Yah, condo fees in Southwest are insane. The purchase prices are quite decent - even I could afford the mortgage, if I wanted - but some of the condo fees rival the rent at cheaper (but still decent) apartment buildings.
Columbia Heights has had a few stabbings, true, but it’s also a densely-populated area with a lot of people coming and going; you’ll get some idiots. I’ve always considered it to be pretty darned safe, though, at least north of 11th Street. It isn’t Cleveland Park, but I’d live there without hesitation; in fact, I very nearly did. I was going to sign the lease on a building in Mt. Pleasant, but a friend told me a unit had opened up in my first-choice building on the Waterfront.
I’m definitely not saying it’s stabby-town, but I consider the H Street area to be about the equivalent in safety. Trinidad is less than three blocks from the bars on H.
I looked at a condo on the 1200 Block of 4th Street, and the condo fees six years ago were already $660.00 a month. I checked a listing in the same building a few months ago and the fees were almost a thousand a month. I really liked the area since it a short walk to Metro and my wife could have walked to work, but the fees were high and I suspected that they were going to go up significantly.
I consider H Street to be somewhat less safe than most of Columbia Heights - but absent more time with crime statistics than I care to invest, I can’t prove it, and I freely admit that my personal feelings aren’t evidence. shrugs
As for those condo fees- yah, that’s pretty much exactly what I’ve seen. I can’t understand why anyone would buy a condo with those fees associated - you’re combining a monthly mortgage with a money-sink as fierce as renting an apartment. That seems crazy to me.
I lived in both B’more and DC as well and I agree with those who say that DC poverty is more concentrated.
I also lived a few mins walk from Hopkins, on the 3300 block of Guilford. That was a pretty decent block. One or two blocks east or south and it got super ghetto. Then nice again! Then ghetto.
A few blocks north of me was like bajillion dollar houses. To the east of that was Waverly, which is again super ghetto.
That being said, I’d much rather live in Baltimore than DC. I adore that city, and to me the Wire is so breathtakingly magnificent as a show . . .
Waverly is definitely not “super ghetto,” especially not by Baltimore standards. It’s a working-class, predominantly-black neighborhood, with some recent white arrivals and some middle-class gentrification going on in certain parts. There are virtually no empty or boarded-up houses in Waverly, a fact that, all by itself, puts the neighborhood far above the really down-at-heel areas of Baltimore.
Yes, the shopping strip on Greenmount Avenue has its share of pawn shops and porn shops, there are some homeless people who hang out in the area, and a lot of the locals don’t have a lot of money. I’m sure there’s also drug use going on in the neighborhood, but i’ve never seen any sign of intensive dealing, and the Baltimore murder maps produced by media outlets like the Baltimore Sun and the City Paper show that the area is not among the top homicide areas either.
Waverly doesn’t even register on the list of worst Baltimore neighborhoods. It’s nowhere near as bad as some of the East Baltimore areas around the Johns Hopkins Hospital, and neither is it anything like West Baltimore in the region either side of Franklin and Edmondson.
Yeah okay maybe I was a bit liberal with the use of the phrase “super ghetto.” I dunno, I didn’t see all of Baltimore but I walked through parts of Waverly on my way to church on Sunday mornings and it looked Wire-ish. Deserted, dirty, not well-maintained,etc. I considered anyplace with blue lights to be “ghetto” but that might be unfair. You seem to know the city better though so I’ll go with your interpretation.
There are definitely aspects of Waverly that seem a bit down-at-heel. It’s not a prosperous area, by any means. Among the people who live there, most are probably getting by on low-wage jobs, and have to struggle to make ends meet. If you go walking around there at night, you probably stand a chance of being robbed, but then again, i know of plenty of people who were robbed on the streets of Charles Village and Oakenshawe (where i lived) as well.
The very fact that you felt that you could walk through Waverly to get to church shows that it’s not an especially bad area. There are parts of Baltimore where, if you’re not local, you wouldn’t walk through even in the middle of the day, especially if you’re white and likely to stand out like a sore thumb. And there are neighborhoods where even driving through can be a dicey proposition.
I understand that places like Waverly can look troublesome, especially to people who come from places that are very different from Baltimore. I not only came from elsewhere, i came from Australia, and Baltimore was like nowhere i’ve ever lived before. I’d never seen that level of urban poverty in a first-world country, and i’d also never before lived in a city that was two-thirds black. The first time i went to Waverly, it looked a little dodgy to me too. But the thing is, once you go back a few times, you realize that the majority of the people are just regular working people trying to get by in a poor city under shitty circumstances. Most of them aren’t going to rob you, and most of them aren’t criminals. We did our shopping in Waverly all the time, and were never hassled.
Sorry if it seems like i’m on a bit of a soapbox, but in the time i lived in Baltimore, i got tired of hearing the whining of Johns Hopkins undergrads who constantly complained about the “ghetto,” and who seemed to define “ghetto” as “anyplace that doesn’t look like the New Jersey suburb where i went to high school.”
Mhendo, I definitely hear you on “whiny undergrad” types. So many people were like, “OMG you walk down Charles St at dusk???” to me. From what I understand, in those types of neighborhoods, you’re not very likely to be harmed if you’re just a random passerby, and I would think nothing of walking through those places in broad daylight.
Although, JHU kids are not as bad as some because many of them grew up in urban-ish places. Where I live and go to school now is bumblefuck GA but these sheltered little jerks here act like going to the grocery store at 10:00 at night is liable to get you shot.
The Wire is nothing short of brilliant; IMHO, it’s one of the top 5 TV shows of all time. I never saw it on it’s original broadcast, but did catch the entire series on DVD. I liked that the series didn’t try to solve the world’s problems and/or wrap everything up in a neat bow at the end, but instead presented things realistically. Though each season was great, possibly my favorite individual episodes are 9 & 10 from Season 5. Especially the last 6-7 minutes of Episode 10…sheer poetry.
The theme song Way down in the Hole by Tom Waits was definitely one of the most iconic elements of the show. I enjoyed how each season had a different version of the same song - my favorite was probably the 5th season theme (sung by Steve Earle). The theme song(s) set the tone for each respective season, and gave each season it’s own individual vibe.
One especially interesting aspect of The Wire for me was that I grew up in the Baltimore, MD area years ago & the show truly captures the city extremely well, i.e. the downtown rowhouses, the waterfront (S2) & Harborplace, and the accents. When I first saw the show I was completely unaware that three of the actors were from the UK - they sounded like they had all grown up in the B-more area. Though I had moved from the Baltimore area years before The Wire premiered, when I started watching the show it really felt like I was right back there, which is something that isn’t always easy to achieve.
This also holds true for the superb '90’s series Homicide: Life on the Street & the HBO mini-series The Corner.
Here’s an interesting retrospective on the show from 2012:
Idris Elba was on tv last month (the Graham Norton Show) and told a good story of being invited to a function at the White House when the Obama’s were there - the president being a huge fan:
So Obama walks up to Elba and says it great to finally meet my second favourite character in The wire, and they both laughed because pretty well everyone has the same favourite character.