The change to the state constitution may have appeared innocuous. It merely required that a majority of residents living within the annexation area approve annexation. In fact, it was not. There had been a decade-long fight prior to the massive 1918 annexation, which, like previous annexations, enabled Baltimore’s jurisdictional reach to follow commercial and residential development as it inevitably expanded over the city line. Baltimore County powers behind the 1948 referendum intended to close the gates around the city, one of the densest in the U.S. at the time. The passage of the measure, as intended, meant the commercial growth, new schools, and residential property taxes in the booming ring of post-WWII suburbs and towns—subsidized by state and federal tax dollars as well as racially discriminatory housing practices and G.I. Bill and FHA lending policies—would forever remain beyond the city/county partition.

It is no coincidence that Baltimore City’s population topped out two years later in the 1950 census and has been shrinking ever since. Subsequently, it has become one of the smallest major cities in terms of square miles. The closing of the city border was part of an even broader political effort that George Romney—the father of the Utah Senator Mitt Romney and Richard Nixon’s first Housing and Urban Development secretary—once characterized as a “high-income white noose” placed around the nation’s urban core. Romney had seen it play out in Detroit when he served as governor of Michigan.

The Baltimore Metropolitan Area, among the wealthiest in the country, continues to see growth—at the exclusion of the city itself.

From the approval of the ’48 referendum to the end of the last century, Baltimore County quadrupled its population and surpassed the city. (The restrictive 1924 Immigration Act, which plummented immigration to historic lows until the 1970s, didn’t help cities like Baltimore replace its losses, either.) Not surprisingly, the income gap—virtually nonexistent between the city and county in 1950—widened exponentially. Entire neighborhoods of low-income families were boxed in by segregated public housing that lacked effective public transportation and access to livable wage jobs, which were departing to the county as well, but also for the non-union Sun Belt and later to Mexico and China.

If you wanted to create a city plagued by segregation, you could not have planned it better. By 1993, in his seminal work, Cities Without Suburbs, urban expert and former Albuquerque Mayor David Rusk described Baltimore and other “inelastic” Rust Belt legacy cities, including Cleveland, St. Louis, Milwaukee, Newark, and Camden, as beyond the point of return without dramatic restructuring and regional governance. Targeted “urban” programs such as empowerment zones—no matter how well-intentioned—would never move the needle. Three decades later, the book—and its 1995 follow up, Baltimore Unbound—remains prescient. There were six Baltimore City census tracts where poverty was above 60 percent in 1990; that number had not budged by 2015, the year of Freddie Gray’s death and the subsequent riot and uprising.

Meanwhile, thriving “elastic” cities such as Charlotte, Jacksonville, Raleigh, Indianapolis, Nashville, Austin, Houston, Columbus, Madison, and Albuquerque expanded their footprints anywhere from more than 250 percent to 2,000-plus percent from 1950 to 1990. Baltimore football fans will recall Charlotte and Jacksonville beat them out for NFL expansion franchises in 1993.

“It’s hard to think, looking back, of any single public decision that’s proved to be more important to Baltimore City than that question in the 1948 election,” former City Councilman and current Abell Foundation president Robert Embry told Baltimore years ago. “It was a very shortsighted decision.”

n hindsight, there was frustratingly little coverage of the 1948 anti-annexation referendum. The Truman-Dewey presidential race and 22 other ballot questions—including funding for Memorial Stadium, a term limit for Maryland governors, and a Red Scare measure forbidding officeholders who advocated the violent overthrow of the government—overshadowed the proposal. That said, alert city activists, leaders, and The Sun’s editorial writers recognized the referendum spelled trouble. A sharp, opinionated gadfly known as “Mrs. B,” a thorn in the side of a half-century of City Hall administrations, called the annexation referendum “ridiculous.” Famous for her election-eve broadcasts, Mrs. B (real name: Marie Oehl von Hattersheim Bauernschmidt) correctly declared passage would “prevent the development of the city.” “Suppose,” she said, “annexation [into the city] had been unlawful and our boundary line would’ve been 25th St.?”

City residents agreed. They voted against the measure by a large count. Baltimore County, however, in what seems a suspiciously high 93 percent turnout looking back, voted in favor by more than 5 to 1. The huge numbers out of the county overrode the city tally and were enough to carry the measure statewide.

Ironically, up until 1853, the city and county had essentially been a single political entity. Initially, it was the city that seceded because of its diverging needs as a burgeoning urban center. By 1952, four years after the approval of the referendum, folks like then City Councilman Frank Flynn were already highlighting that the county was becoming less rural and more suburban and urban. Whatever the distinctions that previously existed, Flynn said, the political boundaries between the two jurisdictions—given their shared geography, economy, and infrastructure—no longer made sense. He noted, as many do today, that county residents took advantage of their proximity to the metro region’s economic and cultural engine, but without paying a fair share of the tax burden. Almost 70 years ago, Flynn proposed considering, if not more annexation into the city, then an even bolder idea—formal reconsolidation.

Legendary former state comptroller Louie Goldstein floated the same idea in reverse. He suggested the county annex the city. Needless to say, neither plan took root. The subsequent construction of the Baltimore Beltway and the urban expressways of I-83 and I-170, aka The Road to Nowhere, exacerbated existing problems in a way that Councilman Flynn and Mrs. B could not have envisioned.

Baltimore, a mid-century economic giant, losing a third of its population? Unimaginable in 1948. Also, not inevitable. Taken together, the city and county would comprise the eighth largest city in the country today. What’s more, the city's problems would be less concentrated and more manageable. Rusk’s research found areas that created metro governments through consolidation were less segregated by race and class, more fiscally sound, and economically healthier. A plan to reduce school segregation could be worked out if the two systems combined efforts.

Consider if Baltimore had continued to annex parts of the county and maintained its status as a top 10 U.S. city. What if, in the 1950s, as beloved city historian Gilbert Sandler once asked, it had added Catonsville, Rosedale, and Pikesville? Annexed Towson in 1960? What if those light rail stops past Woodberry—Lutherville, Timonium, and Hunt Valley—were in the city? What would it mean to Baltimore’s clout in Annapolis and ability to attract Fortune 500 companies?

Of course, more annexation, or even merging the city and county completely, would not have alleviated all of Baltimore’s problems. But it would’ve had a strong palliative effect. Obviously, neither is politically feasible at the moment. Although there have been relatively recent mergers, most of the last big city/county mergers in the U.S. took place in the 1960s. There’s too much entrenched division now. Also, the metro area has expanded—Anne Arundel, Carroll, Harford, Howard, and Queen Anne’s are part of the equation. But as the recent COVID-19 crisis and its economic fallout demonstrates—along with issues like globalization and climate change—the city’s fate is inextricably linked to the wider world. It’s all the more evidence that Baltimore can’t go it alone in tackling its big problems. We need to act as one metro region if the next half century is going to be different than the last.

One bold idea kicked around in the early years after the passage of the 1948 referendum was a proposal for a federated model of the Baltimore metro region government—with each existing jurisdiction keeping some internal autonomy. In other words, the city and the surrounding metro counties would form something like the consolidated working arrangement that exists in cities like Toronto, London, and New York—think of the five boroughs—as well as Portland, Oregon, and the Twin Cities. Currently, there is an organization, the Baltimore Metropolitan Council, which in theory oversees regional planning, but it avoids controversy and has little power. No doubt few readers have heard of it.

“Someday it will almost certainly be adopted here,” a Sun editorial said of the federated government model proposed in 1956. “The question is, when and how?”

Over the next six pages, we look at 12 bold ideas to move Baltimore forward in the 21st century after decades of segregation, isolation, and stagnation. Some are successfully employed elsewhere, some are new, and several are being explored. One worked here before. The overarching theme is Baltimore will remain stuck in place until its internal physical barriers and its city line—a de facto border wall—are torn down.