ABSTRACT
The big project approach to fixing the city by drawing visitors and tourists continued with the construction of a new football stadium and two City-subsidized Convention Center hotel projects, even though fiscal benefits of those types of projects are often questioned. At the height of Baltimore's population decline, in 1995, renowned urban scholar and expert David Rusk wrote Baltimore Unbound, a booklet in which he declared Baltimore, along with 33 other American cities, to be "beyond a point of no return". Baltimore's assessment was based on his theory of inelastic cities first developed in his book Cities without Suburbs. Ever since, Baltimore was an inelastic city; surrounded by affluent and growing suburbs, the city in the center was bound to suffocate, according to Rusk, and become the "region's public housing project". The academic institutions were often slow in recognizing that their own fate was tied to that of their host cities.
