Grew up in Baltimore (first 6 years of life) and my extended family still lives there. It's an absolute shithole. My grandma lives in the ghetto near Caroline St. and North Ave. They filmed an episode of the wire around the corner, but they changed the street names.
For a while there, people were getting killed on every couple of weeks around there, so they put street cameras up on the light poles.
Funny enough, the shittiness of Baltimore doesn't phase me at all. I spent the early part of my life there and we visited at least once a month while growing up even though we moved to NC.
It was a total culture shock for my wife (who grew up on NC) when I took her to visit my grandma about 5 years ago. Just the whole rundown and shitty nature of the inner city rowhouses was not something she was used to.
Your grandma lives in the absolute worst area in Baltimore City. Having spent many years copping drugs out of alleyways and abandoned houses across Baltimore, that place is the deadliest of them all. Even my friends and cohorts that lived in the west side projects were scared to go to that neighborhood. Years later I have to occasionally go back to help our clients (I work for a disability firm), and now I realize what a dumb fuck I was for hanging out there. I don't celebrate my being clean, I celebrate surviving all those years in that neighborhood.
In Baltimore, it's not a racial divide. It really comes down to renters vs home owners.
In both white, black, and mixed neighborhoods where everyone rents or is on Section 8 (welfare housing) you get The Wire. Bunch of lazy addicts and drug dealers. There are indeed many of those neighborhoods here.
However there are just as many normal working class mixed race neighborhoods where everyone owns their home and takes pride in their community. We don't make the news, there's no burnt up houses or graffiti-littered walls, no flashing cameras on the corners, and no trouble from the ghetto-ites.
And that's how we like it. Let the lowlifes kill each other off inside their ghettos and let the rest of us live in peace. It seems to work well - for us.
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