Hey.  As you know from other articles we’ve published, literally thousands of Baltimore’s unemployed and under-employed people could find jobs – good jobs – if only they had affordable transportation to get to work.  Unfortunately, bus and rail transportation are not sufficient for many people living in Baltimore to get to jobs at a distance inside the city and certainly not in the suburbs.

Part of the problem is the lack of prospective, forwarding looking financing that would, in effect, give workers credit for the new jobs they’ve just acquired rather than focusing on the past, on credit histories that do not qualify for affordable financing.  For what it’s worth, Baltimore Rising is working hard to solve this problem.

And there’s something else we trying to do.  We’re going to bring a new car dealer, at least one to start, to the heart of the city’s struggling neighborhoods.  As you can see from the map below, new car manufacturers have all but abandoned the city, preferring instead to get no closer than then beltway in Baltimore and Anne Arundel Counties.

Take a look for yourself.  The map is fully interactive.  You can zoom in and out, blow up the map to the full size of your screen (highly recommended) and move the center of the map to wherever it’s convenient for you.  If you’re interested, zooming way in will show you the names of Baltimore City’s neighborhoods.

Each blue dot represents at least one of the 35 new car dealers nearest to the city – dealers that offer affordable models selling for under $20,000.  Clicking on or mousing over a blue dot will show you the brand and the dealer’s name and address.  As you can see, only 2 of these new car dealers are actually inside the city line, but just barely.  (The 36th blue dot that is deep inside the city line is the location of Luby Chevrolet that closed years ago.) 

Because geo-coding is an imperfect process and several of the dealers (brands) are located at the same address or very near each other, the blue dots on the map don’t tell the whole story.  Use the table below to see the entire list of all 35 dealers, sorted by brand and then by the name of the dealer.  You can blow up the table by clicking on it.

So take a look at the map and the table – and watch this space. We believe that we can put at least 2000 – probably more – unemployed people to work if only we can get them the affordable new cars they need to get to their jobs. And, with your help, that’s exactly what we’re going to do. …And then there are thousands of more other Baltimore residents overpaying for older used cars they can’t afford to maintain. With luck and hard work, we’ll take care of them too.