HUD Secretary Ben Carson decries Baltimore ‘animosity’

BALTIMORE – U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson came to Baltimore Wednesday to tout the Trump administration’s efforts to improve urban areas. But Carson ran into trouble when his entourage was kicked off the Southwest Baltimore property where they planned to hold a press conference.

HUD officials hoped to stage their event on a vacant lot, but never asked permission from Morning Star Baptist Church of Christ, which owns the lot and hopes to build a parking lot there, said church member Gregory Evans. Evans asked the HUD group to move off the property.

“It’s nothing personal,” Evans said from the church lobby, where he was reading the newspaper and checking in children to a vacation Bible school camp. “I didn’t know it was Secretary Carson. I just know there were a bunch of people over there that were taking over our site. And we said, ‘Why are they here? They’ve not even asked for permission to be here.”

Evans said the church has had persistent troubles with the vacant lot, with construction crews for other projects leaving materials on the site.

After Evans confronted HUD officials, they scrambled to move the press conference to an adjacent alley.

Carson was not pleased. He suggested the church was an example of people refusing to work together to solve Baltimore’s problems.

“We just have all this animosity all the time,” Carson told reporters during his press conference. “For instance, you guys know, you were set up on this property and right here is this church that said: ‘Get off our property.’ You know, a church? When we’re talking about helping the people. I mean, this is the level to which we have sunken as a society.”

When pressed to clarify his comments about the church, Carson responded: “What I’m saying is, you know, we have a society in which people, instead of trying to be helpful think only about themselves. That is a problem.”

Evans said his church works to serve the community, distributing clothes and food, offering addiction counseling and providing youth programs. He said HUD has done little to help the neighborhood under the Trump administration.