> “My understanding is that the current parking lot where folks park, where the Wine Source parks, is going to be for the new Cindy Wolf and [Tony] Foreman restaurant that’s going into Café Hon,” Ramos said Tuesday. “The Wine Source is going to lose that…I don’t like tearing down houses for this, but they need the parking.”

Increasingly common Odette Ramos L. Blocks the development of tons of housing units and now advocating for tearing down a duplex because “well what can you do…people gotta park I guess.” Hilarious that she served on the housing committee for Wes Moore’s transition team when her record is this bad on the topic.

While I think this is good news, I would still view this report skeptically for a few reasons:

1. I’ll just start off by saying the 22% reduction in homicides is not statistically significant according to the report.
2. Also there is no statistically significant impact in new sites. The authors mention “all sites” because the estimated impacts for the older sites are lower than the newer sites. So combining the data gets them a bigger impact value and they manage to still stay statistically significant. That seems wrong to me.
3. Research on the impact of SafeStreets in Baltimore is mixed. Other research by Hopkins has found some positive effects but two other studies on the program have found no impact. Similarly the literature nationwide is mixed. To the authors’ credit they note this in the report.
4. Estimating the impact of Safe Streets is hard because sites are not chosen randomly. The sites in the program are those with the most violence. It is likely that a reduction in violence can be attributed to regression to the mean rather than any given intervention.
5. The authors try to get around this by creating a synthetic control group. In other words, they take a bunch of areas around the city and weight their arrests, homicide stats, etc until they get a trend that is as close as possible to each Safe Streets site they are studying. This is a decent way to get around the problems in point two but the approach still has drawbacks the authors don’t give information on. For example, they give error bars for each synthetic control site and treatment site post intervention in the appendices. However they do not give data on how well the synthetic control matches the sites pre-treatment which would enable us to know how good a job they did creating controls. Similarly, we don’t have information on why the control matches pre-treatment trends. Do the control sites vary wildly but average out to a close approximation? Or do the control sites generally mirror the treatment site’s patterns closely?
6. The nonfatal shooting results are barely statistically significant. The confidence intervals stopping at -0.00 for two overall effects makes me wonder if there’s p-hacking going on there. I don’t live and die by a p-value of 0.05 but it’s a flag that maybe data was manipulated until it hit a certain threshold.
7. Putting the data together suggests a statistically significant effect on homicides in the first four years of Safe Streets but no impact/reversion in later years of program implementation (inferred because the impact becomes insignificant for the entire program duration). Again, these findings only apply to old sites. The authors find no statistically significant impacts in the new sites.

I want this program to succeed and I don’t think the above means the program is a failure. I just am very skeptical of the headline findings being reported here.

Really disappointed in Odette Ramos for all she did to kill this. Can’t wait to hear her complain about the lack of affordable housing some more with not a hint of awareness that she is contributing to the problem

Some key quotes:

> In his statement, Scott said that “if these negotiations are successful, BGE will make a historic commitment of more than $100 million in capital improvements” over the next four years. > >Absent from the statement is the fact that BGE would otherwise be expected to pay $124 million in lease fees ($31 million x 4) between 2023 and 2027.

In an interview with Sheila Dixon: > She said she was concerned about the effect of the draft agreement on city efforts to bring internet access to underserved Black neighborhoods. “I didn’t see any commitment to where that would continue,” she said.

>Indeed, the agreement would allow BGE to use funds to extend capacity to places like Kevin Plank’s upscale Port Covington (recently rebranded as “Baltimore Peninsula”) , while avoiding expenditures in East and West Baltimore.

>Dixon said it was also troubling that the agreement would excuse the company from MBE/WBE requirements.

Zeke Cohen: > “I’m also concerned that we have the ability to provide municipal WiFi, but this pretty much forecloses our opportunity to provide it.”

TLDR: Mayor’s Christmas Parade through Hampden may be postponed because the City says it doesn’t have enough police officers due to a Ravens game at the same time.

Edit: Mike Ricci, spokesman for the Hogan admin, says on Twitter the state is willing to assist if the City wants. https://twitter.com/riccimike/status/1595442255652855808?s=46&t=8Be5aO9-Xac5rECl0bPNPA

TLDR: Authors compared cost of 12 common grocery items. Total costs were:

• Harris Teeter: $47.38
• Whole Foods: $47.24
• Safeway: $47.18
• Giant: $46.04
• ShopRite: $42.88
• Weis: $42.38
• Wegmans: $40.58
• Lidl: $34.88
• Aldi: $26.52

TLDR: Article summarizes the debate over Dorsey’s Abundant Housing Act. Dorsey and advocates say it will help bring housing costs down while Torrence says it will “destroy black wealth.” Also getting a mention is a beefed up inclusionary zoning bill proposed by Ramos.

Costello ranked sixth is entirely too high for a man who in the last 2 weeks killed Odette’s bill to study TIFs and a bill to end predatory towing.