It was Imam Earl El Amin who first described Baltimore to me as a city of neighborhoods in a Baltimore Legacy Project interview. While whiter and wealthier neighborhoods received consistent investment, majority-Black neighborhoods were left to manage scarcity as a condition of daily life. A 2020 Urban Institute study found that majority-Black neighborhoods in Baltimore received three times less investment than white neighborhoods between 2004 and 2016. The Washington Post later reported that “the Baltimore Families cornered into subprime loans descended from the same families who’d been denied homeownership — and the chance to build wealth — two generations earlier.”These communities were targeted, not inherently broken. Popular television narratives about Baltimore rarely focus on the conditions that created the crime, drugs and poverty.