Giuliani cleaned up NYC - it can be done here too. Just need strong experienced leaders and the budget.

I wonder how many of our citizens truly know just how blighted some of our worst areas are. Google maps did not know and recently took me through some streets that I can only categorize as just flat-out forsaken. There are no businesses, as we have come to know them, anywhere to be found. No Starbuck's, no restaurants, no boutiques, no Jiffy Lube's, no cafes, etc. Lot's of boarded up shells of former homes and anything that resembles a place of business is identified by a hand-painted sign on an increasingly rotted slab of wood. Stoops are laden with those who are non-productive, angry, wounded, non-healthy, and otherwise horrifically misguided. I am a comfortable Fells Point resident and I can throw a stone to the most hopeless environment conceivable. I believe in a notion that one minute ago was the worst it gets and that right now is the watershed moment where it starts getting better, never again to revert to that worst moment. If it does, then someone(s) is not doing their job. But it does start with each citizen. However, my gut tells me that those on the stoops don't have much of an inlet (internet, newspaper, TV, etc.) to realize that they are so integral to the cure. All they know is the violence that dominates their streets. That the police are their enemy. That witness is synonymous with either snitch or corpse. That voting 'not guilty' is their version of loyalty to their cause. That the drug game is their only hope. That if you don't shoot first, you die first. Solutions? I have a few.