June 14, 2004
High real estate prices in Fells Point -- and social tension
This is pretty amazing -- $700,000 loft homes to be built in Fells Point.
A discussion on the Baltimore Sun's local news forum presents two themes. Theme One, Who wants to spend that much to live in noisy, no-parking Baltimore? Fumes posts:
For that much cash, I want the driveway, a big house, and a cemetary quiet neighborhood.
LonelyDove adds:
Who can afford that much money to live in the city? I don't care if it's Canton, Fells Point, Butchers Hill etc, there is no house in the city worth that kind of money. For the money I would want a hugh house in the county with a built in pool, deck, big big flower bed, lots of trees, central a/c and at least five bedrooms for my brood to run and hide in. My husband and I both work and we could never afford those kind of prices.
Theme Two: What are the rich folk in their $700,000 loft homes going to do when local Welcome Wagon, the punks, gang-bangers and hoodlums, come a'calling from rotten neighborhoods and public housing a short stroll away? mj posts:
... these little regentrification enclaves may be nice, they don't mean a thing if you have a forgotten area located two blocks away or hoodlums from the hellholes crossing over into the "chosen areas"... And that is why he [the mayor] gets so defensive and almost irrational because many people know that all the cosmetic improvements etc do not mean a thing if you cannot get the basics right. Rome is burning and MOM wants to measure his success (and the City's) on whether Fells Point gets a Starbuck francise.
Bingo! A precious geographic insight. One more time: "... these little regentrification enclaves may be nice, they don't mean a thing if you have a forgotten area located two blocks away or hoodlums from the hellholes crossing over into the 'chosen areas.' "
What is interesting to me is to see how quickly forum posters pounce on the mayor (MOM = Martin O'Malley) and his attempt to get more Starbucks for Baltimore. You can't see right away why the mayor would have a problem when a developer decides to build $700,000 loft homes.
But perceptive residents immediate make the real-world connection on the tensions between Baltimore's booming neighborhoods to the south and east of the harbor with poorer, more inland neighborhoods literally half-blocks away.
I dealt with this dichotomy an earlier blog, Baltimore's Upper Fells Point: Worst of all worlds. Who wants both Starbucks yuppies AND your car windows busted in? How does one deal with streams of transient trouble-makers drawn to the magnet of your corner store, open to all hours with a gracious reception to the local dealers, on what should be one of the nicest residential streets in Baltimore, Ann Street?
We had problems Saturday night/Sunday morning, when a Latin gang rolled on to Ann Street. A vehicle double-parked in front of our house and 10 guys in wifebeater T-shirts got out. They started screaming and swinging baseball bats around a black SUV, then went and banged on a door on Pratt Street. Parked in front of the Pratt Street house they found a second black SUV, apparently the target of their gang activity. They started breaking the windows with their bats and clambering over the hoods of other cars before driving away!
Rehabbers and developers are trying to get close to $400,000 for houses in Upper Fells Point, no doubt from Starbucks customers, amid gang violence?
And poster Bud notes:
700K for a house. Then, the liberal city government will force you to financially support those in other areas of the city that have no desire to fend for themselves. ... and people living in certain areas of the city feel they are somehow "entitled" to your money.
Baltimore lacks buffers between many of its war zones and its expensive, let alone middle-class housing. It's a geographic curiosity compared to Washington, D.C., where Rock Creek Park (less so now) used to clearly divide rich and poor. I am not advocating economic or geographic apartheid, only noting as someone that tends to analyze social issues in a geographic and spatial manner, that the middle class and the rich will not stay in areas that are not safe, and protection has not changed much since the days of castle keeps and moats. Hence the huge popularity of gated communities in Florida and California.
In urban Baltimore, we have the perfect opposite of gated communities.
There is a beauty to our chaos for the amateur sociologist. David Simon had to drive from home to write his book 
The Corner, about a drug area in West Baltimore. I just have to sit in my office in the front of my house and turn my neck to look out the window.
For those who aren't amateur sociologists, or writers or moviemakers, however, the endless stream of transients and problems gets old, and eventually people close out the neighborhood, shutting out friend and enemy alike, or move.
Baltimore City puts public housing in prime, desirable areas (between downtown and Fells Point, for example, around Johns Hopkins hopsital, and formerly right beside Little Italy) in such a way as to maximize friction and minimize the chance for a truly healthy, propering middle-class district to coalesce around all sides of the waterfront, and lift all boats.
A realtor once reluctantly pointed out to me, to my pestering about why certain blocks stall and die, how food kitchens drag down Mount Vernon and create an abrupt halt to improvements marching through northeast Butchers Hill and the western edge of Fells Point.
In balkanized Baltimore, we have oases that attempt stability despite drug toughs who move in on many a corner. You would think someone sitting on property worth 300 to 700K would protect their investment with a bit of sweat equity -- a baseball bat or shotgun -- but people in certain income brackets spend a lot of their time earning the mortgage money and commuting and don't need a criminal record earned in their rare down time as a result of being goaded by street punks quite wise in the quirks of the legal system.
Hence the unease on the local news forum at seeing a real estate bubble. Hence people that buy an expensive Fells Point home and retreat to live in their back rooms, away from the vagabonding out on the sidewalk.
The reason a local news forum quickly turns from apparent good news for local homeowners (this project might raise my home value!) to negative assessments of the mayor is that no one has any confidence that education, jobs or public safety are coming any time soon to the poor areas of the city.
Various theories are afloat on why our once tough-on-crime mayor, now moved on to trivial concerns such as Starbucks for city yuppies, has fallen so short of his initial promise. The most convincing theory is that he relizes that the job of mayor is a one-way ticket to political oblivion.
Too bad. It'd be nice if the youth who roam down from Chapel and Monument streets were on their way to real jobs, not their posts within the drug economy. Why, the drug runners and dealers are the ambitious strivers, compared to those with no goals at all, except to smash a window or two.
- posted by jbelliveau at 12:23 PM in The Neighborhood
