Commentary

Homeownership represents the ultimate American dream — success, safety, opportunity and wealth. Despite numerous legal obstacles and the longstanding history of racism, many families of color still managed to purchase homes, creating the largest source of wealth for their families. But homeownership has its challenges, which often intensify when determining how the government and commercial housing industry value Black-owned homes.

Parenting is one of the toughest jobs around. As a father to three daughters, I am constantly asking myself: Am I giving my girls enough space to be themselves? Are they safe from harm? Am I parenting enough, or too little? Now, add cellphones and social media to the mix, and it gets even harder. As parents, we understand the need to strike a balance between our kids fitting in with their peers, focusing on their education and realizing their dreams.

So, as Groucho Marx used to say, “Pardon me while I have an interlude.” This won’t take long. First of all, with regard to Mr. Sperandeo’s complaint that “all we ever hear from you” is negativity about Trump. That’s way out there in imagination land. I make reference to Donald Trump from time to time — as I did in Wednesday’s column, referring to the former president as an insurrectionist — but this column sticks mainly to local topics. I don’t recall referring to Trump’s sons recently, either.

Jessica Pachler called me two days after Christmas. There was another pop pop-pop pop outside her home, a sound instantly recognizable as gunfire to anyone living in parts of Annapolis. “My kids were outside playing with their new Nerf guns,” she said. “And they came running in and said, ‘That was not a Nerf gun.’” Police responded three times to Pachler’s street for gunshots in the days after the holiday.

I’m no stranger to doomscrolling on my outdated iPhone, but lately the Nextdoor app is my least favorite place to do so. I don’t mean to shade the creators of the private social network for neighbors, but I’m concerned with posts that sometimes perpetuate racial profiling and misinformation. Too often, people use Nextdoor thinking they’re being helpful neighbors by posting about “suspicious” folks in their neighborhood, including children, that are many times people of color.

The decisions we make impact real lives. As I represent Northeast and East Baltimore in the Maryland Senate, my constituents constantly remind me of the consequences of those decisions in social media posts, encounters in public places and through emails or calls to my office. In 2020 and 2021, the General Assembly took a visionary step forward, adopting a resolute One Maryland approach to tackle the challenges of public transportation.

Where’s Larry Hogan? Or maybe the better question is: Where’s the next Larry Hogan? The Maryland Republican Party enters 2024 badly splintered with the biggest plank in its eye named Donald J. Trump. The former president may well win the state’s Republican primary on May 14 when all but a handful of states have already cast their ballots, but whether his name appears on the general election ballot in November is nearly irrelevant. Trump won’t win Maryland.

It appears that the Frederick County Public Schools system has learned the wrong lessons — or nothing at all — from its most recent botched attempt to draw new school boundaries. More than a year ago, the school board launched the Crestwood Area Redistricting Study to determine how to best accommodate a 300-seat addition at Crestwood Middle School.