This week, at an event related to the release of the Johns Hopkins Carey School of Business’s annual “Trend Watch” report, attorney Ray Truitt of Ballad Spahr Andrews & Ingersoll made some interesting remarks about development, public housing and the relevance of the upcoming presidential election.

If a Democrat is elected president come November, he said, it is likely that HOPE-VI, the public housing improvement program spearheaded by Sen. Mikulski in 1993, will be resuscitated, “and that may be critical for the development of low-income and affordable housing.”

HOPE-VI is a program meant to help convert “severely distressed” public housing into more livable space. Since George W. Bush became president, however, the federal government has been cutting funding for the program every year.

To some, HOPE-VI is an invaluable lifeline of public money to improve public housing stock. To others, it is a way of tearing down poor people’s homes in order to replace them with mixed-income developments that are privately-owned, and generally more profitable for developers. The most recent issue of The Economist has an interesting article about the possible renewal of HOPE-VI in the next few months or years.

So what’s biotech got to do with it?

For one, the success of the new University of Maryland BioPark on Baltimore’s west side is inextricably tied to a corresponding neighborhood redevelopment effort in the surrounding communities, and it probably would not have moved forward if the city hadn’t cleaned up the public Read the rest of this entry »

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You may have seen Karen Buckelew’s report this morning on President Bill Brody’s impending (well, Dec. 31) retirement from Johns Hopkins University.

Watch below as Brody talks about his experiences with the JHU faculty, student body and connecting with the community during his twelve years as president.

Video shot by Daily Record photographer Max Franz.

Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Flash video.

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In its ongoing effort to rank just about everything, U.S. News & World Report has released its list of America’s Best Children’s Hospitals. Hold your breath (but not for too long), folks.

Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins placed third, just behind Children’s Hospital Boston. D.C.’s Children’s National Medical Center was a lowly 11th place.

The top 15 appear below.

1. Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia
2. Children’s Hospital Boston
3. Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore
4. Children’s Hospital, Denver
5. Rainbow Babies and Children’s Hospital, Cleveland
6. Texas Children’s Hospital, Houston
7. Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center
8. New York-Presbyterian University Hospital of Columbia and Cornell
9. Children’s Hospital and Regional Medical Center, Seattle
10. Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital, Palo Alto, Calif.
11. Children’s National Medical Center, Washington, D.C.
12. Columbus Children’s Hospital
13. Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC
14. Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta
15. St. Louis Children’s Hospital

Thanks to our sister blog in Long Island for pointing us to this story.

-JACKIE SAUTER, Daily Record Multimedia Editor

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