I love TV’s The Wire. When I heard about this self-guided, Wire-themed tour of Baltimore, I thought, “That’s the self-guided tour of Baltimore I’ve been waiting for.” But I read something a few days later that paralyzed my ambitions. Christian Lander, author of the blog and book “Stuff White People Like,” explained in an interview:

When and how did you get the idea for the site?

January 18th. A friend and I were having an IM conversation about The Wire. He said, “Not enough white people watch The Wire.” I said, “Don’t worry, they do.” We started talking about what they’re doing instead of watching The Wire : therapy, getting divorced, going to plays…

For weeks now, the Cleveland Plain Dealer has been running biographies of the 11 women who were found murdered just over a year ago by serial killer Anthony Sowell in a house of the east side of Cleveland.

This week, they profiled Amelda “Amy” Hunter, a “bookworm” from Chicago, that eventually got mixed up with men and drugs. All of the stories, more or less, follow the same pattern: A young woman, loved by her family, full of promise, falls prey to older men, crack and a life on the streets, and her life meets its tragic ending at the hands of a sociopath.

It’s all, of course, terribly sad.

A friend of mine pointed out, in all these stories, in all their coverage, sympathetic as it may be, the Plain Dealer never raises the bigger issue.

Editor’s note: Our faithful readers will note we recently featured a short post with a trailer and some information about a new documentary, The Pruitt-Igoe Myth, which deals with an infamous public housing complex in St. Louis, built in the 1950s and torn down in 1972.

The film’s director, Chad Freidrichs, recently spoke with Rust Wire about this myth and the film it inspired.
Watch the trailer for the movie here. Check out its Flickr page, with great historical photos here. Read more about the complex and its history here.
And …

This article from Chicago Magazine tries to examine Chicago (and by extension Illinois’) culture of corruption in politics.
Among the reasons cited for the state’s problem: old habits die hard, no will for reform, mob connections, racial tensions and more.
What do you think after reading this?
How many of the same things apply to your city?
-KG
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Really interesting article in this week’s Bloomberg Businessweek about Niagara Falls, New York, and some of the problems it faces despite being next to what is litterally one of the largest tourist attractions in the world.
The article details how Niagara Falls
“encompasses just about every mistake a city could make… a 1960s mayor’s decision to bulldoze his quaint downtown and replace it with a bunch of modernist follies. There was a massive hangar-like convention center designed by Philip Johnson; Cesar Pelli’s glassy indoor arboretum, the Wintergarden, which was …

Congressional Quarterly has released its annual report on America’s most crime-ridden cities. This year St. Louis topped the list, upping last year’s leader: Camden, NJ.

Also, Detroit was No.3, Flint, No. 4. Cleveland ranked in at No. 7. Gary, Ind. ranked 9th.

The National Conference of Mayors called the report a “premeditated statistical mugging of America’s cities,” saying the rankings are “bogus.”

St. Louis mayor Francis Slay said on Twitter yesterday “Crime stats reflect crimes. Crime stats rankings reflect how we draw our boundaries.”

This is seriously the most awful thing I have ever read.
In Camden, New Jersey, according to this article in The Nation, the local homeless encampment is the most orderly neighborhood. Unemployed residents smoke a drug called “wet,” marijuana soaked in embalming fluid. The only white people are hookers, many of whom are infected with AIDS, Hepatitis C and other STDs.
Is this the future of all our post-industrial cities in the United States, The Nation asks.
“The poor have to help the poor,” an elderly resident says, “because the ones who make …

The recent high profile shooting of an elderly couple leaving church on Youngstown’s south side—the second such murder of a parishioner at Saint Dominic’s this year—has rocked the city. The usual calls for greater police crackdowns and the typical mystified responses from the public and the media make it clear that few people understand why exactly a cycle of crime is playing out in our inner cities. The only explanations usually given involve the same stories of the loss of manufacturing jobs and the closures of the mills in the 1970s. Almost none address the fact that Youngstown’s—and indeed almost every ghetto in the Rust Belt—has largely been created by economic structural changes that have disproportionately affected African Americans and by deliberately exclusionary policies designed to reinforce segregation.

In the 1950s urban renewal projects changed the face of entire sections of the city of Youngstown. African Americans found themselves time and again in front of the wrecking ball as highways and industrial parks bisected or obliterated their neighborhoods.

Hot off being named the national leader in manufacturing job growth, two senseless crimes are causing the city of Youngstown to temper its exuberance.

Tales From the Rust Belt offers this analysis:

The recent murders of Realtor Vivian Martin on the East Side and elderly residents Thomas Repchic and Angela Figmonari on the South Side near St. Dominic’s church are especially hard on a city that seemed to be focusing on the positives. Earlier this year we were able to celebrate the long list of jobs coming to the area including a third shift at GM Lordstown and the V&M Steel expansion.

Cleveland Housing Court Judge Raymond Pianka is making news again for his aggressive stance on dilapidated properties- especially those purchased by people outside of Cleveland and hoping to make a quick buck.
Judge Pianka’s work was previously highlighted on Rust Wire and in this New York Times Magazine cover story last year. (Read more about him here.)
The Plain Dealer reports he is ordering absentee owners of vacant homes to pay restitution to neighbors whose property values have been eroded by the vacant structures nearby.

“What is happening (in Cleveland) is certainly …