Check back in five years

Baltimore has plenty of reasons to be skeptical of the great green hopes — and few are more outspokenly so than Morning Sunday Hettleman, president of the Maryland Environmental Justice Coalition. Hettleman argues that efforts to clean up the environment and rebuild the inner city since the 1970s have often left working people, and people of color, out in the cold. “Billions have been spent in Baltimore, supposedly to help us, and still it looks like a bomb went off. Where did the money go?” she asks. “The money went to consultants who live in Baltimore County. The money never made it down to the people.”
   Sitting in her drafty home in Waverly — weatherized, badly, by a city work crew, she notes — Hettleman and Dale Hargrave, a local contractor, make their prediction for the green economy, using history as their guide. “If you come back here in five years and ask, ‘Where did the green jobs go?’” Hettleman says. “Well, they went down I-95. They went down I-83. They went down I-695.”

From an article in the April Urbanite.