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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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