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In Which I Complain About This City
Or: An Urbanite's Lament
So a few days ago I mentioned that I was going to get around to typing up some stories about my time living, studying, and working in an urban area you have heard of because of its crime rate. This was reasonably well received, and clearly there is an appetite for this sort of post here. So, here we go. I have spent the last several years of my life living and working in an American city with a very high rate of both property and violent crime. Our police force is largely useless, and spends no time enforcing laws against "quality of life" crimes. Litter is everywhere, and red lights are regarded by many of our drivers as suggestions. Urban blight is everywhere. I spent about a year working part-time at a local courthouse, across the street from which was a block of rowhouses which had clearly suffered more than one fire in the past several years, and through every single one's top floor windows you could clearly see the sky. Until this year our murder clearance rate hovered around 45%, and I'm sure that the recent boost is the result of some creative accounting with regards to cold cases. The police operate under a federal consent decree, imposed in 2017, which they are pleased to inform everyone they achieved 25% compliance with just this year!
Yes my friends, I lived and worked in Charm City. You know it from The Wire, and from the 7-o'clock news.
Baltimore.
Baltimore is a shithole. There's no two ways about it. The subreddit is full of yuppies who live in Mount Vernon or Fed Hill or one of the 5 other safe clean neighborhoods in the city, who will insist up down and sideways that they actually like the city. The food is great! There's so much to do! It's vibrant! There's an art scene! Bullshit. All of it. Utter crap. This city is a shithole. Not a diamond in the rough, not an up-and-comer, not a "if you just tried it" grungy but fun place to live. It's not New York in the 90s, where it's a little rough but if you just give it a chance you'll fall in love. It's a hive of scum and villainy.
I won't bore you with reciting those facts you can find out from a simple google search. How the Gun Trace Task Force was a case study in corruption. How a mayor was arrested and sentenced for various corruption charges. How in the last week alone there have been 84 aggravated assaults, 62 robberies, 17 carjackings, 6 shootings, and 3 homicides. Instead I'll just tell you some of my personal experiences. Things I have seen, or heard, or which were related to me by a friend or coworker.
It is my first week of living in Baltimore. I am tentatively optimistic about this city. After all, if it bleeds it leads. Things can't possibly be as bad as it's portrayed on the news. There's no reason to judge the city before I've had a chance to really experience it. I am talking about this with some of my fellow students. Most of us agree that things are probably exaggerated, and we should form our own opinions. One of my classmates pipes up. She heard gunfire outside her apartment last night. When she got up this morning to come to classes, she found a bullet hole in her car.
It is my first month of living in Baltimore. I am beginning to think that perhaps things are not being exaggerated. One of my friends is having a party. "Just don't use the main entrance to the building" he says in his invitation. "Junkies like to hang out around there. Use the garage." I go to the party. A fellow partygoer mentions he didn't like that the host used the word "junkies" because he feels it is dismissive of people who just need help. A few hours later the group-chat gets a text. Then another. Then another. Then another. Five in all, each more frantic than the last. One of the girls stepped out for a smoke and can't get back in. Some of the aforementioned junkies are harassing her. Three of us leave to get her. One stays by the door, two more go to where she is, and escort her back inside the building. She is crying. The party ends shortly after.
It is my second month of living in Baltimore. I am awoken at midnight by the sound of revving engines. I peek through the blinds. There is a horde of young men riding dirt bikes driving down the street. At least thirty of them, possibly as many as fifty. I do not know at this time that this is a regular occurrence, so I shrug it off and go back to sleep. This will continue to happen sporadically throughout the rest of my time in the city.
It is my third month of living in Baltimore. I am awoken at 2am by the sound of gunfire. I am nervous. I've never heard gunfire outside of a range before. Eventually I go back to sleep. It is not the last time this will happen.
It is my fourth month of living in Baltimore. I have walked to a nearby McDonalds because I'm tired and don't feel like cooking. Before heading in I smoke a cigarette. A local junkie asks for one. I hand him one, and the lighter. He lights the cigarette and begins to walk off. I ask for my lighter back. He begins screaming, pleading, begging me to keep the lighter. He is wailing like a child. Sickened, I wave him off and tell him to keep the damn thing. Like a switch was flipped he immediately stops, and walks away. I know I've been hustled, but for the life of me I can't bring myself to give a shit. I take my burger and fries to go.
It is my sixth month of living in Baltimore. I have yet to find a decent pizza place. This irritates me more than it should. My phone buzzes. I scan the email briefly. It's from the campus police. There was a shooting on school property. No students were involved, so I don't bother reading the whole email. I've gotten a similar email before. I will receive two more before my first year in this city is over.
It is my eighth month of living in Baltimore. One of my professors kindly informs us that it is a matter of when, not if, we are mugged. He suggests all the things he is allowed to suggest. Keep your head on a swivel. Don't wear earbuds in both ears. Don't walk alone at night. Don't go out at all after midnight. Comforted by the knowledge that the only place in the city I go without a gun is the school, I mostly tune this litany of advice out. I've heard it all before, from more than one source.
It is my twelfth month of living in Baltimore. I have accepted a part time position. Every Monday, I go down to the courthouse, arriving before 8:30am. I begin to recognize some of the
junkies and crackheadsindigent citizens along my morning commute. One of them regularly masturbates himself in full view of traffic. I have rather unimaginatively nicknamed him "jack-off" in my head.It is my thirteenth month of living in Baltimore. Every day on my drive home I pass a large banner advertising temp tags from Virginia. This is an illegal service, intended to circumvent the costs of registering a car and getting insurance in Maryland, or at least getting around having a suspended license, or no license. The banner is at least four feet high, and ten feet across.
It is my fifteenth month of living in Baltimore. I am cut off on the freeway coming back from grocery shopping, and honk my horn. The driver swerves out of traffic, and begins driving along next to me, matching my speed. I slow down, he slows down. I speed up, he speeds up. I look over, and he is screaming at me from the driver's seat of his car. I unholster my gun and hold it in my lap. He gets off at my exit, I don't. As he takes the exit, he forms a finger gun and points it at me. I file a police report. I am told to avoid that stretch of highway if possible. I do my grocery shopping at different stores for the next few months.
It is my eighteenth month of living in Baltimore. I still have not found a good pizza place. This has gone from annoying, to infuriating, to depressing. I have tried every recommendation on the subreddit, and half a dozen others besides. This city seems to thrive on pizzas that consist of doughy crust, no sauce, and plastic-y cheese. The best slice I have had in this city so far came from Costco. I joke about this with my friends.
It is my twentieth month of living in Baltimore. I have started working at a different courthouse. This one seems like it's in a slightly better neighborhood. At the very least, there are no obviously deserted and collapsing houses near it. When I tell my supervisor this he laughs, and tells me to make sure I leave before dark.
It is still my twentieth month of living in Baltimore. There has been a shooting near my workplace. I am unaware of this until I try to drive home, and have to detour around police tape cordoning off an intersection. I check the news when I get home. A one paragraph blurb informs me that one man was killed, and another wounded. The dead man appears to have been an innocent bystander. I realize I am more annoyed by the detour than the loss of life, and I am revolted by my own callousness.
It is my twenty-first month of living in Baltimore. It has rained all day, and when it's time for me to leave from work, the road home is flooded out. This road has flooded every time it rains heavily for at least the last ten years, according to my coworkers. No effort has been made to solve the issue. I detour to the next road. This detour takes half an hour. It too is flooded out. My twenty minute drive home takes two hours.
It is my twenty-second month of living in Baltimore. There has been an accident blocking the road on my drive home from work. A driver in a sedan ran a red light, and slammed into an SUV. The SUV has flipped onto its roof. The rear doors are open, and I can see an infant's car seat in the back. The intersection is clear enough for me to drive past. I take a look at the tags on the sedan, already knowing what I'm going to see. Sure enough, temp tags. I'm sure they're fake. For a moment I wonder about the fate of the SUV's occupants. I don't look it up when I get home. I don't want to know.
It is my twenty-fourth month of living in Baltimore. It is my last day working at the courthouse before classes begin again. There was a shooting at the same intersection as before. This time it took place early enough in the day that the police tape is down by the time I drive home, and I am grateful for the fact I won't have to take a detour getting home.
It is my twenty-fifth month of living in Baltimore. Disgusted with this city, the banality of its corruption, the constant grind of low-level crimes that the police just don't seem to give a fuck about, the seemingly monthly shooting close enough for me to hear it, the roving gangs of dirt bike youths who will occasionally smash the mirrors of cars they pass, the need to constantly wave off "squeegee kids" (ten to eighteen year olds who skip school to make a buck washing windshields at intersections throughout the city), the constant pervasive odor of weed, the open air drug deals I see every day, the crackheads and junkies I see every time I step outside my building asking for a dollar or a cigarette, the chicken bones that litter every sidewalk, I begin to write up this post.
When I first began to write I thought I would include anecdotes from other people I knew, if I felt myself running low on stories. I did not. Everything I wrote about in this thread, is something I experienced personally.
There's nothing new about what I've written here. Nothing you haven't heard of before. I'm not even completely sure this belongs in the culture war thread. I just hate this city. I hate what it does to people. I hate the callousness it has successfully infected me with. I hate the fact that I still have not found a decent fucking pizza place. I have received a job offer in a republican-run city in a blood-red state, and while I don't know if I'll be moving there, I will certainly be moving away from here.
From your perspective, what would the local government need to do to improve life in Baltimore? And why do they not do it, whatever it is?
(I imagine nobody knows re: the pizza. It's not that hard to make a good pizza.)
The problem with Baltimore is the people in Baltimore. I don't think genocide followed by suicide is an option the local government can exercise. But maybe when WWIII happens we'll get lucky, although I doubt our adversaries would do us that favor.
My impression is that the situation in Great Migration cities especially deteriorated after deindustrialization. If there were still good livings available for people with relatively low human capital or skills, I imagine the overall chaos would be a lot lower. I've never heard a good answer to the question of: "If we transition to a "knowledge economy," what are the people without useful knowledge supposed to do with themselves?"
Of course I don't dispute that the lever of "actually enforce all of the law, throughout the city" seems to have been abandoned.
I've read a theory by one of the commenters on Steve Sailer's blog that the unprecedented economic prosperity between 1945-73 in the US had the effect of large masses of impulsive, low-IQ people with high time preference from the rural areas of the South and the Midwest moving to Great Migration cities to work in manufacturing (heavy industry in particular). After the oil shocks, stagflation and deindustrialization, it was mostly these people and their descendants who were hit hard, and had no practical means of moving away and getting re-trained to do other things, so they're just stuck there in their misery.
Right - that's a better way of phrasing it.
To me, this appears to be obviously true, and it certainly adds to my cynicism that addressing this situation does not seem to be part of anyone's political platform; I believe the going theory is that those affected are solid clients of the Democratic party, and actually trying to improve their lots (or the lots of the people stuck with them) does not change the political calculus at all, so there's no need to do it.
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