Leaving Baltimore Behind

Leaving Baltimore Behind, Jillian Weinberger, Vox, November 30, 2018, available here

It’s called the Baltimore Housing Mobility Program (BRHP). It started in 2002, and has since moved more than 4,000 people out of the city. Some see it as a way to give low-income Baltimore residents new opportunities in neighborhoods that would otherwise be out of reach.

Barbara Samuels, the managing attorney for fair housing at the Maryland ACLU, helped file the lawsuit that led to this program. She remembers one woman who testified on its behalf, a client who had moved with her children from a public housing complex Baltimore to a suburb.

“She talked about her nephew who had lived in the same public housing development that she had lived in and who had been killed on his way to the grocery store,” Samuels says. The mother who moved felt that her sons had been spared. “She felt like it was life and death, that the program had saved lives.”

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