I just read the wiki page about the wire and it’s a great read
Meanwhile, the US ATTY GENERAL wants another season of
THE WIRE.
Several of the show’s cast members were speaking at the Justice Department on Tuesday, where the topic at hand was the exposure of children to drug use and selling. The actors showed clips from The Wire, and the show was praised for its accurate and compelling depiction of the plight of kids stuck in the middle of drug culture
Speaking to these two points for a moment: I think you’ve got it exactly, here. On my first day as an undergrad interning in DC six years ago, the coordinator for my program dragged all the interns into a room for “DC Orientation.” He taped a giant map of DC to the whiteboard, and said something along the lines of:
Obviously, this was a very very heavily simplified guide to DC, and arguably too much so. And things have changed a bit in the past six years - I’m moving to the Southwest Waterfront in less than two weeks, and really looking forward to it. But the basic idea - that there are giant, contiguous swathes of Rich DC and Poor DC that largely correspond to quadrant lines and the Anacostia River - is still valid.
Also, with regard to abandoned houses: I saw a lot of those when I was visiting Baltimore, even near the JHU main campus. One of the ways in which DC poverty is very different from this struck me when I was working in the Trinidad neighborhood back in the summer of 2008. Trinidad is a pretty poor neighborhood in the Northeast quadrant of DC, not far from Gallaudet University. Summer of 2008, they had a nasty string of drive-by shootings - sufficiently bad that the MPD partially locked-down the neighborhood, only letting people drive through if they could show they lived there.
So - not a great place to live. But the thing is, it looks like a fantastic place. Tidy row-houses with lawns, albeit small ones, pleasant streets - I mean, if it were more metro-accessible and I didn’t know about the crime rate, I would very seriously consider living there. The place doesn’t look like you’d expect poverty to look, and that’s pretty normal for DC. Baltimore poverty looks like poverty.
Just one comment, if I may, since I started this thread. The intent of the thread was just to elicit comments about blowback by Baltimore in response to the series, which many have provided, along with an interesting discussion about the Baltimore/DC environs. Once comments about plot started showing up, it was just courtesy to place them in spoiler boxes for people who haven’t watched the series yet, but who may have dropped in to see what people were saying about Baltimore and the topic at hand. I didn’t get around to seeing it until very recently, myself. The death of those two characters were major turning points in the series. No big deal, as you say.
Um, this article would disagree with you. Now, if you want to live in the outskirts of DC like Fair Fax, VA or Montgomery
Co, MD it would be a hell of a lot better but you’d better have big, big, bucks. Many from there are moving out here,
about 30 miles NE of Bmore because nice housing is lower, especially with the new housing bust going on, and for
a better way of life. We’re seeing a lot of damn Skins colors out here. Damn it.
http://www.brookings.edu/opinions/2005/1110cities_berube.aspx
Forgive me, but I’m not certain how this article is inconsistent with what I said. I said that poverty in DC is concentrated in certain areas, and that these areas tend to look somewhat nicer (that is, the houses are in better shape) than their Baltimore counterparts. The linked article says that there is a lot of poverty in DC, that it’s highly concentrated (as in New Orleans), and smart housing and education programs are needed to fix this. I agree, and I certainly never meant to suggest that there isn’t poverty in DC - there plainly is. It’s just that it takes a different form than in Baltimore.
I’m surprised by your suggestion, as well, that you’d need to live far outside (preferably far outside) the District to have a liveable neighborhood. I spent three years of law school living in Van Ness (or North Cleveland Park, if you like) - as green, quiet, and safe a neighborhood as anyone could wish.
I lived for a year on Boling AFB in Anacostia in the mid-80s, which is certainly not like living in SE DC proper. Two of my kids, however, attended elementary school in SE, as I couldn’t afford to send all four of them to private schools on military salary. They had a tough time of it there, but they sure learned what it meant to be a minority in a place where minorities are not welcome. There were fights or harassment nearly every day. I used to ride the bus to work from there to Foggy Bottom, having to transfer while still in the heart of Southeast. I never had a problem with anybody other than panhandlers, but then I wasn’t looking for trouble, either. Comparing what I saw in SE and what I was seeing of the poor sections of Baltimore on The Wire, there is little comparison between the two places.
The general advice from Diplomatic Security about WDC was about what you got from your program coordinator: don’t sightsee in these sections of town, and it’s a bad idea to even go downtown at night alone. I’d never lived in a place where somebody gave me those sorts of warnings.
well jeez maybe they should read the forums for the wire. a lot of urban kids find it quite glamorous, it’s not something that seems to discourage them from a life of crime
Lighten up, Francis.
They probably can’t read.
:rolleyes:
I’m going to nitpick even further on Trinidad. The crime was happening in the northern portions of Trinidad. The southern part is already gentrifying and has been for some time. The tidy pretty rowhouses tend to be on Florida and Morse. These are only a two blocks from the bars on H Street. Weirdly enough, there were no murders in Trinidad in 2009.
The part of SW near the Waterfront and the federal buildings is nice. There are some dicier parts near the public housing project, but it isn’t a bad area.
I don’t go downtown in any city. The only time I go to downtown Bmore is when the
Baltimore Ravens are playing and I’m surrounded by 70,000 maniacs.
I live 3 hrs from NY and never go there. Good place to get killed.
OUr club went to a Ravens/Skins game in their house and they were pretty wild. I had to
pull a Skins fan away from a gal in our club. Years later she introduced me to her husband
and said I protected her in DC and he thanked me.
There are a couple of times the line “the cheese stands alone” is used, suggesting the Farmer in the Dell.
OK dick.
Bwahahahahaha!
The 1980s called. They want their paranoid stereotype back.
New York City is, and has been for some time, the safest big city in the United States. And in the sort of places that tourists and visitors tend to go (Manhattan, mainly), it’s even safer still.
Think again.
Murders were on the rise in 2010 by double digits - and a 14%
increase in rapes.
If you like it so much why don’t you go so you’ll be
the next one.
I’ll stay here by the Upper Chesapeake Bay - the land of
pleasant living.
Oh, boom, you got me there! New York’s crime rate went up last year! For one year!
Of course, your figures say nothing about New York’s comparative safety. You look at change over a single year, without considering how New York compares to other large cities, and without considering how New York’s current figures compare with its earlier crime figures.
Here’s a table for you to start with, so you can see the changes in New York’s crime rates over the past two decades:
1990 1995 1998 2001 2010
Murder 2,262 1,181 629 649 536
Rape 3,126 3,018 2,476 1,930 1,372
Robbery 100,280 59,733 39,003 27,873 19,529
Fel. Assault 44,122 35,528 28,848 23,020 17,041
Burglary 122,055 75,649 47,181 32,694 18,685
Source (PDF)
In a city of 8.3 million people, that’s a murder rate for 2010 of 6.43 per 100,000.
Here’s a look at the murder rate (per 100,000 inhabitants) for US cities of over 1 million people for the year 2010, based on the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report. Raw data can be downloaded here (Excel file). I calculated the rate per 100,000 myself. Cities listed in order of population.
New York 6.43
Los Angeles 7.63
Chicago 15.25
Houston 11.79
Philadelphia 19.64
Phoenix 7.58
San Antonio 5.67
San Diego 2.21
Dallas 11.33
San Jose 2.06
San Diego and San Jose are comfortable winners. San Antonio is in third, and then just behind is New York.
So, you really showed me. New York might be only the fourth safest big city now! I guess that supports your earlier assertion that it’s a “good place to get killed.” :rolleyes:
If you don’t like big cities, fine. If you have no interest in going to New York, that’s fine also. Just try not to spout bullshit on topics where you clearly don’t know what you’re talking about.
What did I tell you about insults? This is an official warning. And mhendo, please let it go.
Your point on Trinidad is fair - there are worse neighborhoods in DC, and parts are gentrifying. It’s still fairly poor, though - this isn’t Columbia Heights, for example, where gentrification has more-or-less run its course. My main point, though, was that Trinidad doesn’t look poor - and that’s pretty much true even in the northern blocks. Brentwood is another good example - fairly poor, and probably more consistently dangerous than Trinidad, but tidy rowhouses that actually look quite nice.
I agree with you on the Southwest Waterfront - that’s why I’m moving there. 
I highly recommend it to other DC Dopers. My place is two blocks from the Washington Channel and the Anacostia Riverwalk! And next to the Arena Stage! And I’ve got a duck pond! (Hurray, ducks!)
Funny you should mention Columbia Heights. That to me has always felt like a neighborhood that gets sketchier the minute you move away from the principal streets. From my recollection, property crime there is pretty high, and there have been a few stabbings there in recent memory.
I have a friend who lives in Potomac Place and he really likes it there. His brother lived in one of the condos on 4th Street and really liked it as well. It is a lot quieter than a lot of the city. What dissuaded us from moving there was that a lot of the places we liked had very high condo fees.