Baltimore’s 5th district has zero rec centers. The city just gave their money to three new desk jobs.
By Michael Phillips | MDBayNews
Councilman Isaac “Yitzy” Schleifer grew up in Baltimore’s 5th District, a block off Park Heights Avenue. His recreation as a kid was playing ball in alleys. No rec centers. No city pools. He didn’t know what he was missing.
He found out when he got elected to City Council.
Baltimore operates more than 45 recreation centers — roughly three per council district. The 5th District has zero. Not one. Not a single publicly funded facility where a child from Cross Country, Fallstaff, Glen, or Cheswolde can take a free class, shoot hoops in a supervised gym, or swim a lap in a city pool.
This didn’t happen by accident. It happened by choice. And this year’s budget makes that choice again.
A Community Stripped, Then Forgotten
Baltimore once had roughly 130 recreation centers in the 1980s. In 2012, under Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, the city closed or handed to private control 20 of them in a single budget move. Park Heights was hit hard. The Towanda Recreation Center — which served the Park Heights community for decades — was among the casualties, eventually shuttered after an arson and left dark for years.
The closures weren’t random. Between 2000 and 2009, the city’s recreation spending crept from $26 million to $30 million while public safety spending ballooned from $364 million to $460 million. Baltimore chose police over playgrounds and paid for it in blood. The Freddie Gray uprising in 2015 forced a national conversation. Outgoing Councilman Bill Henry said the city had “purposely disinvested” in youth and instead invested “in catching and caging them.”
The Towanda center was eventually renovated and reopened in 2021. Mayor Brandon Scott, who grew up nearby and used Towanda as a kid, called it “my outlet — the place where I came to be safe.” But there’s a catch: Towanda is assigned to the 6th District, not the 5th. So is C.C. Jackson. So is James D. Gross. Geographically, they serve Park Heights. Jurisdictionally, they belong to someone else’s district — which means they don’t count toward the 5th’s allocation, and the 5th’s kids don’t have a seat at the resource table.
The community that was stripped has not been made whole. It has watched adjacent districts get rebuilt while its children still play in alleys.
The Budget Insult
This year, Baltimore’s Fiscal Year 2027 Preliminary Budget offered the 5th District not a rec center, but a bureaucratic expansion.
Service 644 — the administration line for Recreation and Parks — is increasing by roughly $952,000, from $10.95 million to $11.9 million. The budget documents explain why: the agency is reallocating $422,000 from park maintenance, horticulture, and community recreation center funds to create three new administrative positions — an IT Manager, an Administrative Analyst, and an HR Business Partner.
The leadership team gets bigger. The 5th District gets nothing.
“Why is the leadership team getting bigger while an entire district’s children are being ignored?” Schleifer asked on social media this week. His proposed remedy — cutting the admin budget by 1/14th for an agency that can’t serve all 14 districts — is blunt, but the math is hard to argue with.
Service 648 — the construction line for Recreation and Parks — is another story. It proves the city knows how to invest when it wants to. Two districts get brand new renovated centers in FY2027. The 5th District gets nothing.
A city audit previously found that Recreation and Parks lacked the processes to ensure resources were being targeted toward marginalized communities, and had fallen short of full compliance with a 2018 city equity law requiring agencies to factor racial and income equity into budgeting decisions. The agency has an equity coordinator on staff. It apparently just doesn’t have a formal, written benchmark for what equity actually looks like — or a system for knowing when it’s failed to achieve it.
What a Rec Center Actually Does
This isn’t a soft argument about feelings. The data is unambiguous.
In 2025, Baltimore saw youth homicides fall from 12 to just two, while aggravated assaults dropped 20% and robberies fell nearly 31% — correlated directly with expanded summer rec programming that drew more than 3,200 youth into camps and kept nine rec centers open until 11 p.m. on weekends.
A Park Heights resident named Tre Henriques, who took his three daughters to the newly renovated Towanda pool every day, put it plainly: “If there’s nothing in the area, the first thing you’re gonna do is go hang on the block.”
That’s not a liberal talking point. That’s a public safety argument. Recreation is cheaper than incarceration. Safe spaces for kids are less expensive than trauma centers, courts, and corrections systems. The conservative case for investing in rec centers isn’t charity — it’s fiscal efficiency and basic civic accountability.
The Question That Demands an Answer
Baltimore’s 5th District is home to tens of thousands of residents in one of the most historically underinvested corridors in the city. Park Heights is more than 96% African American, largely poor, and has watched its commercial strips hollow out over decades while entire blocks of abandoned housing accumulated around it. Schools in the area average an F grade. A crime occurs, on average, every six and a half hours.
These are the conditions that make a rec center not a luxury but a lifeline.
The city had rec centers here. It took them away. It rebuilt some of them in neighboring districts. And now, with the chance to address a gap that its own equity audit called out years ago, Baltimore’s Recreation and Parks administration is instead hiring three desk workers.
Mayor Brandon Scott — a son of Park Heights who credits a rec center with keeping him safe as a child — has championed recreation investment as a public safety strategy. His administration broke ground on a new library in Park Heights last August. The equity language is right. The investment narrative is right.
But the 5th District still has zero rec centers. And the FY2027 budget doesn’t change that.
That’s not oversight. At this point, it’s a policy.
Sources: Reporting draws on the Baltimore City FY2027 Preliminary Budget (Recreation and Parks, Services 644–653); Baltimore City Council District 5 and District 6 resource pages (baltimorecitycouncil.com); Baltimore City Recreation and Parks center listings (bcrp.baltimorecity.gov); Baltimore Fishbowl reporting on the Harlem Park Recreation Center reopening (August 2022); The Baltimore Sun archives on the city’s recreation center closures and catch-up investments (July 2023); The Baltimore Sun reporting on the Towanda Recreation Center reopening (October 2021); The Baltimore Banner audit coverage on Recreation and Parks’ equity law compliance (December 2022); WBAL/CBS Baltimore reporting on Baltimore’s 2025 youth crime decline and summer engagement strategy; CrimeGrade.org data on Park Heights crime frequency; Park Heights, Baltimore Wikipedia entry on neighborhood demographics and history; The Real News Network on Baltimore’s recreation vs. policing spending trends (2020); and social media posts from Councilman Isaac Schleifer (@CouncilmanYitzy) published in advance of FY2027 budget deliberations.
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