Wednesday, September 30, 2015

Non-Profit Failed Freddie Gray’s Neighborhood, Still Gets HUD Millions

The Daily Caller reports:
A liberally funded anti-poverty group’s plan failed miserably to revitalize the destitute Baltimore neighborhood where Freddie Gray lived but the non-profit continues to pay its officers lavish salaries with one top executive earning more than $1 million in 2014.

Columbia, Md.-based Enterprise Community Partners conducts anti-poverty projects nationwide, but it lost the battle in its own backyard in Sandtown-Winchester – the Baltimore neighborhood that was once home to former Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and entertainer Billie Holiday. Gray died there after suffering a spinal cord injury while in police custody in an incident that sparked violent riots across Baltimore earlier this year.

Enterprise’s extravagant salaries reminded conservative think tank Capital Research Center Executive Vice President Scott Walker of Thomas Sowell’s “Poverty Pimps” – a 1998 poem about profiting from the poor.

Enterprise partnered with then-Baltimore Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke in 1990 to revitalize Sandtown-Winchester on four fronts: community building, housing and economic development, health services and education. More than $130 million of public and private money was invested in the neighborhood, which built more than 1,000 homes and bolstered public schools.



Rent-seeking in action.