TOUGH LOVE
“Tough Love” is defined as treating a person harshly or with discipline in order to help them in the long run, or in other words “being cruel to be kind”. We hear this term most often associated with parents of drug addicts who have made the hard decision to stop financially supporting their children or be enablers. But there is a woman in Baltimore who has also been practicing tough love since 2009; however, the target of her concern is not an individual she loves but rather the city of Baltimore itself.
After being laid off from her job with more time on her hands than she liked, Carol Ott began attending community meetings. She became increasingly more and more frustrated when the same issues kept popping up on every agenda. Problem properties that were run down, abandoned or unsafe kept being discussed but nothing was ever being done. After several years of listening to everyone’s complaints, she took to the street herself and visited some of these properties. She went into the neighborhoods that others would find too scary, and she sat down and talked to some of the tenants and nearby residents. After hearing some of their stories and seeing the conditions they were living in, she began taking photos and looking up who the owners were. In January 2009, she decided to make these property owners accountable and created a website called “Baltimore Slumlord Watch”. Not only did she show photos of the property, but she listed the address of the building, the owner’s name and contact information, as well as the local and state representatives responsible for that district.
Needless to say, Carol’s website stirred up a LOT of emotions and elicited many angry responses. Some were from the owners themselves, who primarily came up with excuses as to WHY they had abandoned the property or had not fixed it up. Many pleaded ignorance or cried poor, while others blamed the city for being too difficult to work with or said the tenants would only destroy the property again if they cleaned it up. But what was most surprising were ALL the nasty comments she also received from local citizens who criticized her for publicly shaming or exposing these property owners, telling her she was offensive and castigating her for pointing out the “ugly” side of the city.
Despite all the threats and negative reaction she received, Carol never backed down and kept posting more and more properties. The message she gave others was always clear. In order to build something up, you must first expose the problem and then stand firm and not crumble when you meet resistance. There are a lot of people who simply don’t like change or are threatened by anyone who comes in with strong opinions and ideas on how to improve something. There are also too many people who want to blame someone else for the situation they are in. But as Carol has pointed out herself, she thinks what happened to some of Baltimore’s neighborhoods was everyone’s fault. In some way, we have ALL contributed to this problem, and generations of people have allowed it to keep happening.
Although Carol Ott’s mission was to help clean up some of Baltimore’s worst neighborhoods and restore a city with pride, her goal was not that different from a parent who wants the same for their child. What was once a healthy, vibrant and active community was now “just a wasteland” in her opinion. Any parent who has watched their child succumb to drugs or alcohol and be ravaged by the effects also knows only too well how devastating and destructive this is to the family and to the community in general. We ALL suffer when one member goes down that path, but most of us just look away and hope the “situation” will correct itself on its own. Most of us do NOT have the courage to do what Carol Ott has done.
Copyright © 2013 (Michelle Parsons, Getting Back on Your Path). All Rights Reserved.
