BY MELISSA MADDOX-EVANS GUEST COLUMNIST

Celebrated PBS documentarian Ken Burns says, “ … everything in American history led

up to (the Civil War), and everything since has been a consequence of it.” As startling as

his words are, they ring true. Equally true is that public conversations about race and

race relations are complicated and fraught with strife, particularly when it comes to the

issue of housing.

Annapolis is alive with opportunities and traditions. My time here has introduced me to

wonderful people who call “Crabtown” home. While from my vantage point I am able to

see a commonality in how our local traditions guide all of us, I am also able to see,

unfortunately, how our city’s opportunities are systemically limited for some.

Census data reveal divisions in the social and economic upward mobility of our citizens,

revealing that nearly 1 in 4 Black Annapolitans live below the poverty line while only 1 in

20 whites are impoverished. Black citizens are not, and have never been, deficient nor

inherently inadequate. The systems in which we live in are failing us at an unequal rate

because the systems themselves are flawed.

I know this because I work within one of them, one that impacts generational wealth

building: housing. In his book “The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our

Government Segregated America,” bestselling author Richard Rothstein writes: “Equity

that families have in their homes is the main source of wealth for middle class

Americans. African American families today, whose parents and grandparents were

denied participation in the equity-accumulating boom of the 1950s and 1960s, have

great difficulty catching up now. As with income, there is little mobility by wealth in

America.”

For a variety of reasons, as discussed many times on these editorial pages, the housing

and economic opportunities for our city’s low-income citizens have been limited for

many years. If we are to maintain our civic integrity, we must be willing to engage in

honest and introspective conversations about the reasons for the housing inequities in

our city.

Dinner table discussions that examine our histories and ask questions like, why did our

parents or grandparents move to the neighborhoods they moved into? Were they able to

obtain bank loans to buy their home? Was any class of people excluded from the

neighborhood at the time? Are they still, as a practical matter, excluded today? What

makes a neighborhood “good” or “bad?” What makes the schools in our area “good” or

“bad?” By challenging ourselves and our families to answer honestly, we will continue to

gain the necessary insights to improve our flawed systems.

Resistance toward policy advancement is often rooted in emotion, misinformation, false

perceptions, and prejudice. Let us step into the challenge and agree to talk honestly

about what “affordable housing” really means to each of us and how the term makes us

feel. Creating and preserving more of it is difficult if it evokes viscerally negative

feelings. Those feelings can become insurmountable when more “affordable housing” is

needed in your neighborhood.

I believe Annapolis has an opportunity to embrace systemic changes to local housing

policies, to re-engineer its social contract with its citizens, and to fully live up to the full

promise of our city’s traditions and opportunities. To do so, however, we must agree to

have honest conversations that move past stigmas of the past, so that the One Annapolis

promise can come true for all citizens, Black and white.



Melissa Maddox-Evans, Esq. joined the Housing Authority of the City of Annapolis as

the Executive Director/CEO in October 2019. Ms. Maddox-Evans has more than sixteen

years of experience in the affordable housing industry and over twenty-seven years in

community development initiatives. She received her B.A. from Georgetown University

and her law degree from the University of Georgia.