Quote:
Originally Posted by Crawford
Baltimore's traditional core is pretty terrible. Great bones, but terminally ill. The old shopping district and the urban renewal Charles Center area are all a mess. The areas surrounding the core are all doing well tho.
Baltimore had core issues pre-Covid, but it now isn't alone. There are lots of cities with really strong gentrification where the traditional downtown seems in bad shape, esp. post-Covid. St. Louis, Oakland, maybe Pittsburgh, maybe Portland. Even arguably SF (bad shape for SF standards).
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I have a few knocks against Baltimore.
1. As an outsider, Hopkins seems to be a very passive civic institution. I'm sure it has billions in its endowment...you would think it would do more to stabalize larger parts of the city. In Philly, Penn has been VERY involved in the neighborhoods in West Philadelphia. It views its own success as being intertwined with that of the surrounding community.
Penn provides a number of benefits to Penn employees like mortgage assistance, downpayment assistance, and forgiveness for employees that buy in certain zones of West Philadelphia. Further, as prices increase, it tweaks the amounts and areas that are eligible. It's not an insignificant beneft has Penn has about 40K employees across the university and it's miscellaneous hospitals. It also provides tiered support to local elementary schools, both monetarily and in terms of teacher training and assistance, explicitly. At its most generous, Penn actually built the physical plant of a new neighborhood elementary school (about two decades ago) which is now one of the highest rated elementary schools not just in Philadelphia, but in the state. Even there, it provides monetary support to an additional 5 or 6 elementary schools beyond the catchment of this one school.
My assumption is that Hopkins has the ability to do all of this and not sure if it does or not.
2. People in Baltimore don't seem to go out, even in safe neighborhoods. The last time I was in Baltimore, myself and a group of friends spent a night walking around a few of the nicer close in neighborhoods (Fells Point, Federal Hill) and literally nobody was outside. Even in walkable areas, there doesn't seem to be a culture of going outside and or patronizing local establishments. The atmosphere was very striking to me...bordering on making it feel unsafe. We walked up and down block after block of super tidy well tended row house neighborhoods and it seems as though every door was closed and people were inside. Sure, going about their lives, but the restaurants and bars literally a few blocks away were empty. It struck me as notable...in Philly and NYC there's much more bustling activity in stable higher income residential areas which feels completely lacking in Baltimore.
That's it. On the plus side, from an institutional standpoint, everyone nods to Hopkins, but it should be noted that over the years, UMBC has turned itself into something of a STEM powerhouse, particulary for graduate programs. There is probably something the city can do to leverage UMBC's new found relevance but I'm not close enough to the city or school to understand the nuance.