BALTIMORE — When driving through a neighborhood, it's difficult to get a full picture of some of the problems people living there may be facing.
That's why Mayor Brandon Scott, along with other city leaders, walked.
“We consistently go out into our neighborhoods to work with community leaders and communities to help around all the issues that they have," Mayor Scott said.
Issues like dumping, vacant housing, poor road conditions, and even issues you can only know about when talking with the people who live in the Coldstream-Homestead-Montebello neighborhood.
“At the end of the day, it's about poverty, it's about concentrated poverty and continuing to let policies and practices occur that allow that to proliferate," Maraizu Onyenaka said.
Mayor Scott says he wants to continue to uplift neighborhoods like this by solving problems the people may have.
He says walking the streets lets him see how he and others can help.
“But also, you see some other things that maybe you didn’t see before. Neighbors are saying, like hey, our signs have been here for a long time; they are starting to fade. Can we help get those up? We need to change the way they do trash pick-up or something like that," he said.
Although a lot of the problems in neighborhoods won’t get solved overnight, the neighbors feel good about getting their voices heard.
“But it means a lot for us to see all of the main city agencies kind of focusing in and seeing where they can play a part because the types of problems that we have did not happen over a moment; they happened over decades, and they’re complex, and they’re going to require complex solutions," Onyenaka said.
Solutions the city will work to provide to neighborhoods to improve Baltimore.
