A war on crime, fought with wood
Cities, non-profits and ex-offenders team up to reclaim lumber — and lives
BALTIMORE – A federal agency more commonly associated with its Smokey Bear mascot and tips on preventing forest fires thinks it may have part of the solution in big cities’ fight on crime: urban wood.
The U.S. Forest Service has quietly launched a “matchmaking” effort to connect non-profits employing formerly incarcerated workers who deconstruct abandoned buildings in big metropolises such as Baltimore with private companies looking for a dependable supply of reclaimed lumber.
Agency officials say the partnerships could go a long way toward reducing the scourge of violent crime while decreasing the number of exoffenders who return to prison: About
70% of Baltimore offenders find themselves back in jail within three years of being released.
The wood project also fits the Forest Service mission because it helps keep good wood out of landfills as Maryland and Baltimore officials push forward with a program to demolish about
4,000 homes over the next four years, agency officials said.
About 14.5 million tons of wood in America’s landfills every year comes from urban areas, according to the most recent Forest Service estimates. That’s more than the amount of timber harvested from national forests each year.
“It’s about air quality and water quality,” said Morgan Grove, a Baltimore-based research forester who is spearheading what the agency has dubbed the Urban Wood Project. “It’s also about reducing crime and helping people move forward. ... At its core, it’s really still maintaining the mission of revitalizing that the Forest Service has had since the agency was started in the early 1900s.”
“It’s about air quality and water quality. It’s also about reducing crime and helping people move forward.”
Morgan Grove Urban Wood Project
Few cities have been hit as hard as Baltimore by violent crime and the scourge of abandoned housing — bigcity blight that becomes hubs for illicit drug use and prostitution and is frequently used by assailants to dump homicide victims.
Some of the nation’s cities with the highest homicide rates also have enormous stocks of abandoned buildings.
Baltimore (55.8 homicides per
100,000 residents) has roughly 16,000 abandoned structures. Cook County, which includes Chicago (24 homicides per 100,000), has an estimated 55,000 abandoned buildings. Detroit (39.7 homicides per 100,000) has about
70,000 abandoned buildings. Baltimore’s sea of boarded-up buildings provides an ugly reminder of what the city once was before being decimated by white flight, the loss of
100,000 industrial jobs in the latter half of the 20th century and the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s and
1990s. The city, which boasted a population of nearly 950,000 people in
1950, now hovers around 615,000. Baltimore had the highest per capita homicide rate of any big U.S. city in
2017 as it tallied 343 murders.
In the agency’s first matchmaking effort, the Forest Service hooked up Humanim — a Maryland-based nonprofit group that employs ex-offenders who deconstruct abandoned buildings as well as refurbish and sell wood and bricks from abandoned structures — with Room& Board, a Minneapolis-headquartered furniture retailer that touts its use of American lumber and local craftsmen.
This year, Room & Board began selling furniture made from Southern yellow pine and Douglas fir ripped out of century-old abandoned row homes in some of Baltimore’s more violenceplagued neighborhoods.
Gene Wilson, Room & Board’s director of merchandising and vendor management, says the company has been drawn by the quality and unique character of the wood — the dense Southern yellow pine Humanim is pulling out of Baltimore homes is difficult to find — and the social benefit the company can have by buying through a firm employing ex-convicts. The furniture retailer said it is not benefiting from any cost savings by using Baltimore lumber.
“This is really dialed in and well set up,” he said.
For some of the Humanim workers, such as Kobe Bland, the project has offered a chance at salvaging life.
Bland, 18, said he had been arrested at least 10 times as a juvenile on drugrelated charges and was shot by a rival when has 15. Not long after he was released after his latest arrest, Bland learned his girlfriend was pregnant.
His aunt came to Max Pollock, director of Humanim’s wood and brick processing division, known as Brick + Board, and told Pollock she was worried that she’d lose her nephew to prison or worse if he didn’t have a job. Pollock agreed to give him a shot.
Four months later, Bland says he has stopped dealing drugs and is slowly getting the hang of legitimate work.
“I’m hopeful this job will keep me out of trouble,” Bland said as he took a break from processing sheets of pine. “It’s hard. All I know is the street, and every day I think about going back. But I know this is a way for me to be there for my family.”
Around the country, other cities — including Chicago; Cleveland; Dayton, Ohio — have programs that pay former offenders or even jail inmates to demolish homes. But the Baltimore program operated by Humanim is unique for its focus on deconstruction and refurbishing reclaimed wood.
Jeff Carroll, vice president for Humanim, said sustained employment is the ticket to keeping ex-offenders from heading back to prison. The Humanim jobs, which pay $11.66 to $22 an hour and provide health care benefits, are ideally transitional — with ex-offenders spending 18 months to two years with the non-profit — before moving on to better-paying work in the trades.
Damon Toogood, 39, an ex-offender who has moved up the ranks and is now a deconstruction team foreman, said the work helped him turn the corner from a dark past.
In 1995 at age 16, he was charged as an adult with murder, robbery and weapons violations for his part in the killing of a 41-year-man in the city. Toogood and a teenage friend, Ronald Harris, accosted the victim, artist and antiques dealer Keith Huppert, in the city’s Bolton Hill area.
When Huppert refused their demand for money, Harris fatally shot him.
Prosecutors eventually dropped the murder charge against Toogood, but he did 61⁄ years for the robbery and weap
2 ons violation. Harris was released from prison recently after serving the bulk of his 25-year sentence, Toogood said.
Toogood did a second five-year stint in prison on drug-related charges. The best he could initially find after getting out of prison four years ago was a
$7.75-an-hour job at McDonald’s until Carroll hired him at Humanim.
He’s now earning enough to help his
20-year-old daughter with college and recently bought his first home with his girlfriend in a nearby suburb.
“The light didn’t turn on in me until Jeff (Carroll) gave me a chance,” Toogood said. “It gave me something to look forward to.”
Toogood said he thinks about Huppert, the victim of the 1995 armed robbery, constantly. He said the 16-year-old who took part in what he called a “senseless crime” was a kid who thought the best he could be was a “tough guy, thug on the block.”
“If I could take back what I did, I would,” he said. “This is something I’m going to deal with my whole life.”