By Abby Mergenmeier and Jacob Taylor
Capital News Service
BALTIMORE–Dawn Ford sits in her wheelchair in the hallway of her rowhouse on the 600 block of South Smallwood Street, gazing up at the old painting of two horses grazing in a field, mountains rising in the background.
“Wyoming,” she says with a smile. “When I was a kid, I always wanted to go to Wyoming. I wanted to go, like in the pictures, where you can see the mountains with the sun at the top.”
Ford, 62, lives in Carrollton Ridge, a neighborhood in Southwest Baltimore that sits in a wedge formed by Gwynn Falls to the west and Carroll Park to the south.
She has high blood pressure, hypertension, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). She’s had three heart attacks in 10 years. Her COPD makes it difficult to breathe, so she has an oxygen tank by her side day and night.
If she could, she would move clean out of the city, Ford says, but she doesn’t have the money. She lives in a house her grandfather bought and passed down to her, so she has no mortgage to worry about. But the wooden back porch appears to be slowly collapsing. Her house hasn’t had any major repairs since 1941, the year her grandfather bought it.
The fact that Ford is a homeowner makes her unusual in her part of the city. According to data from the Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance (BNIA), just 25 percent of houses in Southwest Baltimore are occupied by their owners, far below other parts of the city.
But like many homeowners in Baltimore’s deteriorating neighborhoods, Ford is trapped by her bad health and her low income. She could try to sell her house but, even if she could find a buyer, she likely wouldn’t get more than $15,000 for it, the value assessed by the state. That would be enough cash to rent a new place for a while, but probably not enough to purchase a better house.
In 2015, about half of all households in Southwest Baltimore had an income of less than $25,000 a year, according to BNIA data, and nearly 28 percent of the 8,252 residential properties in the area were vacant and abandoned.
Ford lives on a monthly Social Security check of $488.67 and has no money to fix up her house — let alone move to Wyoming. With her health problems, she can’t work and rarely leaves her house.
She can walk a few steps at a time, but she generally uses a wheelchair, even inside her home. She is able to use her stair railing to hoist herself up to her second-floor bedroom twice a day, she says.
When she leaves her house by herself, she says, it’s usually to go to the grocery store. She calls a taxi cab to take her there and rides a motorized scooter to get around the store. Sometimes, if a task is small enough, she says, she calls on her neighbors to run errands for her.
The Carrollton Ridge area originated as a German immigrant community. The first homes went up in the 1870s. Work in nearby factories was plentiful.
Today, the area is depressed and BNIA data reports a 2015 unemployment rate of almost 16 percent — three times greater than the national average that year. Most of the factories are gone. The remaining jobs are largely in fast-food restaurants and stores in the Westside Shopping Center.
On South Smallwood Street, the sky-blue color of Ford’s front door pops next to the 10 other doors on her block. Six of those houses are vacant, and four of those vacants are boarded up with plywood that is gray with age.
With so many vacancies, people from nearby neighborhoods regularly drive through the alleys and use Carrollton Ridge as a dumping site for their own trash.
Trash has become one of the biggest, most visible problems in Carrollton Ridge, and Ford knows that its presence isn’t good for anyone’s health because it attracts unwanted mice and roaches that eventually creep into houses.
“The trash is worse than the drugs,” Ford says. “The man next door, he’ll get out there and clean the streets, all the way up and down. I said [to him], ‘You’re doing a thankless job.’ ”
Empty cans, bottles, food wrappers, couches, mattresses, other furniture, and unidentifiable pieces of plastic and fabric make up the trash that is scattered widely across many of the streets and sidewalks. Many of the trash piles resemble those that would be found at city dumps, with debris and waste piled 6-feet high in some places.
With the unwanted trash come the unwelcome pests.
Pointing down between her knees at Sarge, the plump, sometimes irritable 11-year-old dachshund sitting between her ankles, Ford says, “That’s the mouse killer right there.”
Sarge has killed about 400 mice over his lifetime and Ford says she hasn’t spotted a mouse for nearly four months.
But Ford says the roaches are worse than the mice. They come into her home when her neighbor in the next rowhouse, whom she shares a wall with, sprays bug repellant. To combat the bugs, she uses Sevin, a bug killer designed strictly for outdoor use.
“I throw the [Sevin] dust around and it kind of tames them down and sends them back where they came from,” Ford says. The roaches “come on over here, and I run them back.”
Sevin is a garden pesticide. The labeling on Sevin products stress that the dust is not meant for indoor use, to use extreme caution when using it, and especially to avoid contact with bare skin.
Ford says she knows that the Sevin dust she has used for years is not considered safe for indoor use, but that doesn’t worry her.
“Anything and everything you use is going to be against you,” Ford said. “I’ve used that stuff since I was 16 years old.”
When Ford has a doctor’s appointment, Bon Secours Hospital provides free transportation with a shuttle that picks her up, takes her to their primary care facility on West Baltimore Street, and then drops her off at her front steps by the end of the day.
Otherwise, Ford stays home. She says she spends her days watching Westerns and horror flicks on TV while making designs out of yarn on plastic canvas, in a rowhouse decorated with fading paintings of wide-open spaces.
