Quote:
Originally Posted by Crawford
Also, Baltimore does have an in-town favored quarter corridor of (mostly white) wealth. It's small but it's there. It's kind of an eastern St. Louis. Similar size, modest skyline, city-county arrangement, % black, hint of South and with white wedge of wealth.
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I find it interesting that the in-town favored quarter of Baltimore (basically the "white L") has basically the same population as the favored quarter of Pittsburgh (150,000). The difference being the balance of the city in the case of Pittsburgh is still mostly a collection of intact, if unfashionable neighborhoods, where the balance of Baltimore (some 430,000) is mainly 80%-90% black neighborhoods, often considerably troubled.
This is the single biggest reason, TBH, that Baltimore lags the rest of the Northeast corridor. For all that gentrification is presented as being a process where wealthy white people displace poor black and brown people, gentrifiers preferentially pick working-class white neighborhoods. When those aren't available, they move into Latino areas, which Baltimore has a distinct lack of (though areas of East Baltimore around Baltimore Highlands/Armstead Gardens/Bayview have flipped Latino over the last 20 years). Black neighborhoods when they do gentrify, tend to do so quite slowly, over generations. And let's also be clear that according to polling, even most black people don't prefer to live in hyperblack communities, which is why black flight occurs across the country both in gentrifying and declining black urban neighborhoods. That means that the future of most such areas is often bleak, short of managed reconstruction heavily subsidized by federal HUD money.
While this problem is largely intractable on the local level, a more solvable one for Baltimore is fixing downtown. Baltimore has a lot of cute, walkable urban areas on the downtown fringe, like Federal Hill, Mt. Vernon, Ridgeley's Delight, and Little Italy. However, downtown has many flaws. It's quite large - past the point of easy walkability. The conversion of most roads into multi-lane one-way streets means cars zip through at unsafe speeds. Highways and large multi-lane boulevards stop easy pedestrian connectivity with most of the nearby neighborhoods. Even pre-COVID, it wasn't a particularly robust downtown for office work, though outside of a few nodes, the residential component also feels a bit lackluster. Most of the efforts to revitalize downtown have focused on the Inner Harbor, and the large-scale developments there are very inward-focused (like in a sunbelt city) and don't have much to draw someone to explore the wider area on foot.
As someone who lives in Pittsburgh, I'm well aware of the process where in-town neighborhoods steal the luster of Downtown proper, weakening efforts to revitalize the core. That said, it's missing something akin to Pittsburgh's Cultural District, or Market Square. There's plenty of interesting things, but they're often blocks apart, without a decent high street packed with commercial draws.
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