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In Which I Complain About This City
Or: An Urbanite's Lament
So a few days ago I mentioned that I was going to get around to typing up some stories about my time living, studying, and working in an urban area you have heard of because of its crime rate. This was reasonably well received, and clearly there is an appetite for this sort of post here. So, here we go. I have spent the last several years of my life living and working in an American city with a very high rate of both property and violent crime. Our police force is largely useless, and spends no time enforcing laws against "quality of life" crimes. Litter is everywhere, and red lights are regarded by many of our drivers as suggestions. Urban blight is everywhere. I spent about a year working part-time at a local courthouse, across the street from which was a block of rowhouses which had clearly suffered more than one fire in the past several years, and through every single one's top floor windows you could clearly see the sky. Until this year our murder clearance rate hovered around 45%, and I'm sure that the recent boost is the result of some creative accounting with regards to cold cases. The police operate under a federal consent decree, imposed in 2017, which they are pleased to inform everyone they achieved 25% compliance with just this year!
Yes my friends, I lived and worked in Charm City. You know it from The Wire, and from the 7-o'clock news.
Baltimore.
Baltimore is a shithole. There's no two ways about it. The subreddit is full of yuppies who live in Mount Vernon or Fed Hill or one of the 5 other safe clean neighborhoods in the city, who will insist up down and sideways that they actually like the city. The food is great! There's so much to do! It's vibrant! There's an art scene! Bullshit. All of it. Utter crap. This city is a shithole. Not a diamond in the rough, not an up-and-comer, not a "if you just tried it" grungy but fun place to live. It's not New York in the 90s, where it's a little rough but if you just give it a chance you'll fall in love. It's a hive of scum and villainy.
I won't bore you with reciting those facts you can find out from a simple google search. How the Gun Trace Task Force was a case study in corruption. How a mayor was arrested and sentenced for various corruption charges. How in the last week alone there have been 84 aggravated assaults, 62 robberies, 17 carjackings, 6 shootings, and 3 homicides. Instead I'll just tell you some of my personal experiences. Things I have seen, or heard, or which were related to me by a friend or coworker.
It is my first week of living in Baltimore. I am tentatively optimistic about this city. After all, if it bleeds it leads. Things can't possibly be as bad as it's portrayed on the news. There's no reason to judge the city before I've had a chance to really experience it. I am talking about this with some of my fellow students. Most of us agree that things are probably exaggerated, and we should form our own opinions. One of my classmates pipes up. She heard gunfire outside her apartment last night. When she got up this morning to come to classes, she found a bullet hole in her car.
It is my first month of living in Baltimore. I am beginning to think that perhaps things are not being exaggerated. One of my friends is having a party. "Just don't use the main entrance to the building" he says in his invitation. "Junkies like to hang out around there. Use the garage." I go to the party. A fellow partygoer mentions he didn't like that the host used the word "junkies" because he feels it is dismissive of people who just need help. A few hours later the group-chat gets a text. Then another. Then another. Then another. Five in all, each more frantic than the last. One of the girls stepped out for a smoke and can't get back in. Some of the aforementioned junkies are harassing her. Three of us leave to get her. One stays by the door, two more go to where she is, and escort her back inside the building. She is crying. The party ends shortly after.
It is my second month of living in Baltimore. I am awoken at midnight by the sound of revving engines. I peek through the blinds. There is a horde of young men riding dirt bikes driving down the street. At least thirty of them, possibly as many as fifty. I do not know at this time that this is a regular occurrence, so I shrug it off and go back to sleep. This will continue to happen sporadically throughout the rest of my time in the city.
It is my third month of living in Baltimore. I am awoken at 2am by the sound of gunfire. I am nervous. I've never heard gunfire outside of a range before. Eventually I go back to sleep. It is not the last time this will happen.
It is my fourth month of living in Baltimore. I have walked to a nearby McDonalds because I'm tired and don't feel like cooking. Before heading in I smoke a cigarette. A local junkie asks for one. I hand him one, and the lighter. He lights the cigarette and begins to walk off. I ask for my lighter back. He begins screaming, pleading, begging me to keep the lighter. He is wailing like a child. Sickened, I wave him off and tell him to keep the damn thing. Like a switch was flipped he immediately stops, and walks away. I know I've been hustled, but for the life of me I can't bring myself to give a shit. I take my burger and fries to go.
It is my sixth month of living in Baltimore. I have yet to find a decent pizza place. This irritates me more than it should. My phone buzzes. I scan the email briefly. It's from the campus police. There was a shooting on school property. No students were involved, so I don't bother reading the whole email. I've gotten a similar email before. I will receive two more before my first year in this city is over.
It is my eighth month of living in Baltimore. One of my professors kindly informs us that it is a matter of when, not if, we are mugged. He suggests all the things he is allowed to suggest. Keep your head on a swivel. Don't wear earbuds in both ears. Don't walk alone at night. Don't go out at all after midnight. Comforted by the knowledge that the only place in the city I go without a gun is the school, I mostly tune this litany of advice out. I've heard it all before, from more than one source.
It is my twelfth month of living in Baltimore. I have accepted a part time position. Every Monday, I go down to the courthouse, arriving before 8:30am. I begin to recognize some of the
junkies and crackheadsindigent citizens along my morning commute. One of them regularly masturbates himself in full view of traffic. I have rather unimaginatively nicknamed him "jack-off" in my head.It is my thirteenth month of living in Baltimore. Every day on my drive home I pass a large banner advertising temp tags from Virginia. This is an illegal service, intended to circumvent the costs of registering a car and getting insurance in Maryland, or at least getting around having a suspended license, or no license. The banner is at least four feet high, and ten feet across.
It is my fifteenth month of living in Baltimore. I am cut off on the freeway coming back from grocery shopping, and honk my horn. The driver swerves out of traffic, and begins driving along next to me, matching my speed. I slow down, he slows down. I speed up, he speeds up. I look over, and he is screaming at me from the driver's seat of his car. I unholster my gun and hold it in my lap. He gets off at my exit, I don't. As he takes the exit, he forms a finger gun and points it at me. I file a police report. I am told to avoid that stretch of highway if possible. I do my grocery shopping at different stores for the next few months.
It is my eighteenth month of living in Baltimore. I still have not found a good pizza place. This has gone from annoying, to infuriating, to depressing. I have tried every recommendation on the subreddit, and half a dozen others besides. This city seems to thrive on pizzas that consist of doughy crust, no sauce, and plastic-y cheese. The best slice I have had in this city so far came from Costco. I joke about this with my friends.
It is my twentieth month of living in Baltimore. I have started working at a different courthouse. This one seems like it's in a slightly better neighborhood. At the very least, there are no obviously deserted and collapsing houses near it. When I tell my supervisor this he laughs, and tells me to make sure I leave before dark.
It is still my twentieth month of living in Baltimore. There has been a shooting near my workplace. I am unaware of this until I try to drive home, and have to detour around police tape cordoning off an intersection. I check the news when I get home. A one paragraph blurb informs me that one man was killed, and another wounded. The dead man appears to have been an innocent bystander. I realize I am more annoyed by the detour than the loss of life, and I am revolted by my own callousness.
It is my twenty-first month of living in Baltimore. It has rained all day, and when it's time for me to leave from work, the road home is flooded out. This road has flooded every time it rains heavily for at least the last ten years, according to my coworkers. No effort has been made to solve the issue. I detour to the next road. This detour takes half an hour. It too is flooded out. My twenty minute drive home takes two hours.
It is my twenty-second month of living in Baltimore. There has been an accident blocking the road on my drive home from work. A driver in a sedan ran a red light, and slammed into an SUV. The SUV has flipped onto its roof. The rear doors are open, and I can see an infant's car seat in the back. The intersection is clear enough for me to drive past. I take a look at the tags on the sedan, already knowing what I'm going to see. Sure enough, temp tags. I'm sure they're fake. For a moment I wonder about the fate of the SUV's occupants. I don't look it up when I get home. I don't want to know.
It is my twenty-fourth month of living in Baltimore. It is my last day working at the courthouse before classes begin again. There was a shooting at the same intersection as before. This time it took place early enough in the day that the police tape is down by the time I drive home, and I am grateful for the fact I won't have to take a detour getting home.
It is my twenty-fifth month of living in Baltimore. Disgusted with this city, the banality of its corruption, the constant grind of low-level crimes that the police just don't seem to give a fuck about, the seemingly monthly shooting close enough for me to hear it, the roving gangs of dirt bike youths who will occasionally smash the mirrors of cars they pass, the need to constantly wave off "squeegee kids" (ten to eighteen year olds who skip school to make a buck washing windshields at intersections throughout the city), the constant pervasive odor of weed, the open air drug deals I see every day, the crackheads and junkies I see every time I step outside my building asking for a dollar or a cigarette, the chicken bones that litter every sidewalk, I begin to write up this post.
When I first began to write I thought I would include anecdotes from other people I knew, if I felt myself running low on stories. I did not. Everything I wrote about in this thread, is something I experienced personally.
There's nothing new about what I've written here. Nothing you haven't heard of before. I'm not even completely sure this belongs in the culture war thread. I just hate this city. I hate what it does to people. I hate the callousness it has successfully infected me with. I hate the fact that I still have not found a decent fucking pizza place. I have received a job offer in a republican-run city in a blood-red state, and while I don't know if I'll be moving there, I will certainly be moving away from here.
Marylanders for some reason think Ledos pizza is good. They're weird.
We like Scittinos in Catonsville. Even better is Antica Napoli Pizza in Gettysburg. Hit some orchards on your way there, make it a trip.
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I've had some exposure to Baltimore but haven't lived there. Everything in your post tracks.
I know it depends on how you measure it, but I think that it's either Baltimore or Detroit that has the "record" for Major American City with the greatest decline from its peak. I think the edge may be with Detroit. I vaguely remember reading somewhere that, at one point, it was in the Top-5 for per capita GDP in the country.
What's been interesting to see since 2008 (with some epilogue before) is the amount of hagiography developed around these cities.
Bruce Springsteen like valorization of Blue Collar "vibes".
The idea that there used to be these amazing, thriving communities - which is true enough until you zoom out and realize that those communities existed because of gross ethnic segregation that was largely enforced by vigilante violence between and among the young males in those neighborhoods.
A generic "tough guy" image paired with a "we raised our families!" aesthetic. Maybe I'll cede the point on tough guys (factory labor work was hard) but on the latter ... any "tough guy" in a Rust Belt bar will probably easily play a game of one upping you on "my dad beat me worse than your dad beat you." Having spent a fair amount of time in Milwaukee (which is definitely the most Midwestern of all the Midwestern cities) it really is shocking how much crippling alcoholism is simple assumed as normal for about 1/3rd of the population.
And all of this is besides the rough socio-economic truth that factory labor jobs largely suck. They don't "make you feel good at the end of the day." They cause repetitive use injuries or, for a shorter career, paralysis because of a freak accidents. Most of the over-regulation of business today can be traced straight back to old industrial work (OSHA, EPA, etc.).
And yet there are still pockets of American culture - low, middle, and highbrow - that love to whimsically discuss the glory of the Baltimore Docs in 1955. Strange.
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I have never lived in Baltimore, but I've lived pretty close. Yeah, Baltimore has "nice neighborhoods" but even those neighborhoods are really not that nice, and you have to be really well off to live there.
That said, while DC obviously has more money and more "nice areas," it's also kind of a shithole city, IMO. When you drive from Maryland into DC, you can tell the exact block you cross over because the streets instantly become more riddled with potholes.
It is easier to find good pizza in DC, though.
DC has the assistance of endless Federal programs pumping the city because congresspeople don't want to live in a dump. I haven't been to DC in years, but as a child I loved visiting there. At some point in adulthood I want to do a big museum tour, but I don't know when that will happen.
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Demographics alone are insufficient to explain the status of Baltimore and St Louis. The black populations of these inner cities have by far the highest violent crime rates (outside of actual war zones) of any black population on earth (Cape Town is still lower when controlled for demographics). Higher than any major African city (and yes, there are plenty of Bantu-majority African cities where it’s likely that the majority of violent homicides are captured by publicly recorded data). Higher even than Haiti, which is in many ways literally lawless.
The complete explanation for Baltimore’s poor status includes inertia and options. The US is the wealthiest major country on earth. Anyone in Baltimore who is unhappy with the state of affairs can leave without expending any great effort. There are plentiful jobs almost everywhere else. The city is entirely selected for people who are satisfied with the state of affairs and do not care to change it. There are a lot of people (including rich and powerful people) who have to live in New York. Nobody has to live in Baltimore.
I think there are other thing unique to American inner cities that might account for the difference. For one thing, there’s actually a very strong selection bias still at work. Anyone with any sort of talent, ambition, and work ethic tends to flee the ghetto areas for better areas. The ones that remain are the ones who have few prospects and aren’t ambitious enough or smart enough to make a better life. Add in that the younger generations living in that area are decades removed from positive role models of the sort that happen in better areas — a man working hard to get a good job, hell a man sticking around to raise his kids, parents who care about what their kids are doing with whom at what hour, kids expected to learn in school. Basically the kids are raised feral by adults raised feral and don’t know of anyone in their peer group who are civilized in the conventional sense. All of that mitigates against any sort of Law, Order, or Respect.
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I often wonder if we're seeing some sort of terrible example the Founder Effect. Because African American slave descendants aren't just a random sampling of Africans that got plucked up by UFOs and dropped here. They were the losers of inter tribal civilizational fitness tests, captured and sold off. That has to have some sort of selection bias on what subset of Africans ended up in the slave trade in the first place.
Through generations of sexual assault and limited-opportunity marriage, that sub-population was also forced to incorporate substantial genetic contributions from the most brutal and impulse-driven individuals among the white Borderers in their vicinity, a group that had overall been actively pre-selected for violence and low conscientiousness. Given the way white Appalachia mirrors Baltimore, I haven't heard anyone rule out the possibility that the whole thing is just those Borderer genes, full stop.
Most white genetics in the African American community come from slave owners and their sons- upper class- and not from borderers(who tended to live far away from the main slave holding areas).
I think it's more complicated than that. A lot of ex-indentured servants mingled with black servants and slaves in the early colonial period, and a supermajority of slave owners (~70%) owned less than 40 slaves, most significantly less than that. Plus, slaves near urban areas or major transportation routes were frequently rented out as industrial (for men) or domestic (for women) labor, remitting most of their wages to their owner. Those slaves obviously were much freer to develop relationships in the general population than agricultural workers bound to a single plantation or homestead.
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I thought at least some of the minor Southern aristocracy was descended from transported and otherwise indigent emigres, and that there were overall more situations of modest households owning 1-2 slaves than of big aristocratic plantations? In any case, whatever their strengths in bravado or disease resistance or whatever it took to succeed economically in the Old South, by definition the failsons who will rape the most servant girls are not the ones carrying the best genes for impulse control and orderly prosociality.
It also seems plausible that even the enslaved women on big estates would be highly vulnerable to opportunistic sexual assault from random employees and other poor whites in the vicinity.
The way it worked was geographical: in the lowland Tidewater and Piedmont of the Eastern Seaboard, large scale plantation owners were the descendents of early settlers groups -- Barbadians in South Carolina, the famous Second Sons Cavaliers in Virginia --, while the large scale plantation owners in the more recently settled Trans Appalachian West was a mix. There were a lot of people who were descendents of settlers from the old frontier in the uplands of the Appalachians, which would include the Scotch-Irish and Scots Borderers everyone is talking about, but also just a mixture of the lower classes from up and down the coast who left the old, more settled areas to seek their fortune out West.
This group is where the planters in Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi come from. While Tidewater/Piedmont planters did up sticks and move West, they had to deal with a lot of cracker neighbors who would be beneath their notice back East.
They also were the group that pushed into the Trans-Mississippi West below the Mason Dixon line (and Missouri), including Louisiana and Texas. Sam Houston's family originated from the Shenandoah valley, for example. The exceptions there are the old French planters of Louisiana and the Spanish Royal land grantees in Texas.
So, the answer is 'Old Wealth on the coast, New Money everywhere else, mostly'.
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While there were some descendants of involuntary transportees who owned plantations, they were by definition upwardsly mobile and successful- eg not with typical borderer genetics. And it’s my understanding that while the average slave-owning household had a single digit number of slaves, slaves were more likely to live on big plantations because those households didn’t own very many people- and that the slaves on smaller farms skewed maler than the slave population as a whole.
No doubt there was some forcible rape going on, and male promiscuity seems to be correlated mostly with bad things, it seems a lot more plausible that most slave women having babies with members of their owner’s family were essentially mistresses/concubines- the documented examples, like plaçage in southern Louisiana, or Thomas Jefferson/Sally Hemings, certainly seem to have been that, and most historical examples of slave systems that were less embarrassed about such things seem to have worked that way.
I am not saying that these relationships meet modern- or other reasonable- standards of consent. But I doubt that would occur to men OK with owning people.
While this doesn’t sound implausible, plantation owners themselves didn’t seem to think it was happening- they thought half-white children born on plantations were all the descendants of the owners.
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It's also plausible that slave owners would take a dim view of randos raping their slaves, and respond with violence and/or prosecution. (this kind of activity was technically illegal on a number of levels after all)
Do you have any evidence one way or the other, or are you just speculating? (and/or operating under the assumption that White Man Bad?)
I think I was arguing that rapists and predators are by definition Bad. Also that even rich elite clans usually have a couple of members and hangers-on whose individual genetics would not be a valuable addition to anyone's family tree.
I'm not aware of any helpful published surveys supporting this, but to my mind the counter-narrative where Southern patriarchs eagerly guard the honor of their random enslaved field hands is making the more extraordinary claim. Who would even dare to come forward with a rape accusation in that context? Given the overall attitude to women of that class, why would they be believed and avenged rather than punished for causing trouble and/or assumed to have themselves been the seducers?
Slave owners ran breeding programs to produce a more docile slave population. Sexual access to female slaves probably wasn't guarded 100%, but it assuredly wasn't available to randos on the basis of nobody caring.
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You know who was in even closer proximity to a lot of female slaves than white guys?
Male slaves -- if the slaveholders didn't care about their slaves being raped, I would think inter-slave rape would be a much bigger problem than 'other poor whites in the vicinity' wandering onto the plantation for some raping.
I think that neither probably happened very much, for reasons along the lines of those elucidated by thrownaway.
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They presumably wouldn't have been guarding the honor of their "random enslaved field hands" so much as their productivity. A slave was an investment. Part of that investment particularly for female slaves was breeding potential. An unexpected pregnancy with unknown paternity eats into that investment.
Slaves were property and damaging the property of the elite is generally not tolerated regardless of whether or not they actually cared about the women.
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Slave-owners were the highest class of European Americans. Borderers (in Appalachia) were not the normative background of slave-owners who were pedigreed Anglo-Saxons. African Americans derive their white admixture pre-enfranchisement to the most high-performing European Americans, not to the poor borderers.
So there’s an interesting effect on African Americans: they were (as noted above) the most backwards of the most backwards part of the world; they received upper class pedigree white DNA; after emancipation until probably 1990, the white DNA they received would be significantly worse than normal white, because of the taboo.
Yeah, this isn't close to true. It was kind of true in the 18th century but, when Westward expansion hit the Appalachians and the Revolution happened, New Wealth became extremely common in the Old South West. Andrew Jackson was not from the 'highest class of European Americans'. Plenty of slaveowners in Alabama or Mississippi or Arkansas or whatever has borderer background.
Not to mention that not all plantations were vast affairs with hundreds of slaves. Plenty of slaveowners had just a few slaves and these people would be almost entirely of lower class background back East.
Slave-owners were the highest class of European Americans, not “every slave-owner descended from the previous highest-class Europeans”. Borderers were not the normative background, not “there was no borderer slaveowner in the South.” Reading carefully is important, yeah. Andrew Jackson amassed slaves after he had already ascended to the upper class of European Americans (his first slave purchased was after he came an attorney with high-status friends, the same year he came protege to founding father William Blount). He ascended to the upper class like, I don’t know, JD Vance. (As today, the highest class is not all descended from the previous highest class, but pass through a rigorous selection filter which requires a high IQ, which gets to the very point of what we are discussing (the genetic quality of the slave-owning class)).
If 70% of southern whites did not own slaves, and if slave ownership was in direct proportion to wealth, then it hardly matters whether (of the remaining, wealthier 30%) many had just 1-2 slaves, as the wealthier families with many slaves means that most slaves worked for the wealthy. Here, do the math: those who held 40+ slaves collectively held 31% of all slaves; 7-39 slaves held 53%; and those who owned less than 7 collectively held just 16% of all slaves. I imagine those who held 1-2, aka the poor (but not as poor as the remaining 70% of white families lol) is much lower, like 2%. So the median slave experience was actually working under a wealthy white who could employ 7+ slaves, and perhaps the median number is as high as 30+!
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They may have been upper-class, but the Tidewater gentry still subscribed to a violent honor culture and disdained manual labor, so I don't think it should be surprising that some of their descendants would display these negative qualities, particularly absent the kind of social hierarchy that maintained their whole neo-feudal enterprise.
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It is unclear that most African Americans’ white ancestry is from the Anglo owner class, though. They may have been victims of sexual predation by lower class and lower status local whites, too, and perhaps even predominantly.
The slave owning class told jokes about light skinned slaves being their owners bastards and the larger groups of poor whites didn’t live near the plantations anyways.
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I find that unlikely as plantation slaves would not be intermixing with poor whites, and a poor white harming a rich white’s property would be a crime.
My understanding is that a substantial portion of plantation labor in colonial and early post-Revolution America was white indentured servants, some of whom were Borderers and a great many of whom were Irish. Certainly there were white overseers and staff working on plantations, and they would generally have had more direct contact with field slaves than the owners would.
Anyone with more in-depth knowledge of the period is welcome to correct me, but it’s certainly far from clear to me that slave-owners would have been the whites with the most intimate access to, and proclivity toward, sexual predation upon black slave women.
The slave owning class wrote jokes about themselves raping slaves, and broadly tended to keep borderers as far away as possible IIRC. The poor whites working on plantations might have some borderer descent, but the majority weren’t that different, ethnically, from their betters.
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Can you offer support for your assertion that white Appalachia mirrors Baltimore? It has never been my impression that the rates of violent crime or property crime are at all comparable between those places. To provide one example, poor, mountainous West Virginia had the lowest crime rate in the nation from 1971 to 1998.
https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/articles/1680
I'd say the mirroring only applies with regard to rates of drug abuse and alcoholism.
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In theory, you could test this hypothesis by researching whether African Americans with a higher percentage of white ancestry have lower rates of criminal behavior than African Americans with a higher percentage of black ancestry. For added fun, you could see if it makes a difference whether that white ancestry is predominantly Puritan/Quaker or Borderer/Cavalier (to use the terminology from Albion’s Seed).
Given that black criminality rates have increased markedly since the 1950s, my guess is that you’d find the elevated rates are almost entirely culture-bound, for reasons that were laid out in the Moynihan Report sixty years ago. The fact that lower-class whites are now showing similar signs of social dysfunction where they didn’t before is further evidence that culture, not genes, is the primary factor involved.
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Absence of stable families correlates strongly with all this awful stuff. Stable families correlate with the opposite of all this awful stuff. We know a considerable amount of the variance in family stability is cultural, because we've seen the rates change dramatically within living memory due to cultural changes.
Ditto for the crime rate generally; We've had it lower, and we've had it higher. What we have is what we've collectively chosen.
You made me curious, and I did a search for: "What happened to black family stability?"
"The original, often controversial, research presented in this book links marital decline to a pivotal drop in the pool of marriageable black males. Increased joblessness has robbed many black men of their economic viability, rendering them not only less desirable as mates, but also less inclined to take on the responsibility of marriage. Higher death rates resulting from disease, poor health care, and violent crime, as well as evergrowing incarceration rates, have further depleted the male population."
From the abstract of a 1995 book, The Decline in Marriage Among African Americans.
https://www.russellsage.org/publications/decline-marriage-among-african-americans-1
Is there a way to Make Black Men Economically Viable Again?
Eliminate the minimum wage so that they can find work at their natural wage, eliminate zoning and build more housing so that they can afford to live at below minimum wage salaries, and eliminate welfare so that they don't have to compete with the government for the role of husbands to black women would be a good start.
I'm going to invoke Chesterton's fence on this one (although there are some possibilities for different fences).
Does Chesterton's Fence apply here? We know why the minimum wage and welfare are there (provide a floor on labor prices and give assistance to help the needy). Eliminating them might have consequences we don't foresee, but that isn't exactly what Chesterton's Fence is about. It's about not eliminating something unless you know why it was put there.
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the argument can be drawn at least three decades earlier.
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This sounds like the mirror image of chalking every disparity up to systemic racism. Can we at least try the El Salvador solution before cursing people down seven generations?
I mean, I'd be willing to try that to be proven wrong. But we won't. So all I'm left with is my wondering.
The El Salvador solution (locking up the most violent 4% of the male population) would indeed almost certainly yield huge QOL improvements for cities like Baltimore, New Orleans and St Louis.
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I've spent over a decade living in the northeast, bouncing around a few cities while making what most here would consider poverty wages until recently. I've never lived in Baltimore specifically, although I have spent a few years in multiple places with similar demographics and reputations. Maybe your experience is colored by your proximity to the courthouse or something, maybe it's a pre/post-COVID thing but...I've just never encountered things like that? I'd routinely go out every Friday and Saturday night and walk/bike a couple miles through the downtown area to get home at 2-3am completely hammered and nobody ever bothered me. Do you all go out of your way looking for trouble? Do things change when you're significantly older and look like an easy mark? I didn't think I was particularly intimidating, but who knows.
In the last ~2 years there has been a noticeable uptick in the number of homeless people (the opioid epidemic making itself felt?), but they were at first largely confined to the homeless encampment (our equivalent of SF's mission district I suppose). Once that got cleared, they all moved to congregate in a public space which honestly hasn't been any better. At some point, people will get sick of it and I imagine they'll clear it out more aggressively and institutionalize the homeless at a significant cost. In the meantime, my quality of life and lived experience haven't been affected in the slightest - never been mugged, never had anything broken into, never had my bike/car stolen, never been harassed or attacked. I've enjoyed all the cities I lived in and don't have any desire to move elsewhere.
Baltimore is unusually bad, even by US 'bad city' standards. While there are pronounced efforts to keep violence out of the Inner Harbor area and a few yuppie neighborhoods, it's very much a relatively narrow zone with a very thin buffer, and you can't really avoid going out of those areas if you're living there. Assaults and bike thefts on Johns Hopkins students were nearly endemic even pre-COVID, Monkey's reports on gunshots are if anything lower than my experience being there for a few months, and you could run into aggressive and grabby panhandlers just a couple blocks from the central police headquarters in the Inner Harbor area.
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More anecdotal experience : I have lived across the North East corridor and west coast tech cities and your speculation sounds right.
If this is GP's first experience with urban living, I'd recommend giving it another shot. Literally everywhere is better. NYC is 100x better than the news makes it look. Boston is America's best imitation of a nice European city. SF's homeless are easily avoided, and the rest of the city is like living in paradise, if you can afford it. Seattle, well, I don't have nice things to say about Seattle. Sorry.
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Some of this seems to be about very small microenvironments and whether you stumble across and into them is quite random. Last year, my wife and I visited Milwaukee. I know Milwaukee pretty well, there are a bunch of areas of the city that aren't great, but I typically think of them as being quite easy to avoid if you have any familiarity with the geography. We went to a basketball game, an event at a brewery, then went out to go grab a takeout pizza afterwards. Thus far, all was well! Nothing to see other than people out having a good time. Maybe a few bums panhandling at a couple streetcorners, but nothing really worth mentioning. After we grabbed our pizza, we thought it would be nice to enjoy it at one of the local parks on the Milwaukee River, which is much more scenic than you might expect. To our surprise, the park that seems pretty nice during the day had dozens of vagrants, a couple of which began yelling at us about our pizza literally the moment we stepped off the riverwalk and into the park. We fled pretty quickly - we both felt like we were in genuine danger, not just uncomfortable with some beggars. I still think the city is a generally nice place to visit, but I have revised my opinion on how attentive I should be at night.
On the other hand, Baltimore really is unusually bad, even compared to other Rust Belt degradation.
About ten years ago, some friends and I visited a restaurant in a Chicago suburb, right on the edge between an extremely rich neighborhood and a fairly poor one. When we arrived around 8:00, the staff and customers were all white, and the background music was pop. When we left a little after 9:00, the staff and all the other customers were black, and the background music was hip hop. On our way out, one of the employees warned us not to linger in the parking lot. Apparently that’s how this restaurant operates: well-off whites during the day, poor and more frequently criminal blacks at night. It was the first time I’d ever witnessed such a clear division in the same physical location.
I'm kind of curious to know what it's like to live in Grosse Pointe Park, MI, in a wealthy white neighborhood just one block from a typical Detroit hood. Pretty rare nowadays to see this without a miles-long, gradual buffer zone.
I'm also curious. But from my understanding Grosse Pointe is actually not desirable anymore. The rich, like Matt Ishbia, prefer to live out in Bloomfield, far beyond the reach of local vibrance.
And... this is correct. You can buy some very nice homes there for not so much. For less than a million you can own an updated 3000 square foot colonial with 5 bedrooms.
https://www.redfin.com/city/9051/MI/Grosse-Pointe-Park
It's a buyers market too. Lots of inventory!
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It's possible I'm just particularly (un)lucky. It's possible I just have a lower tolerance for the vague air of lawlessness that pervades the area than others do. Frankly, I don't really care what the reason is anymore. I used to, but at this point I'm just taking solace in the fact that I'm already living in the worst city I'll ever live in, and wherever I move after this will be better than here.
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The opioid epidemic has been going on for something like two decades already though.
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I lived, briefly, in the worst part of Fort Worth. Prostitution happened more or less in the open and homeless beggars and stray dogs ran rampant over I’ll-maintained roads, hassling random passers by.
It was not that bad.
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As someone who lives in a particularly red area of an already red state, I'd say go ahead and do it... unless you're still angling to find a suitable life partner, then you might need to optimize for that first and foremost.
I read your entire post with a certain amount of bemusement, because while these problems aren't totally absent from this area, they're treated as an aberration, rather than a baked-in feature. The politicians and law enforcement talk a big game about fighting crime, and to a large extent actually follow through. I think the literal ONLY extant organized criminal gang active in the whole Tri-county area was rolled up and shut down the year after I moved here.
There was a single homeless man who used to post up outside my (very small) office building a couple years back. One day I came by and saw a Sheriff's deputy having a conversation with him. He hasn't been seen since, and no new vagrant has stepped in to take his place.
The town is miles and miles of suburbs, with one increasingly dense downtown area, and one long major 'strip' of road that has most of the local mainstay restaurants and amusements. That strip in particular is kept as clean and nice as possible because that's what drives most of the commerce for the surrounding area, although there are other developed areas that offer alternative, more walkable amenities.
On one occasion I was out with a date in the downtown area and a shooting occurred right outside the bar we were in. I didn't notice anything had happened until I walked outside and there were easily a dozen police cars with officers on the scene locking things down and questioning witnesses. These guys KNOW that keeping the area's reputation for safety intact is necessary to keep the money flowing here. So I dislike that there was in fact a shooting, but there is a certain comfort from knowing the local constabulary is actually focused on catching the guy and preventing it occurring again.
EDIT: I did a quick search of news articles, and there hasn't been a shooting incident in the downtown area since that one I happened be present for, over a year ago. And I laugh hard because it also dredged up news stories saying the perp of the previous shooting turned himself in (it was a white guy in case that matters), so the case wrapped up nigh-instantly rather than dragging out and people worrying about the guy resurfacing to do it again.
Much I could complain about, the local government has its corrupt and inefficient elements. But there's no sense in which I feel at risk, either my person or my property, when going about daily activities. Corrupt, inefficient, but RESPONSIVE and mostly competent governance is acceptable enough for me. I may at some point try to run for local office.
Also, there is a variety of great pizza places all around. Most of them are expensive though.
Yes, there's less 'culture' in the strict sense. I'd have to drive hours to go to a major concert or event. Although occasionally larger country music acts (the modern examples of the genre though, blech) do shows here. There are barely any 'tech jobs' to speak of, you're definitely not getting hired by one of the big players if you're here. There's something to the strategy of putting in 5 years with a giant company at high salary to save, then moving to a cheaper COL location with your nest egg.
Yeah the people are pretty fucking bland. The LGBTQ presence is limited overall, most restaurants close at 10, most bars around midnight. If you're in your twenties, the dating pool is limited and if you don't find a solid group of friends quickly, it can be very boring since most of the 'fun' stuff is geared for an older generation. Golf courses, tiki bars, nature trails. There IS a decent-sized university nearby where you could look for parties. But that is the tradeoff, because the more 'vibrant' the populace, the more likely you're getting all the attendant problems and risks, and the people around here just don't want to deal with that.
I understand why some people would accept the risks, the constant anxiety that is induced by living in a dense city with an apathetic (at best) government and frayed social fabric. I simply could never reach that sort of mindset myself. I like having a few local haunts that I can visit without fear of mugging, being shot at, or seeing a guy walking around naked and/or drugged out of his gourd. I like being able to have friends over without, as you have seen, having to warn them about the local wildlife. I like that what relatively low taxes I pay do actually go towards keeping the town nice and that the cops try their damndest to keep the undesirable elements on the fringes of society at bay.
And I feel like people who live in the cities long-term forget that all of this is EASILY possible if your citizens and your government just GIVE A DAMN, and that you don't have to believe that fixing things is futile.
I'm sure you've heard of "sideshows" or "slideshows" where groups of mostly Dodge Challengers and Chargers do donuts in the middle of an urban intersection or freeway or bridge, creating an informal yet spectacularly dangerous block party. Also the roving gangs of plateless dirt bikes and quads, presumably mostly stolen anyway. Oakland, Baltimore, Atlanta, etc
And the police are literally completely incapable of shutting these down. We've heard the official explanations about manpower and escalation, but I would love to know how those internal deliberations really go. You've gotta have some gung-ho sergeants putting together gameplans and orchestration, but the top brass shut it down? For woke / squishy / PR reasons? Anyone have real insight?
It seems like it'd be 'trivial' to infiltrate the chat groups that are organizing these things and have a sting set up to roll up as many participants as possible.
Logistically challenging because of the decentralized nature of the situation. Its the rough equivalent to the raucous high school house party that gets out of hand, as soon as someone yells "SHIT, THE COPS" everyone scatters and most of them WILL get away.
I imagine the bigger difficulty is that a lot of those arrested would be minors and how do you justify throwing the book at them solely as a deterrent?
From a vigilante standpoint, I imagine a quick way to get them to disperse is to just fire a high-powered rifle into the air a few times and MAYBE put a couple rounds into an engine block. But ironically doing so is, individually, a more serious crime than what most of the actual miscreants are each committing so you're risking legal consequences yourself in the process.
Really seems like its a proxy for the quality of parenting in your area. If these things are happening regularly maybe it is a sign that the rot has really set in already.
Once the rot is passed down it is metastasized. Here in southeast asia there is a popular pastime among Malaysian Malay kids called basikal lajak. Take a normal bike, shorten the height by shaving the handlebar and the seat down, take off the brakes and reflective pads, then go to the highest point on your nearest highway and speed downhill. The kids go prone on the bike to minimize drag, and they also do not wear any protective gear of any sprt because protection is for pussies.
Wipeouts are common, but this practice came into focus because a group of malay kids lajak at 3am (because of the heat) and they went down the wrong direction of a highway, smashing into a car driven by a chinese woman. The malays cried that this woman murdered the eight kids, and the courts were subject to racialised pressure from malays until finally the high courts made clear that the driver, who was on the correct side of the road and following all rules, was not responsible for the kids all killing themselves.
So, why would the kids do something so incredibly stupid and dangerous and still think they were in the right? Its because their authority figures are themselves lajak (the grown up version are called rempits, who waste their food delivery paychecks on constantly destroyed motorbikes because they do drag racing at night too). These figures are the ones feted in the community, seen as cool and brave for irritating the authority figures enslaved to the rich yet too impotent to clamp down on rempits.
What of the parents? The parents either are rempits themselves, or simply do not give a shit. The mothers of the kids killed by the driver said that they had no responsibility for the conduct of their kids because 'kids do what they want, the government should build things for kids to do'. Its 3am and your kids are riding downhill! They did that when their road outside the village was a 200m dirt track and cars were nonexistent, but thats not the case anymore.
Because of this incident, the parents have doubled down. Rempits regularly arrange for convoys to travel the interstate highways to prove that THEY own the roads, not the authorities and certainly not normies. Any attempt at shutting them down is met with cries of racial discrimination, and politicians promise to fight for the right of rempits to practice their unique culture regardless of the cost to normies. It does not matter that the police and normies are themselves malays who simply want to lead a normal life, what matters is that the thugs are playing at being a protected class, and their rotten behavior flows down to their offspring.
It is difficult enough to enforce behavior when it is technically in-community policing. It will be Impossible in racial-culturally segregated societies like the USA.
I'm pretty sure the US is less racially-culturally segregated than Malaysia.
Perhaps not? Malaysia certainly isn't great, and Singapore uses forced integration as a cheat code, but I've never felt under active threat and treated like a foreigner in Indian plantation worker encampments or in Malay kampungs the way I was treated when I crashed at my friends place in Prospect Park (the precursor to the aforementioned loot goblin episode). I honestly think the difference between Black (ghetto) and Latino America is greater than the difference between Malay and Chinese Malaysia, much less Black vs White America. I've lived in both, and the cultural contrast/conflict between ghetto america vs gentrified condos is extreme, much less suburbia. When malays reach class escape velocity and become middle or upper class, they upgrade the trappings of their existing culture and maintain existing cultural practices. Blacks who reach class escape velocity either turn full white (Obama Harris) or live white while acting black (rap and sport stars). There is no maintenance of the actual good practices of hood life: community time sharing for elder or childcare, church attendance, I'm struggling here so I'm tapping out.
I could just be especially negative towards 'the black experience', since I am not actually black and my black friends were codeswitchers who had intact middle class families and spoke ebonics just to get entry into Orange street clubs.
What’s the intermarriage rate between Chinese and Malays? Most people with a large social circle in diverse middle class parts of the US will know or have known at least a few black-white couples. I’m in KL on occasion and I’ve never seen a Chinese-Malay couple.
Honestly you might have seen plenty of Chinese women who were married to Malay men, but they dress identically to upper class Malay women (HEAVY makeup, overly embroidered tudungs, and double layered flowy full body dressses that swish aggressively to show off the expensive underlayer or shoes) and thus are indistinguishable. Similarly, upper class Malay men can look extremely Chinese, so the racial differences may not be so obvious if they are dressed the same. Malay and Chinese men can look very similar, especially when heavily weathered by the sun. For air conditioned professionals, grooming can make all the difference. Remove Hishamuddins pornstache, put him in a suit and he will look like any number of Chinese contractors.
Specific to marriage rates, Chinese women marry out at far higher rates than Chinese men, but usually to White or Indian men. Chinese women rarely marry malay men due to extreme familial resistance stemming from the religious intransigence of Islam, and for the most part girls who marry malays become fully acculturated, hence my above on the presentation.
Off the top of my head I would say the ratio of Chinese women marriages in Malaysia is 85% chinese, 7% white, 6% indian and 2% others (black, malay, hispanic). Among PMC it would be 60% chinese, 25% white, 10% indian and 5% others. This factors in the overseas education rate of Chinese PMC, where it is almost guaranteed they will marry a foreigner.
Indian and malay with have lower outmarriage rates because of lower baseline attractiveness relative to chinese women. Pale skin and low bodyfat% is still valued, and unfortunately indian and malay girls simply don't have the same genetics or cultural influences incentivizing outmarriage optimisations. Indian and Malay families refuse to let Their women be despoiled by outsiders, but Chinese either devalue daughters (more a historical than current practice) or the Chinese PMC is cucked by western liberal values into pretending all races are equal and perpetuate the kayfabe. The last point is more a westernised Asian phenomenon but such liberal pieties have found traction in the PMC here.
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San Antonio PD wasn’t able to prevent this until they lost local control of their police department and the state troopers shut this stuff down. I don’t know what happened behind the scenes though.
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Meta still hires remote and at most they'll knock 15% off of Bay Area comp.
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It's one of the things I thought about when I drew up my list of places I would be applying to work for, along with many others. Fortunately this country still has a plethora of cities in red states, some of which are run by people who - as you put it - give a damn, and have a decently high population of young people. I'm going to be moving to one of them. I spent my college and then law school career with an almost single-minded focus on the area I want to practice in, so while I attend a relatively regional school, I'm not limited to searching for jobs in the DMV. I've had very pleasant and productive conversations with offices that I can say without exaggeration span the country. It seems like I'll have my pick of several different places.
I might have to make a follow-up post about my process for making the speadsheet of places I want to apply to. It was extremely Mottian. Salary and cost of living of course, but I also made my own adjusted cost of living. I have excel columns on total population, population growth or decline, median age, percentage of white population, largest minority population, size of the local Jewish community (I like Chabad), presence of graduate programs, ease of access to nature, violent crime rate, property crime rate, addiction rate, presence of a "progressive prosecutor", political leaning of the county, political leaning of the state, gun laws, presence of a med school, reputation of local hospitals, and a few others.
If you want a large Jewish community, have you tried moving out towards Pikesville? You'll encounter fewer gunshots and more "I'm the only one out driving on a Saturday morning..." Not that you should stay here if you don't like it. It's a big wide world, find a place where you're comfortable.
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Without doxxing yourself, would it be possible to give your top 5 or 10 cities by those criteria? Would make for an interesting discussion.
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If you have a law degree and bar license, you can do pretty well in this area. That's my secret, I zeroed in on practicing the exact type of law that people that live here are most likely to need.
Lol definitely mottean, but I think there's no real substitute for doing an actual 'vibe check' and living in an area for a while. But knowing what you're getting into is good.
A mild pro-tip on this point is that moving somewhere with a lot of retirees tends to vastly increase the availability of local medical resources. Two main reasons: old folks are the major consumer of medical services so providers go where the money goes... and experienced doctors in the twilight of their careers will also move to this area as a pre-emptive retirement move, so you can have access to professionals with MASSIVE amounts of experience available, although it can be hard to book an appointment because they will work whatever hours they please.
I also don't mind gambling a bit that as a younger, healthy guy I'm unlikely to need any major medical services and so the quality of hospitals is demoted somewhat in my general hierarchy of needs.
Absolutely. I'm going to be doing some traveling this semester and next, visiting the areas I'm particularly interested in. I'm planning on walking around the area near where I would potentially be working, as well as checking out the areas I might live in. It's going to be a bit of a pain in the ass, but as you said, there's no substitute for an actual vibe check.
Good tip, thank you.
I differ from you in this for two reasons. The first, my hobbies include activities that put me at a noticeably higher risk for needing emergency medical care. I'm a particular enthusiast of competitive shooting (2-gun my beloved), as well as hiking and camping. I've done what I can to give myself an edge if something were to happen - I got my EMT-B several years ago and have mostly retained the emergency trauma lessons, as well as a Stop The Bleed course. My friend group recently had a competition where we had to record ourselves putting on a tourniquet from wherever we keep it in our daily lives in under sixty seconds. We're uh... weird. But fun. Anyway, so I tend to want to have good quality medical care in the area for that reason. The second, I'm hoping this next move will be my last for some time. I'd like to put down some roots. So, with an eye to the future, I take medical care into account. I thought about accounting for primary school quality as well, but I figure I'll either be somewhere with good schools, or I'll be making enough that I can afford to put my kid(s) in private school.
I've also pulled the trick of befriending guys with actual experience with trauma medicine and having them around me a good portion of the time.
One is previously a Navy Corpsman who has stitched up bullet wounds in Marines, the other was previously an EMT and now a fireman. So long as I have one of them around I can be relatively certain I'll make it to the hospital if I'm not killed instantly by any particular event.
My health insurance is geared towards catastrophic events (and paying for lost wages from being unable to work) so I do have to make sure I can get to the emergency room.
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I feel like this could describe my north-Texas environment.
There are a few nutjobs on the train, but everyone uses the sprawling highways. There might be beggars at intersections, but no camps, no fentanyl shuffle. It gets worse if you go into Dallas proper, but not that much worse. Not in the parts remotely near a venue. Maybe it’s just too damn hot to stay on the streets.
I was looking up articles on some recent shootings in Deep Ellum, and they make all the right noises. Clamp down on anything resembling a trend. Manage the impression of safety.
It really is a constant.
I have literally never seen a Fent zombie or similar zonked out drug user in person around here. I bet they exist, the drug trade sure does, but I'd guess they remain in off-the-beaten-path drug dens that are 'known to police' so they can keep an eye on things, and the druggies don't get to wander the street.
I think there are also areas that are rural enough and mostly vacant and abandoned where you can form a homeless camp without anybody noticing easily, so there's less pressure to set up in populated areas.
And of course, the local response to the housing crunch has been... building more housing at a frenetic pace. Much to my chagrin the cow pasture near my house has been converted into a tiny little gated community of houses on postage-stamp lots, but I can at least be pretty damn sure there's unlikely to be an 'affordable housing' development thrown up within walking distance of me.
I know people don't much like it as an idea and it's probably not possible to formalize in laws, but this actually is my primary solution to homelessness. I want the police to aggressively enforce rules to chase bums out of nice city parks. I also want them to look the other way at encampments in lightly trafficked areas. My goal isn't to "criminalize homelessness", it's to keep bums out of parks and off of sidewalks.
Yep. See my comment here where the police will roll through at irregular intervals to make sure there's no nasty surprises or people hiding in the camps, but otherwise tolerate them when they're well away from civilization.
It WOULD be hard to formalize, because the way trespass laws work. The owner of a particular wooded, vacant parcel of land can tolerate a homeless camp but at any time can also have them all trespassed off if he wants to do something with it. So there could be 'tacit' agreement with the owner to tolerate them in the meantime, while reserving the right to kick 'em off if it becomes inconvenient. The other option is letting the city or county own the land but leave it undeveloped and just let the camp exist, but that opens up some potentially problematic optics. You don't want there to be any implied 'contract' between the land owner and the camped out homeless to ensure their safety as 'guests.'
The cops around here are also a bit more aggressive than average about enforcing panhandling laws, which has led to some 'interesting' tactics to evolve by the panhandlers to create some level of deniability as to why they're standing around at the intersection. Of course, summers here get hot and humid as balls so there is a natural deterrent in effect too. The panhandlers themselves are most likely to set up in places with shade.
Private landowners have many of the same worries, like liability and the condition of the property should they decide to do something with it in the future. But they also have to worry about squatter's rights in the medium term. I don't know if there are jurisdictions where they have to worry about tenant laws, but I would not be surprised.
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I think this is probably a lot of it. Having a release valve to give people an option of doing something other than the most disruptive possible thing seems very helpful. If nothing else it means when the cops hassle them they have an option of a place to go where they won't be hassled and of course won't be bothering other people. If there are literally no options available which don't involve bothering normal productive people, then why not set up shop in downtown and shit directly onto the sidewalk. The cops having a middle option of "roust them out of here and into the out of the way encampment not bothering anyone" also means there is something for them to since all of the more serious remedies have been denied them.
Back when I was in the criminal defense world there'd be the occasional 'raid' on a given encampment which was basically just a handful of officers checking the tents for fugitives, drugs, and weapons, and otherwise making sure there were no dead bodies or hazards to the occupants. It was pretty obvious that arresting the homeless guys would be doing them a favor so unless there was an actual violent resister it was most common to just seize whatever contraband was lying around in plain sight and asking if anybody needed medical attention, then leaving.
If the raids are random enough, it probably disincentivizes them acting as drug mules and such.
Don’t you want homeless encampments moving every so often to prevent buildup of unsanitary conditions? It’s not like anyone’s gonna run plumbing or garbage collection out there.
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As a different post for a different point: Maryland has become one of the most fascinating states, to me. It's probably the most important state that nobody really thinks about: DC is basically a carve-out of Maryland, and even if they're very different places, they're often the same thing. A lot of the old money of Maryland runs through DC, and Maryland is an odd hodge-podge of beautiful small town Americana, blue collar throwbacks, and absolute total shitholes. The history of Maryland is this deeply-repressed and forgotten thing (Catholicism was suppressed until the adoption of the Bill of Rights with the Constitution). And Marylanders often have a pride in their state that rivals Texas or California.
I wonder how much of Baltimore's condition has specifically to do with the nature of DC. In any other state, the largest city would attract some measure of wealth and some corresponding level of niceness, but all the wealth in Maryland is oriented toward the District. Baltimore is a second- or third-tier city relative to Philadelphia or New York, and it doesn't even have the tax haven corporate deference of Trenton New Jersey. In some respect the city has no real economic motive for being, except that it's close enough to DC to beg at the table for scraps, and it has a port. If Baltimore had become the government's capital city (as it could have been), I doubt it would be quite a dilapidated as it is today. If DC had been put somewhere else entirely, I wonder if it would be as bad as it is.
Detroit is different but still equally shitty though.
Detroit's decline is pretty exceptional and represents some deep forces. The amount of industry and wealth lost in Detroit was incredible.
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In about 2-3 hours, you can even make it to the far western counties of Maryland.
Thurmont almost out West Virginias West Virginia.
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There's also Montgomery County, in the '70s and '80s (when I was young) a collection of affluent 95% white DC suburbs, now a declining black/latino/other third world immigrant area (the public school system is just 25% white now, a figure which includes Arabs). It's a "sanctuary county" where the local politicians virtue-signal by denouncing ICE and Republicans and fellating "diversity".
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As Bilbo mentioned, Baltimore is the epitome of faded American glory and white flight.
I spent a whole day at the Baltimore museum of industry and covered perhaps 80% of what they had? https://www.thebmi.org/
Excellent place to visit to remind you of what cities like this were at one point.
That’s a hefty URL.
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Bilbo?
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It's largely been forgotten now, but Baltimore used to be a tremendous steel city, based around the Bethlehem Steel Sparrows Point facility. It was the largest steel plant in the world in the 1950s. There were many other large mills and shipyards there, making all kinds of things out of steel. Here's a good article about this:
https://thepursuitofhistory.org/2021/12/22/sparrows-point-from-steelmaking-to-distribution-center-hub/
Baltimore was hit extremely hard by deindustrialization, and decent jobs have not come in the same numbers to replace the ones that were lost. I suppose the interesting followup question is why the population remaining in Baltimore reacted in such destructive ways.
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This, along with another user's posts about Pittsburgh (whose name I've accidentally rudely forgotten) is one of the best posts on the site. This kind of stuff is much more interesting and compelling than yet another post about abstract housing policies or culture war coconuts. I think there's a rich tradition waiting to be written about the characters and places of the country.
Has anything really changed in response to the Key bridge collapsing? I live in the next major city Southwest of you, and was actually driving home the night it collapsed and was supposed to take that route and took a different one to avoid city traffic.
It is a good post. But we've all read posts like it before, and have either internalized the message or don't want to. Abstract housing policy may not be gripping, but it is new!
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It's the kind of thing that makes a forum feel like a community.
Informative but has real heart. Visceral, but no shock value.
I feared that the original community has taken too many Ls. There were a lot of platform migrations and splinter groups. I still feel worry, but posts like these keep me optimistic.
Eh, the only other places that allow for open discussion of topics like these are places like the chans and Kiwi Farms. And as much as I enjoy wallowing in the mud with other anonson 4chan, and as much as I sometimes get annoyed by the overly intellectual approach of rationalists and others on here (that often can't see the forest for the trees), there's really nowhere else to go on the internet for interesting discussions like this.
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Traffic got a bit worse, but it seems to have mostly smoothed itself out now. It just takes a few more minutes to get anywhere on any given day, but it's not too horrible.
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I suspect rebuilding that will go about as well as maintaining the power grid goes in South Africa. Import the third world, become the third world.
One of the bizarre bits of Baltimore is how close it is to DC; there are pretty regular departures from the localized incompetence and corruption (if only by infusing massive floods of cash) just so people from DC aren't inconvenienced. I'd be willing to bet that the Key Bridge falls into that pile, just because otherwise people going to Aberdeen have to deal with Baltimore roads.
It's more than that. The Key bridge was how hazardous loads got around the east side of the city. They can't (legally) go through the tunnels to go through the city. Now, they're either illegally going through the tunnels, or all going around the west side of the city which adds considerable time to trucking loads up/down 95.
The lack of the Key bridge inconveniences those of us who live here, but it's a real problem for road-based freight. I think that's the primary reason the feds want to throw money at getting it fixed.
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Okay, I’ll be the one to bite the bullet and speak plainly. Baltimore is a majority-black city, has been for decades now. In that link I cited above (from the Baltimore City Planner’s Office, no less), the announcement states that the city “is growing browner” and has not only a declining population from 2010 to 2020, but also a declining white population, from 32% in 2000 to 28% in 2020.
You made a very good write-up and I enjoyed reading it. However, curiously absent from your discussion was the topic of race. You didn’t mention the races of anyone in your write-up. Certainly Baltimore’s majority-minority demographics are a unique trait for this city compared to most places in the United States. Do you think that the city’s multi-racial aspect has anything to do with its problems? As you describe things, Baltimore seems like a very low-trust, corrupt, impoverished “shithole”. Do you think that’s because of how many non-whites (and particularly the proportion of blacks and mixed-race people) there are who live there?
Does the absence have to be curious?
“I don’t see race” is enough of a cultural touchstone to earn its own section in DEI trainings. And there’s the common wisdom that more experience with other races breaks down barriers. It might even be scientific (warning: sociology research). It’s certainly generational.
So I don’t find it surprising when someone neglects to catalogue race.
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I'm fascinated by discussions of Baltimore or Gary, Indiana and other similar places on Reddit. It's usually a mixture of people describing their own terrible experiences (while studiously omitting the demographics of the perpetrators), economic explanations and occasionally cryptic comments alluding to the real cause that the mods haven't spotted. This is an example.
I can't remember where I read it, but I saw a blog post once that showed you could predict 80% of a US city's crime rate by measuring its African American population.
Back when I was a Fresh-off-the-boat immigrant, I did a 'crime detection' machine learning project. The unique part was that I mixed race with wider demographics (census info) & proximity to institutions (schools, banks,etc.).
I don't want to share the full report for anonymity reasons, but old naive me found a bunch of interesting statistical co-relations.
My favorite insight: Race does not help predict crime.
I am being half truthful ofc. The more accurate takeaway is : "Race is not needed when predicting crime, as long as you have other spicy features."
The spiciest - 'Female household with no husband'. It was by far the most predictive demographic feature for crime. The black crime problem is a fatherlessness problem. Not too surprising for the the average mottezian. But for a fresh-off-the-boat immigrant, I genuinely could not make sense of this finding. Nice to see my 8 year old study corroborate my 2024 intuition.
The more boring, but no less important feature was - 'Participation in labor force'. Nothing surprising here. Less jobs = More crime. More crime = Less jobs.
Second spiciest - Race can be completely discarded if you're accounting for local geography. Yes, black people commit more crime. But they seem to commit all their crimes in specific places. Crime occurs near nightclubs and schools. High density places have more crime, yes, but it is trivial to triage the hotspots down to the specific block. As much as random inspections in certain neighborhoods is a liberal meme, hot spot based inspections are objectively less racist.
Takeaways:
Joblessness and fatherlessness problems are the main cultural problems contributing to crime. You don't need an average IQ workforce to do well on either. Both are endemic in urban black communities. But, pair a bunch of Appalachian whites with these 2 problems and crime will still go up.
Crime is a hyper-local phenomenon. Crime can be largely addressed through stringent policing of the hotspots. My guess is that crime-as-a-lifestyle, like any social phenomenon is memetic and relies on social contagion. Dispersed criminals might find other spots to base their operations out of, but it is hard to scale if hotspots are stamped out. It also means that police don't need proportionally higher resources to curb crime. Most of the city can do just fine with the amount of policing it has.
Very interesting stuff.
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Slight disagree on race not being a visible indicator. Its all about your immediate environ, and I can't tell whether someone was raised fatherless, but I can tell when someone doesn't belong, and race is the fastest and most statistically significant shorthand I had. A shit neighborhood with crime infesting it often is blacker, true, but in public desegregated spaces I found laying attention to isolated or 4+ groups of blacks to be optimal for barm minimization. It is precisely because black criminals are outside their local geographic bound that the racial element comes to the fore I will never go anywhere near Crown Heights of my own volition, so the black criminals there are a distant problem. Seeing a group of 4 black kids strut into the C train at Chambers is anomalous enough to immediately set off spidey senses. If they had a boombox it was Showtime, who were irritating for other reasons.
Crime stands out precisely because it is anomalous: MonkeyWithAMachinegun treats the miasma of everpresent crime as background noise to the city, and living in Bed-Dtuy made me think incidental misery was just par for the course. An extended period of crashing at a friends place in fucking Alphabet City made me realize that crime was NOT an everpresent feature, it is localized to lazy thugs who can't be bothered to stray out of their neighbourhoods and thats what makes their anomalous presence such a visible precursor to crime.
In the end I ended up getting into trouble with white criminals more often, but I treat that as statistical provenance: I curated my social environment to be as white/asian as possible, so obviously any stupid shit I encountered will be due to them. The statistical frequency for which my encountering black people lead to negative experiences for me was a much higher rate than with whites, even controlling for geographic accidents. I may nkt have been Die Hard 4 John McClane, but wearing a nice suit and shoes at the bad side of Prospect Park might as well have put a quest icon screaming 'LOOT GOBLIN' to the neighbourhood.
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I've visited Gary multiple times, just to look around and do photography. I would say that I honestly felt quite safe there; much like Cairo, Illinois, another place where I've been which has suffered a similar fate - anyone that would rob or shoot me migrated away 20 or more years ago. The place is simply empty of people to a degree that's hard to even explain. There's nobody there.
I wish I could share my pictures, but it would destroy my already crap opsec.
In the 2007/2008 Google street view of Cairo, one of the buildings on the main commercial strip had completely collapsed and was just a pile of rubble spilling out onto the sidewalk.
I can confirm that when I was there in 2018, it certainly had not gotten any better. From 2000 to 2020, the population fell by half from around 3,600 to around 1,800. This from a peak of over 15,000 in 1920.
With the general decline of the river trade, Cairo is remarkably remote now. It's very hard for me to see how it could ever attract investment again. I imagine if you had commercial interests in the area, you'd base yourself in Cape Girardeau or Paducah.
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I actually have a very rare thing - a friend who grew up in Gary. Her description is that that the only people left are the very elderly, and the people who are so dysfunctional they drop out of the South Side of Chicago and go to Gary. The latter would be a real problem if they got a gun and spotted you, but for the most part they're too low-functioning even to do that, otherwise they'd be driving up Chicago's crime rate.
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Peoria, Illinois also feels like that. I've done urban decay photography around there, and I didn’t feel so much unsafe as…spooked out. There’s a certain “hollowed out” feeling to small-ish Midwestern rustbelt cities where even the criminals have ghosted away, and there’s just the dusty bones of long-dead businesses and echoes of decay.
It's incredible to me, just how large a portion of the U.S. consists of areas like that. You can drive for hours through formerly-inhabited areas, in most of which you can fairly confidently say: "This will never be anything again." "That building will eventually cave in, no one's gonna save it." "This must have been beautiful in the '50s."
I wish we lived in a different world, where that didn't happen.
I guess I haven't spent too much time in the Rust Belt specifically, but there has been a lot of migration around the country for at least the last century. It's easy to point to growing Sun Belt cities and stagnating-or-shrinking northern ones -- an older friend from Ohio noted that Cincinnati is about the same size it was in the 70s and still mostly fits inside the same interstate ring road, while Houston is in the process of building a third.
But it's also impacted smaller communities. My family history involves a couple tiny rural towns in the South that have since completely evaporated and left only road signs and a couple still-occupied houses. The historical marker points to where the one room schoolhouse and the general store had been. These places disappeared with better cars and roads in the middle of the last century: we can just bus the kids to the bigger school down the road, and drive into town for the store. Will this get rebuilt? I don't know: some developers nearby have been trying to sell swanky ranchettes, but even if that happened in the same place, it's a fundamentally different community -- this time around it has electricity and indoor plumbing, not to mention air conditioning and a major city within a few hours of driving, none of which were there a century ago.
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Gary had 52 homicides in 2023, a per-100k rate of 76.8. This is a third higher than Baltimore, and 12x the rate of the US as a whole.
And they were a little proud of that number, because it was 18% fewer homicides than in 2022.
Time for a little math. Let's make a simplified model of Gary where the population is gender balanced, and equally age distributed between age 0 and 65. Let's further say that males age 15-30 represent 75% of homicide victims.
Among this sliver of the population the murder rate is 499 per 100,000!
A 15 year old boy in Gary will have a nearly 7.5% chance of being murdered before age 30.
Obviously there are all sorts of problems with the model, but it should be mostly accurate. I think it's possible that a quarter of adult men in Gary have been shot at some point.
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Well, I can't argue with that. I just wonder where they were happening, and over what. I admit I didn't go into the residential areas much.
That's still only 1 murder a week, and a population who goes 99.9% unmurdered each year. Hard to casually distinguish from 0 and 100%; it just adds up over time.
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He didn't really need to. Everyone bar maybe certain sleeper agents* knows what Baltimore is like.
Everyone knows there are no solutions to the crime and disorder issue that don't involve totalitarian levels of paternalism /social control over blacks, outright genocide whether fast or slow or eugenics, none of which are likely to occur.
*the Soviet sleeper agent who went by 'Jack Barsky' almost failed his mission in late 1970s right at the start because the first address he went to was a hotel in the blackest part of Chicago. He was taught perfect English and spycraft but not this particular aspect of reality.
Please remember that not every Mottizen is American. There are at least three Australian regulars (AshLael, OliveTapenade and me), and a bunch from other countries.
Also, I'm American and I have no idea (or didn't until this post I guess) what Baltimore is like. Assuming every American knows about any given city is a bad assumption to make.
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Barsky also had two children by black (immigrant, interestingly) women, so he clearly took his mission to "blend in" seriously.
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I do not actually agree that this is true. There are probably lots of reasonable knobs to turn that would help the problem enormously.
It depends. What level of nuance is warranted in your view with regard to social policy? Would you say that American society practiced totalitarian levels of paternalism /social control over blacks before the Civil Rights Movement, relative to its treatment of whites? What knobs do you regard as reasonable?
No, not really.
It restricted them from white areas and largely contained the violence inside the black community. Black/white homicide rate was very similar then.
I'd consider segregation and non homicidal eugenics reasonable, the latter of course should be applied to all populations.
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Can you share what some of those might be? I am afraid to say I mostly hold the same opinion as No_one, but that might be a lack of perspective on other options.
Just the opposite of any recent progressive justice system "reform" like the NY bail reform (that let those migrants who got in a brawl with the cops or people arrested with body parts out) that would be a start. The knob was turned in one direction and made things worse, they can turn it in the other.
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Incentivizing stable families would make a massive difference, I'd bet.
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Ever try Paulie Gee’s in Hampden? It’s expensive and full of whatever hipsters are called these days, but good pizza IMO.
But yeah, Baltimore is a shithole. My car insurance was cut in half when I left, and I haven’t actually calculated my local taxes but I assume they were slashed upon leaving as well.
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Weirdly, Baltimore is one of my favorite cities to visit and outside of the dirt bikes I haven't run into any of this.
I once took public transit in Baltimore. I saw a man attempting to sell jewelry from his knee high athletic socks, two boys who scampered off and back on the train at each stop (tickets are honor system and checks are done at stations), various crack heads shouting, and a few normies just trying to get home. And that was a single ride on a quiet Saturday afternoon.
Last time I was in Baltimore I was at a bar, alone, waiting for someone, and a black woman was loudly talking on her phone a few seats down from me.
And she's very upset. Someone she thought was a friend had wronged her, she's yelling about it. "That bitch I can't believe her she's a real N..." And then she stops, looks at me meaningfully, and starts again "She's a real Nasty woman."
And it was so funny to me because I've never seen someone so obviously censor their language around what they perceived as my delicate sensibilities.
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I've never been to Baltimore myself, so I have exactly one Baltimore story.
A family member of mine is really into road trips and camping--not quite the "hashtag vanlife" sort, but he has been to all 50 states, driven up to Alaska, visits all the national parks along his routes, etc. He's always the family member to play the "every place has good people and bad people" card when people start talking about good or bad places; he is prone to smugly defending this by pointing out that, yes, whatever city you're talking about, he's probably actually been there, and no, you probably haven't.
In all his many travels, the only place he's ever had a problem was Baltimore. I want to say it was in the last year or two; he stopped for groceries in Baltimore--it wasn't even a destination--and had his window smashed in. He'd left a CD wallet (remember those?) on the passenger's seat of his car, and that was apparently sufficient inducement. I have a hard time imagining why someone would smash a window to steal 30 CDs in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Twenty Two, but then--I have a hard time imagining why someone would smash in any car window that was not, say, between them and a dying person or animal.
Of course, this family member is now quick to point out that lots of people get their windows smashed in, say, San Francisco, too, and that his one bad experience shouldn't be taken as an indictment of a whole city. But the fact remains: Baltimore is where it happened.
There are a lot of places I will not go for any reason short of, maybe, a family member's wedding. Baltimore and San Francisco are thus on the same list as China and Mexico. "But there are amazing things to see there, and amazing people to meet!" Indeed, but there are safer places to go, equally filled with amazing things to see and amazing people to meet; I could spend my whole life traveling to amazing places that are not crime warrens or failed or totalitarian states, and still never get to see them all. So why in God's name would I choose the risky ones?
You're missing out not visiting Mexico City. The murder rate is similar to that of Phoenix, there's cops on every other street corner with rifles, and it really is an amazing place. Incredible history, architecture, etc.
Last I heard, the air pollution was really bad there though.
It's not that bad in the summer (under 100 usually). In the winter it may be worse, but I've never visited in the winter.
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Unless you're a spy, or someone valuable enough to your government that China could get concessions from treating you like one, there's very little risk posed by the Chinese government. There are currently three Americans that America itself considers wrongfully imprisoned in China.
Looks like about 2.5 million Americans visit China each year.
It's a similar risk for Chinese nationals visiting the West. If you're the Huawei heiress then maybe you should be careful. If you're a nobody then it's very unlikely the state will visit trumped up charges upon you.
Actually if you're a professor the risk looks less trivial, there are a lot of cases of professors being prosecuted and found not guilty.
Specifically, I have published some academic criticism of the Chinese government under my real name, and I had some past associations with a Chinese national who disappeared (probably he disappeared on purpose, to avoid being disappeared by others, but I don't actually know for sure) a few years back.
This is all sufficiently small time that I would give myself better than 90% odds of being fine if I were to ever visit China... but the same could probably be said of Mexico. Even a 100% safe and successful tourist jaunt to either destination would involve a lot more nervous checking over my shoulder than could possibly be worth the trip.
Mexico is actually pretty safe if you stay on the beaten path- Americans who get murdered or kidnapped mostly leave the tourist track without paying protection money.
Your guided tour of Mexico City pyramids or all inclusive resort trip are pretty safe.
I was quite surprised recently to learn that Acapulco, which has always connoted "resort getaway for rich Americans", has become a cartel-controlled hellhole.
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China is just about perfectly safe. I've been on multiple multi-month and multi-week trips to China to work and to visit in-laws and have experienced zero issues. The air quality is horrible in the winter. That's my only complaint.
I've been to China, too; I got pickpocketed once, but aside from that it was great.
An example: one time I was hanging out in a place with a lot of foreign students, when a Chinese lady came through asking if any native English speakers wanted to earn some money recording English-language instructional tapes. I got into her car, and she did indeed drive me to a recording studio where I read out a bunch of grade-school level stuff and then they paid me.
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Probably this is what makes it a nice city for me to visit. Cheap, low pressure, less crowded than NYC or DC or SF.
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As discussed in this post, I had the experience of a junkie getting into my building's garage and smashing every passenger side window. There are some people that really are just terrible enough that they're perfectly happy to trade $200 of your money for the possibility of finding 50 cents in your cupholder. Baltimore has more of these people than most places.
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I also won't ever travel to Baltimore for any reason anymore. I used to go fairly frequently as a kid to see Orioles games with my family, my dad being a fan, and Cal Ripken being kind of a local hero. As a teenager and young adult in the late 90's and early 00's, we used to go often for Otakon. That was definitely when I began to notice weirdness.
One year the guy manning the desk at the hotel straight up stole some of the cash we used to pay for the room, and we didn't realize it until we went to check out and they said we still owed $100 that hadn't been paid up front. Being suburban teens, we were just confused, tired, in a hurry to leave, and dutifully paid again. We didn't realize we were stolen from until we had time on the drive home to talk about it.
Year after year the encounters we had with street people got weirder and worse. To this day, Baltimore had some of the scariest, most destitute hobos I've ever seen. One guy tried to lure us down an alleyway with the promise of prostitutes outside the convention center.
Many years later around 2019 we went to see Joe Rogan in Baltimore. The show was great, exiting the parking garage after was an experience. A car next to us, instead of waiting their turn, had the girlfriend just stand in the middle of the line of cars so he could back out. Cars kept going around her. Eventually he kirked out and just went for it, fuck the guy behind him he might back into. Then he spent the entire 30 minutes it took to slowly trickle out of the parking garage leaning out his windows, screaming at the guy in front of him who didn't let him in to get out and fight him. This being two cars behind us, my then pregnant wife was terrified he would eventually pull a gun and start shooting in our general direction, because Baltimore. And that was the last time. It's just not worth it.
On one of my trips to Baltimore, I took a cab somewhere. My buddy and I were in that same boat (a bit older I suppose), but obviously seemed like rubes to our cab driver. He drove the wrong way, I absolutely believe intentionally, running up the fare. I had enough geographic sense of the city that I realized what was happening and hopped out of the car at a stop. My buddy, being even a bit more of a rube than me, was attempting to pay the driver as I was informing the driver what my opinion of him was; I did eventually get him to just get out, but he didn't seem to really get it until I had explained to him that this asshole was stealing from us.
I've been to some low-trust places in the States, but Baltimore is pretty easily number one.
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A bar so low it's painted on the floor.
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Do you just go to inner harbor?
Depends if I'm visiting friends or going to an O's game. Obviously not seeking out bad neighborhoods, but I've been around most of the colleges and a few of the suburbs.
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The whole white L isn’t too bad, especially if you don’t live in Baltimore and aren’t paying the taxes and car insurance.
/images/17236412002298768.webp
"Isn't too bad" by Baltimore standards, I guess - we took the kids to Baltimore to see the aquarium not that long ago, which I see is inside the L, and we still got hassled by a homeless guy for money, literally inside the crowded fast-food place where we were eating lunch. I guess he figured the staff would be too busy with the lunch rush to notice him and throw him out, and a place so close to the aquarium would have plenty of affluent tourists.
Yeah I’m not defending Baltimore by any means but the white L is similar to most other American cities (that is to say kind of crappy and trending worse, but you probably won’t die). The inner harbor is part of the L, but being the tourist center of the city is a favorite homeless/beggar area.
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There are people who still desperately cling onto the notion that crime is directly a result of poverty. It is very hard for them to explain how Baltimore (GDP per capita of ~$60k USD) has more murders annually than Italy ($35k).
Oh, Italy also has roughly a 100x larger population (60 million vs 600 thousand). But of course they are famously free of organized crime.
Maybe the real underlying cause is that murder rate is inversely proportional to pizza quality?
Starting to think this would show up as a strong correlation...
One of my coworkers used to live in Boston. He insists that one particular pizza joint was a money laundering operation. Walk in to pick up, see that it looks nothing like your order, take it and leave anyway because the only staff are straight out of a Seagal movie.
It wasn't in Arlington, was it? I recently went to a small local pizza joint there that was completely empty except for the guy behind the counter. Looked like a pretty normal older gentleman, but he seemed very unhappy about me walking in and offering to buy something from him, the 2 slices of pizza I ordered took much longer than I would have expected to prepare, and the pizza wasn't very good, and it made me wonder if some money laundering was going on. Maybe this is an entire genre of pizza joints.
And now I'm reminded of this Tumblr thread on hole-in-the-wall pizza joints as possible mob fronts. The OP:
And perhaps my favorite bit:
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No idea, but I think this was in the 90s.
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What does the histogram look like? A bimodal distribution is compatible with the poverty->crime theory.
The nation’s capital is next door; they’re included in the same pay scale. I doubt white-collar policy wonks are smashing windows for drug money. But they’re definitely bringing up that GDP per capita.
I believe Jordan Peterson once said the strongest correlation in social science is between income inequality in a place and the rate of male homicide -- and the second-strongest is between IQ and various indicators of life success.
It would not at all surprise me to find such a bimodal distribution in a place known for criminality, if that correlation is indeed as strong as he let on.
I'm still quite sad about what happened to JP. Benzos, and getting off Benzos, definitely did a number on him. His podcast isn't that bad, but dunno what's going on with his Twitter. Canada also did him really dirty and put a huge chip on his shoulder.
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As you can see the among EU and US states, those which have the lowest gdp per capita are all EU ones. Yet the states, EU or US, which have the lowest murder rate per capita are also all EU ones. Any explanation why relies upon microgeography to explain away the anti-correlation shown @johnfabian, must look at the wider picture.
The bimodal distribution is an argument against using average GDP to assume away poverty. Clearly, poor people can exist even when wealthy ones are nearby.
Is it actually anti-correlated? I would expect two similar curves, each with a negative correlation between wealth and murders. But one of them was flattened by two world wars and an iron curtain. I can’t draw plots at the moment, but I bet you could make all sorts of correlations with the right gerrymandering.
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Even ignoring the circumstance that GDP (especially per capita) tells you almost nothing about real poverty, productivity or really anything and this might as well be Catholics wondering why the number of people with perfect pitch is not correlated with Gross Holy Water Consumption, I thought it's fairly well accepted that what matters for the poverty -> antisocial behaviour is not absolute wealth but perceived relative wealth. Italians in Italy are not surrounded by a society that is conspicuously more affluent than they are.
I would never claim that poverty has no effect on crime. I think besides being on some intuitive level obvious there are very broad relations one one can see, that go beyond simply that people who commit crimes tend to have the same kind of cognitive impairments that also keep one poor.
But this supposed iron law that crime is purely the product of poverty is something you see repeated everywhere where even the simplest of glances at the correlation can see how patently false that is.
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I do not accept this claim. I am sure that many people in polite company articulate as much, I doubt the sincerity of the belief. I have too much experience with people that are obviously relatively poor posing absolutely no threat to me and people who don't seem to be in any particular financial stress being the kind of people I want to avoid. I also don't see a plausible mechanism to go from low perceived relative wealth to just throwing garbage on the ground in your own neighborhood; the more obvious causal chain is that people that lack intellect and impulse control are poor because of their low intellect and poor impulse control, which also leads to their antisocial behavior. People that are poor by circumstance don't engage in the same level of antisocial behavior.
I’m also reluctant to blame perception/envy, but how about cost of living?
I dunno. I still can’t decide if a 10th percentile income would have more buying power within a big economy or a small one. Intuitively, I think the small one, but the math isn’t checking out…
I am fairly confident, though, that housing regulations + property value combine to put a floor on housing costs. So it’d be possible for places with higher inequality to chop off the bottom of the supply, leaving more people homeless. Hence California.
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Except sex crime of course.
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Well I would kill for a good pizza, so that tracks.
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From your perspective, what would the local government need to do to improve life in Baltimore? And why do they not do it, whatever it is?
(I imagine nobody knows re: the pizza. It's not that hard to make a good pizza.)
The problem with Baltimore is the people in Baltimore. I don't think genocide followed by suicide is an option the local government can exercise. But maybe when WWIII happens we'll get lucky, although I doubt our adversaries would do us that favor.
New Orleans is very mildly better than Baltimore because of a lax attitude towards police brutality, while still being a very black city with few economic opportunities.
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My impression is that the situation in Great Migration cities especially deteriorated after deindustrialization. If there were still good livings available for people with relatively low human capital or skills, I imagine the overall chaos would be a lot lower. I've never heard a good answer to the question of: "If we transition to a "knowledge economy," what are the people without useful knowledge supposed to do with themselves?"
Of course I don't dispute that the lever of "actually enforce all of the law, throughout the city" seems to have been abandoned.
I've read a theory by one of the commenters on Steve Sailer's blog that the unprecedented economic prosperity between 1945-73 in the US had the effect of large masses of impulsive, low-IQ people with high time preference from the rural areas of the South and the Midwest moving to Great Migration cities to work in manufacturing (heavy industry in particular). After the oil shocks, stagflation and deindustrialization, it was mostly these people and their descendants who were hit hard, and had no practical means of moving away and getting re-trained to do other things, so they're just stuck there in their misery.
Right - that's a better way of phrasing it.
To me, this appears to be obviously true, and it certainly adds to my cynicism that addressing this situation does not seem to be part of anyone's political platform; I believe the going theory is that those affected are solid clients of the Democratic party, and actually trying to improve their lots (or the lots of the people stuck with them) does not change the political calculus at all, so there's no need to do it.
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Why don’t you try what Longshanks tried in Braveheart? Well, I guess that would require the denizens of Baltimore to believe in marriage….
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Is this also happening because car insurance is cheaper or more loosely regulated in Virginia? Or is there something else also at play here?
Virginia is a little weird for, until literally last month, allowing either car insurance or paying a one-time fee. Unlike most states, where you're often required to show proof of insurance or can have your license suspended without it, even legitimate dealers wouldn't and often couldn't check insurance status.
((A lot of the temp tags are just entirely fake, produced in Photoshop or MSPaint. Others are from 'licensed dealers' that sprout up, print a ton of tags, and close immediately after.))
Virginia also has much laxer vehicle safety inspections, mostly just an eyeball inspection on tires/brakes/mirrors/exhaust (though, to their credit, they're done annually); Maryland requires them only on transfer of a vehicle but can involve upwards of an hour on a vehicle lift, and no small number of marginal cars will flunk MD inspections consistently.
Both states have smog and emissions testing, though I don't think VA temp tags require it.
As an aside, it will never cease to amaze me that some states require vehicle safety inspections. Coming from a state that never requires any inspections ever, it’s completely jarring to me that people find such an intrusive policy not only normal, but actually a positive good.
It's not hard to come up with support for a minimal version -- every mechanic worth their salt has had some customer come in with a car where the brake pads have dissolved, the tires are bald, and the frame is about to fold in half, and the customer decides that they'll just drive it home. There's a libertarian argument that these problems solve themselves, and it's not wrong, but no few of these people end up taking out innocents with them. There's a pragmatic argument that the costs are huge and the benefits small, and it's probably right, but it's an ugly one to make.
The trouble's that even accepting that minimal version, it quickly turns from a 'is this car remotely safe' into a 'does someone who only buys new cars like how this one looks', or even a 'how do we get a guaranteed easy job for a handful of schmucks who can't be trusted with a wrench'? And even people who do recognize how bad the ugly versions of these programs get don't care that much about them, so it's a hard political problem.
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Bold of you to think those of us stuck with such thing actually view it as a positive or good.
At least, that's my take on it. I view them as less than worthless and more an annoying road-tax that I have to pay so often(on top of getting my windshield replaced, again) and a punishment for being a good little citizen that criminals just skirt on by without a care.
Assuming that a critical mass of residents in an inspection state hated inspections, they'd get rid of it. There's at least some people who support inspections or it wouldn't exist.
Have any states gone from an inspection regime to a non-inspection regime?
Oklahoma axed them some time back: https://oksenate.gov/press-releases/mandatory-vehicle-inspections-abolished-repeal-will-save-oklahomans-12-million
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Texas voted to phase them out, but hasn't abolished them yet.
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https://www.nashville.gov/departments/health/environmental-health/vehicle-inspection
Metro Nashville (TN) abolished emissions inspections in 2022.
I lived there and suffered through those for many years. There was MUCH rejoicing when it went away.
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The steelman: cars are dangerous heavy machinery and neglect of maintenance causes a significant amount of death and destruction. Public safety is substantially served by requiring cars be kept in good order. Just like how it's reasonable that cars be required to have working head and tail lights, its reasonable to require they have working brakes and suspension, and checking those requires a mechanical inspection.
Oh, I get the argument for it, but I have a similar instinctual response as I would toward a law requiring annual housing inspections or mandating preemptive parenting classes before couples are allowed to have children. It just seems weirdly invasive.
Driving already requires a license, although I’m not sure if inspections specifically do anything.
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I mean, at the end of the day, operating a motor vehicle on public roads paid for via taxation is a privilege, not a right. You can drive a car in any condition on your own private property.
I’m not arguing; I’m just conveying my impression from a state with fewer restrictions and more freedom.
It’s starting to feel like talking about freedom of speech with Europeans. You make the merest mention that you appreciate America’s freedom of speech, and they start tripping over themselves to tell you why their much more restrictive version is actually better and more socially responsible. I get that the states that require vehicle inspections have their reasons. I just find the requirements bizarre, intrusive, and off-putting. No amount of argument is going to change my mind, as mine is an instinctive and emotional response, not a carefully-thought through rational one.
In other words, it's an argument from dignity (liberal) against an argument for safety (traditionalist-progressive).
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