot and two children on bikes.
They were passing a huge demolition site.
They put them temporary fences
up for all them construction projects downtown.
But yet, over here, we can't get a fence.
Nothing to let the children know
that the site was dangerous.
- [narrator] N'namdi began an effort
to document and report blight, which ultimately led
to her founding Fight Blight Bmore.
- Fight Blight Bmore is an economic, environmental,
and social justice initiative led by the village
and informed by the data to remediate blight in Baltimore.
We have four primary functions.
Probably the most important thing that we do is really work
with community to break down why blight exists,
how it came into being,
and what its true impact on community is.
And so we spend a lot of time doing presentations
and workshops, or even taking people
on what we call hood hikes to really look at,
and talk about, and pull that thread of history through.
When we look at the public health implications of blight,
we find that we have three times the national average
in childhood asthma.
The neighborhoods with highest concentrations of blight
are the neighborhoods with the lowest life expectancy.
[gentle music]
We developed a mobile app that really allows folks
to go door to door, taking pictures
and documenting the physical condition of the property.
Then we can take all of that data
and help to create a community-based analysis
of the level of blight in community.
When you look at all the five forms of blight—
vacancy, abandonment, dilapidation, underutilization,
and misutilization—our estimate
is there are
in Baltimore
that meet those five characteristics.
Even though that Baltimore has a lot of innovation happening
in different pockets, there are very few places
and spaces inside the Black Butterfly to do innovation.
And so we took a vacant house and a vacant lot
and turned them into the Hack Hub,
which is our imagination, innovation, and incubation space.
And we are currently in the process of really fundraising
to rebuild those two properties
into a state-of-the-art facility.
The Stop Oppressive Seizures Fund, our primary focus
is to disrupt, dismantle, and then decolonize
our philosophy surrounding real property.
And in the manner of disrupting,
we are working through the Tax Sale Bailout
to support homeowners who are unable, for whatever reason,
to pay their property taxes, while we are working
with other advocates to force the city
and the state to abolish the tax sale as we know it.
And then finally, to decolonize our idea about real property
is to really move from a idea of ownership
to an idea of stewardship over the land.
Because the reality of it is, this planet
can survive without us,
we can't survive without it.
[gentle music]
Probably one of the most damaging aspects of blight
is the lived experience of people in communities
as it pertains to, like, how people socialize
and how people are able to connect to one another.
Because in many of these neighborhoods,
you have people who are now the last person standing
on the block, literally, where they have lived
for 50, 60, 70 years and have watched their neighbors,
you know, die, move off, be arrested.
And so there's a sense of loneliness.
Blight, in a way, destroys the fabric, the substance,
the things that make people connect or stick together.
And so it's important to center community in the work.
And it's important to do the work as community
because the reality is, human beings are designed
to organize to have our needs met.
So a lot of times, when people think about development,
they're talking about real estate development.
When we say development,
we're talking about community development.
The fight against blight is actually a fight
for healthy, whole, vibrant communities.