It Doesn't Always Have to be Like This

In the time that I've lived in Baltimore, it's been almost true by definition that "you're never more than 3 blocks from a bad neighborhood." Tonight I was driving through the city and thought "Perhaps it doesn't always have to be like this."

When you get down to it, it's pretty incredible that I even live in this city. My parents are firmly from the generation that grew up outside the city (their parents having moved to the suburbs before they were born / from a rural area) and I think their idea of city life was cemented during the late 1970's (mid-80's at the latest). To walk after dark in an urban area is to take your life into your own hands, even at 8 PM in Mount Vernon. To me, you just have to be aware of your surroundings and in large swathes of this city you're going to be fine (although there are even larger swathes where you might want to be concerned).

So, just as my parents formed an opinion about how cities operate, I've got this picture of how cities work and I'm thinking that perhaps in a few years it will be outdated. My impression of cities (of which Baltimore is an extreme example) is that there are the "good areas" full of late-model apartments or rehabbed townhouses or warehouses converted to condos and the "bad areas" full of poverty, dilapidated housing, and crime. The transition from one to the other is very sharp (as little as a couple blocks or a bridge) and usually marked by recently rehabbed homes, construction, or real estate sale signs.

Tonight I realized that given the current financial collapse, the Baltimore real estate boom may have tailed off for good. I am still feeling slightly optimistic that Baltimore gets hurt less than the rest of the nation, so hopefully it doesn't go much the other way (I hear the B'more real estate market is holding up better than the national average). If that's true, then here's what we might see - the rich stay rich, the poor stay poor, but perhaps some middle-income neighborhoods will start to exist in between.

Seems crazy, right? For the last decade or so as fast as an area became at all reasonable to live in real estate values jumped up so quickly that only rich yuppie types could afford them. Since the rich and middle-class had been steadily departing cities for the previous few decades, that meant that they started pushing back poor neighborhoods. This has sort of ended, but if we're lucky, it won't totally reverse. If the expansion slows down then it might be possible for middle-income families to start migrating to the transitional areas near the rich yuppie neighborhoods. In time, the transitional neighborhoods could become a reasonable area.

I don't know, call me crazy, but I kind of do like Baltimore and I do want to believe that urban living can be a reasonable lifestyle in the modern world. I'm not crazy enough to think we're going to have mixed-income neighborhoods, but is it too much to dream to imagine a city with less of a bimodal income distribution?