A Head Hunter is hitting me up for a spot in downtown Baltimore. Maybe more like South Baltimore, near that casino.
What can Local SDMBers tell me about living there? I can see relatively cheap real estate prices, compared to Sunny California.
Don’t live there. Too much gun violence.
Lived in the area for 30 years. The casino is in the same neighborhood as the Orioles and Ravens stadiums, and generally OK during the day.
For living arrangements I would look outside the city in the surrounding counties, Anne Arundel and Howard are both good and safe.
I grew up in Baltimore county and my mom and my sibs all still live in the Baltimore metro area. As with most any place, there are nice neighborhoods and awful neighborhoods within commuting distance of south Baltimore. I’m not sure I’d want to live within walking distance, altho things have changed since I lived there, so I don’t have the most current info.
But if you can commute from the 'burbs, there are a number of places where you don’t have to worry about bullets flying. Personally, I like the area around Baltimore - lots to do in the city itself, proximity to DC for all it has to offer, close to Virginia and Pennsylvania, water-related activities on the Chesapeake Bay and many of the rivers. Let them fly you to town for an interview - it would be worth a look.
It’s fine. It’s a big city. It has the same problems as every other big city in America.
I’ll tell you one thing about Baltimore: the “bad” parts are pretty random. One block will be solid corporate high-rises, the next block might be entirely abandoned bombed-out buildings. It’s a lot better than it used to be, but it’s still impossible not to notice this.
If living in Baltimore proper isn’t appealing to you, the Maryland Area Regional Commuter (MARC) train runs south from Baltimore all the way to DC, and east from Baltimore to Cecil County (in the far northeast corner of Maryland), so your options for getting to Baltimore are pretty wide-open. Another line runs from Frederick to DC and all the way out to Martinsburg, WV. Here’s a map of the system: http://www.perryvillemd.org/sites/perryvillemd/files/file/file/marc-train-map.gif
No one has mentioned the weather, which may be pretty disappointing to a Californian. We have so few warm, comfortable, low humidity days that at my house we call them “California days.”
I grew up in Carroll County, to the west-northwest. The Inner Harbor was a fun place to go hang out on a weekend evening. I wouldn’t go there now, because it would be so sad to see what reports say it has become.
If you don’t mind commuting, there are plenty of places to go where you can get away from congestion if you want.
If you do move there, enjoy a crab feast for me.
I have a soft spot for Baltimore, but it is very east coast and if you don’t like that, or aren’t familiar with the culture, you might not like it. The east coast can be faster paced and people can be more assertive/aggressive. I can tell you that the breakfasts in the city jail are surprisingly good, if that’s important to you.
Granted it’s been many years, but when I lived there it wasn’t a city, it was a big small town. Except for some touristy spots, the corporate/business area rolled up the sidewalk at 5pm.
…& Camden Yards sux! The seats down the lines are angled towards centerfield instead of towards the plate. This causes you to look not just over people in front of you but at an angle. If anyone of about 10 people moved, you couldn’t see the pitch delivered.
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I used to work at the University Medical Center (I designed equipment for a neurobiologist), which isn’t that far from where the casino is. There are a lot of areas around there that are fine during the day, but you don’t necessarily want to be there late at night. Lexington Market is a good example. It’s a great place to eat lunch during the day, but you don’t really want to walk through there after dark.
I personally wouldn’t want to live too close to that area. That whole area used to be slums and warehouses. Then they put in the Inner Harbor and revitalized the entire area. The end result is you have a bunch of really nice areas and a bunch of leftover slum areas intertwined.
You can get to the casino area fairly quickly since 295 and 395 both dump out around there. Traffic can be a bit of a bitch, but it’s no worse than any other big city (and much better than Pittsburgh - I swear they intentionally designed that city to trap people downtown).
I lived in Glen Burnie (I worked at the airport at the time), Catonsville/Arbutus, and Chase. Glen Burnie is pretty far outside of the city, but you can shoot right up 295 and get there quickly. When I lived in Chase (northeast, near Martin State Airport), getting downtown was a bit more of a pain, but I did that every day. It wasn’t that bad. Howard County is a lot more expensive, and I personally don’t think it’s worth the expense. I liked Anne Arundel County. The southwest side of Baltimore gets to be a royal bitch for traffic from about November to the end of December. Interstate 70 backs up really bad and Maryland 29 between 70 and Columbia also backs up. Year-round, the west side of the beltway (695) from a bit above where it meets I-70 all the way down to 95, and the north side, especially around 83, are the worst.
There are a lot of decent areas to live in around the Catonsville/Arbutus area, though again, some bad areas as well. There are also back roads that you can take to get downtown that aren’t too bad if the beltway is clogged.
These days I work in Owings Mills. I’m more of a rural person at heart, so I live all the way up in PA. Gives me a very long drive to work. You don’t want to live anywhere near where I do if you work on the southern side of the city. Although, to be fair, going down 83 will get you downtown fairly quickly as long as it’s not too clogged with traffic.
Sorry for the double-post, but thought of this after hitting submit.
Baltimore’s weather kinda sucks. The winters are fairly mild. Snow is rare and usually melts quickly. Temperatures hover around the 30s and 40s all winter. Then you get all of about 2 weeks of spring and bam, you’re into hot and miserable summers. At the end of that, you get about 2 weeks of fall, and you’re right back into winter. If you like cool and comfortable spring and fall weather, you are almost never going to see it.
The past couple of years have been extremely humid. I don’t know the reason for the change, but all of a sudden the mid-Atlantic region has tried to do its best to become the east coast version of Seattle’s crappy weather. Almost every day is overcast. “Cloudy with a chance of thunderstorms” has been by far the most prevalent daily forecast. “Sunny” is almost non-existent. “Partly cloudy” seems to be about the best you can hope for. Baltimore has had two major “once in a thousand years” type of floods in the past couple of years. If you like to garden, your garden will do very, very well with all of the rain. The ground for the last couple of years has been almost completely saturated.
I don’t know if this current trend will continue. It only started a couple of years ago. Before that, the weather was more normal, aside from the very short spring and fall seasons.
Stay away from Ellicott City. It used to be a nice place, so older guides will probably recommend it as a good area. It has been hit particularly hard with all of the flooding. It’s currently rebuilding and recovering from all of that damage.
I was there for a week last year. We stayed around the convention center. There were nice areas, but I’ve never seen so many homeless people in my life. And I live in Memphis.
I lived in Bawlmer from 1975-1983, and Randy Newman’s song came out in 1977. I learned to love the city, living in Charles Village as I did. Visiting Fell’s Point, Little Italy, Mt. Vernon and Federal Hill was great fun. But the lyrics were accurate then, and it sounds like they’re accurate now.
Thanks. My wife is kinda used to Toronto and Pittsburgh, so she is used to that sort of weather. I dont care for heavy rain, truth be told. The change could be to the Global warming of course, but this has been a weird weather year all across the USA, even here in Sunny SoCal.
Apparently I was slightly off, closer to the big BNI airport than the big casino.
I assume you mean BWI.
I worked at BWI when I lived in Glen Burnie. There are a lot of nice areas around there that are reasonably priced. Severn and Pasedena are also good areas (in general).
That’s actually a pretty good area to be in. You are far enough outside of the city that you are away from most of the inner city crime and decay. But if you want to go into the city to go to the Inner Harbor or to other places for fun you can just shoot right up 295 and get there very quickly. There is a lot of stuff all along Route 2. Annapolis isn’t too far away if you want to go there for a day trip.
When I wanted to go into DC from there, I would go down to the DC Beltway, drive around the top side of the Beltway to the first metro station, then I’d park there and take the metro in. You can also take the Marc Local (train) into DC from BWI but it only runs at certain times. The metro gives you more flexibility with your schedule.
So yeah, easy access to DC, Annapolis, and Baltimore. It’s not a bad area.
You can kinda think of the whole DC/Baltimore area as one big city, in a way. There’s no country area between the two cities. The northern suburbs of DC and the southern suburbs of Baltimore are the same thing (the Laurel / Glen Burnie area).