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i had to laugh a little when the murder rates are mentioned: Baltimore has "improved" to the point where now its murder rate is only 3 times as bad as minneapolis, and only twice as bad as milwaukee. Talk about damning with faint praise. If wealth indicators and good eyesight aren't enough to sway you, then murder rates should certainly work. There were reasons why baltimore was chosen as the backdrop for not one, but two tv crime/murder shows ( homicide in the 1990s, the wire in 2000s). I'm quite sure that the city wasn't chosen out of thin air..
i never said baltimore improved i said that its still a high murder rate but is decreasing so yet to have my question answered is it thriving i don't think in that manner it is.
funny now i'm laughing it was only a matter of time before someone brought it up and i knew it would be you. Last i checked homicide and the wire were local productions from producers, writers and directors with even actors who were either from or have roots to the baltimore area so yeah baltimore was kind of the logical choice here. You would have a point if a random producer from hollywood made the series but they didn't.(Barry Levinson director born in Baltimore, Ed Burns writer producer ex homicide detective born in Baltimore, david simon producer writer married to a baltimore novelist and sun reporter). So what do you think three men with ties to Baltimore are going to talk about? Pink Flamingos, and butterflies? No its most likely they were eating MD crabs with a Natty Boh talking about Baltimore. Yeah there's a reason alright lol
those same rowhouses that were temporally sold in the 70s-80s under urban homesteader agreements are now being "sold" for less than $10,000 on craigslist and other real estate sites, which should give you an idea of their "desirability". You too, can own a dump in a shooting gallery..
what get your facts right for one??? Those same homes (older than Milwaukee itself) that sold for a dollar in the present day neighborhoods of otterbein, federal hill can go anywhere from 180k to 500k but for $10,000 a month that's a good amount for rent a group of college students would pay to live in this area. Homes in Federal Hill on the market now. The highest I see in the area are condos on the water selling at 8.5M http://www.zillow.com/federal-hill-baltimore-md/
minneapolis is now loaded with fortune headquarters and home offices for many major companies, and the economy has historically been quite strong in the twin cities,, and is only getting better. I hope that wisconsin follows suit soon, but with scott walker in charge, that's pretty doubtful. Wisconsin's shining star is really madison, which has always been near the top of the nation's desirable cities, but milwaukee certainly has that potential.its neighborhoods are in good shape, it has lake michigan and marquette university as its neighbors, great ethnic restaurants *( especially german and polish/serbian), and chicago just down the road..
ok for all that we have urbanity, history, character, under armour, legg mason, port of baltimore, sports pimilco, ravens, camden yards orioles body of water chesapeake bay, schools johns hopkins, morgan state university, johns hopkins medical center, and over 250 neighborhoods that are all slums according to some. Don't forget our state capital Annapolis home of the US Naval Academy, our local oldbay seafood culture, ethnic restaurants and ethnic people, dc literally down the road, Richmond down the street, philadelphia up the street, pittsburg to the west, and new york.
i hope that baltimore improves, it already started lots of development under construction as we speak.
Last edited by Northernest Southernest C; 02-24-2015 at 09:09 PM..
Talk about damning with faint praise. If wealth indicators and good eyesight aren't enough to sway you, then murder rates should certainly work. There were reasons why Baltimore was chosen as the backdrop for not one, but two TV crime/murder shows ( Homicide in the 1990s, The Wire in 2000s). I'm quite sure that the city wasn't chosen out of thin air.
Talk about being underrated. Step Up, the sum of all fears, hairspray were filmed and set in Baltimore and was not defined by crime. Baltimore is the backdrop for many shows that are filmed here but are set somewhere else in the movie or television show. Head of State/House of Cards filmed in Baltimore set in DC, The Invasion, and in The Social Network Johns Hopkins University was a double for Harvard due to its similar architecture. In Veep Baltimore's Engineers Club and Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport were made to stand in for Helsinki, Finland. In the Wire the rough spots of Baltimore I think in terms of the narrative landscape, really having place be distinct helps define shows. So if your making a show based on crime your not going to focus the show around the inner harbor. Although, its good at grabbing an audience its also manipulative because now your only reality of Baltimore becomes the wire and that's why so many outsiders bring it up but its really getting old now.
You have proved what others in the Baltimore Forum already know, that Baltimore has a number of dedicated and hardworking trolls. I think it would be unseemly for any Midwestern city to receive that kind of criticism. Midwesterners are simply a lot nicer that that. Anyway, one of the posters in this thread asked how Baltimore got to be in such bad shape. I didn't arrive until the 80s, but by then the place was already in pretty desperate condition. In other words, Baltimore has been in bad shape for a long long time. In my opinion it isn't very productive to blame residents that have arrived in the past generation for what have been ongoing problems.
As for Milwaukee vs. Baltimore, it is interesting to look at a study of gentrification in the 90s and 2000's: Gentrification in America Report
In the 2000's 23.2% of Baltimore's census tracts improved compared to 12.% in Milwaukee. The number that did not improve was relatively similar: 129 in Baltimore and 116 in Milwaukee. The number in good condition (and therefore not eligible for "gentrification") was much higher in Milwaukee; 77 in Milwaukee vs. 32 in Baltimore. My conclusion: Milwaukee was in far better shape in 1999 than Baltimore but hasn't done particularly well over the past decade.
As for how the cities look, I have never been to Milwaukee but I did notice something when I took tour of some of the more troubled neighborhoods in Cleveland. In Baltimore a huge portion of the city's abandoned homes are still standing and may continue to stand for another 20 years or more. This contrasts with troubled neighborhoods in Cleveland that are full of empty lots. It is simply too expensive to demolish rowhouses before everyone in the row leaves. That means there are tons of mostly empty blocks in Baltimore with just a few residents. To outsiders that have never seen this kind of thing, it looks pretty disconcerting but it is really a problem inherent to rowhouse construction. By the way, paying to relocate a homeowner on one of the mostly abandoned blocks costs at least $150,000 - a cost that the city clearly can not afford. So the abandoned houses just sit. Unfortunately, at a certain point they become unrehabable. But this can take a while. I am presently rehabbing a rowhouse that has been abandoned for 25 years.
I have to admit that highly distressed neighborhoods in Cleveland look a lot better than highly distressed neighborhoods in Baltimore - but the level of abandonment is often about the same. Would I be correct if I guessed that some of Milwaukee's most troubled neighborhoods also have lots of vacant lots?
A better definition would involve using the MSA as a standard of reference, for almost any city. Lots os wealth to the west and north of Milwaukee..
A city like Baltimore is quite poor ( all you need to do is look at it), but the suburbs are very wealthy..
There is more to being poor than just the poverty rate. I looked up some 2012 figures for income and poverty in Policy Map and here are the results: Poverty rate - Milwaukee 28.3 % vs. 23.4 % in Baltimore; Per capita income - Milwaukee $19,199 vs. $24,155 in Baltimore. I don't deny that MassVt has the right to feel any way he wants about poverty in Baltimore, but I think the demographics should also be considered by the broader audience.
There's not a lot of credibility in those Baltimore threads IH77 and Stepintrax are infamous for having something racial and negative to say on anything. They even made one racist thread that said what's going Black history month and they replied crime, thieving, the usual. Here's the kind of posts these guys make and we really don't take them to seriously its a wonder they were not banned. //www.city-data.com/forum/balti...ight=Baltimore
Last edited by Northernest Southernest C; 02-25-2015 at 09:29 PM..
You have proved what others in the Baltimore Forum already know, that Baltimore has a number of dedicated and hardworking trolls. I think it would be unseemly for any Midwestern city to receive that kind of criticism. Midwesterners are simply a lot nicer that that. Anyway, one of the posters in this thread asked how Baltimore got to be in such bad shape. I didn't arrive until the 80s, but by then the place was already in pretty desperate condition. In other words, Baltimore has been in bad shape for a long long time. In my opinion it isn't very productive to blame residents that have arrived in the past generation for what have been ongoing problems.
As for Milwaukee vs. Baltimore, it is interesting to look at a study of gentrification in the 90s and 2000's: Gentrification in America Report
In the 2000's 23.2% of Baltimore's census tracts improved compared to 12.% in Milwaukee. The number that did not improve was relatively similar: 129 in Baltimore and 116 in Milwaukee. The number in good condition (and therefore not eligible for "gentrification") was much higher in Milwaukee; 77 in Milwaukee vs. 32 in Baltimore. My conclusion: Milwaukee was in far better shape in 1999 than Baltimore but hasn't done particularly well over the past decade.
As for how the cities look, I have never been to Milwaukee but I did notice something when I took tour of some of the more troubled neighborhoods in Cleveland. In Baltimore a huge portion of the city's abandoned homes are still standing and may continue to stand for another 20 years or more. This contrasts with troubled neighborhoods in Cleveland that are full of empty lots. It is simply too expensive to demolish rowhouses before everyone in the row leaves. That means there are tons of mostly empty blocks in Baltimore with just a few residents. To outsiders that have never seen this kind of thing, it looks pretty disconcerting but it is really a problem inherent to rowhouse construction. By the way, paying to relocate a homeowner on one of the mostly abandoned blocks costs at least $150,000 - a cost that the city clearly can not afford. So the abandoned houses just sit. Unfortunately, at a certain point they become unrehabable. But this can take a while. I am presently rehabbing a rowhouse that has been abandoned for 25 years.
I have to admit that highly distressed neighborhoods in Cleveland look a lot better than highly distressed neighborhoods in Baltimore - but the level of abandonment is often about the same. Would I be correct if I guessed that some of Milwaukee's most troubled neighborhoods also have lots of vacant lots?
I would honestly say that because Baltimore is a row house city, its poverty is magnified several times that of a city with other housing types. Milwaukee's neighborhoods ( from my time living in WI) do not look desperately poor--many have fairly decent single-family houses, with lawns, with decent spacing between homes. Abandoned row house cities just have an look of abject poverty about them that is nearly impossible to shake. Consider the general sentiment about Camden, NJ, a small row house city just across the Delaware River from Philadelphia. It's considered to be one of the worst dumps in America, and it looks just like Philly, or Baltimore.
Milwaukee's ( and Chicago's) bungalow neighborhoods are actually very pleasant, especially those with craftsman-style bungalows. The lawns are nicely manicured, and gently slope alongside a walkway to wide streets. The home themselves are not huge, but they are pretty-well kept, and there's plenty of room for everyone, inside and out. Baltimore simply isn't like this, especially in its inner city.
There was a great CD thread a couple of years ago about "which cities were the worst, visually-speaking", or words to that effect.It was pretty informative, and also pretty funny. It compared cities like Philly and Baltimore to cities like LA and other West Coats cities. There were quite a few jokes about how palm trees made a neighborhood more appealing, and a more than a few remarks about how the income levels weren't any different, but the PERCEPTIONS of such neighborhoods were much different. Inglewood in LA actually looks halfway decent, in appearance, but economically is not different from Baltimore--but Balto suffers by comparison, because parts of it LOOK hopeless, and undesirable.
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