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 ex-offenders 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
“I’m hopeful this job will keep me out of trouble.”
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 Baltimorebased 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.”
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 residents.
In the agency’s first matchmaking effort, the Forest Service hooked up Humanim — a Maryland-based non-profit 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 Minneapolisheadquartered 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.
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.
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 61⁄2 years for the robbery and weapons 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 $7.75an-hour job at McDonald’s.
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.