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Reply to "baltimore to DC commute on MARC"
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[quote=Anonymous]OP, as you can infer from the posts, Baltimore is a complicated topic. Some people thoroughly hate the city and want nothing to do with it but continually bash the persistent crime problems (fair enough) but there are also wonderful things about Baltimore and if you carefully place yourself in the right areas with the right schools, Baltimore can be a great experience. But it does require some persistence and being careful where you live and strategizing when it comes to schools. There are great public schools in Baltimore but you can count them on one hand, for example. And it does come down to what kind of lifestyle you want and your tolerance for certain kinds of environments. For example, the two premier high schools in Baltimore are City College and Polytechnic Institute, which have old histories and were major powerhouses - in the past. Today, no, statistically speaking, they can't be compared to the premier public high schools in key DC suburbs if you only look at test scores and % going to college. But both City and Poly still have excellent programs within the larger school and specialized tracks and still place graduates into top colleges across the country. So they are high schools you can still "work" with from that perspective. I'm a double Ivy graduate, a product of the Baltimore private schools, but if my kids wanted to go to the IB program at City College, I'd have confidence in it. There are more and more people with faith in the Baltimore public schools today than 20 years ago and more people are going through Roland Park/Mount Washington elementary schools, middle schools, then City College/Poly, including families that could afford private schools. And, of course, School for the Arts is one of the premier art schools in the whole country. It's fabulous, if you get in (you do need to demonstrate real artistic talent). Regarding commuting, many people commute to the DC area from Baltimore. It is a trade off but if you only have to go into DC twice a week and work from home the other three days, it's eminently doable. You can catch up on emails while taking the MARC, or use that time to relax with a book. It's not perfect, but commutes are still long within the DC area. One area of Baltimore I do like is Catonsville, a suburb off the southwestern corner of Baltimore (it's in Baltimore County, not the city). Of all the suburbs in the Baltimore or DC area, Catonsville comes closest to an old fashioned small town. It's not fancy, like a real small town, and it has a main street with individual shops and chains, a mixture of housing stock from graceful old houses on large lots on tree lined streets, to new developments and 1950s rowhouses and split levels. The schools do vary, some elementary schools are ok, others are excellent, and they all feed into Catonsville High School, which I consider a great school. The high school is both racially and economically diverse, with upper middle class kids going to school with working class kids and I've always been impressed with kids from Catonsville. They're normal kids. Not rich public school or private school kids, but normal kids, and they go to all kinds of colleges from the Ivies to UMBC next door to community colleges. As a bonus, Catonsville has Route 40 nearby, which probably has the largest concentration of "ethnic" eateries in the Baltimore area, as well as several Asian supermarkets. Commuting to DC is very feasible from Catonsville, both by car and by MARC. Now, crime is certainly a problematic issue in Baltimore. But it's still very segregated. Some areas have virtually no crime, and 90+% of the crime is still concentrated in several distinct parts of the city. There's a lot of hand-wringing over it and there has been some spill over into the nicer parts of the city. I don't know what the future brings, nor does anyone, but many people continue to live in lovely areas completely unaffected by the crime problems and there's still tons of money being poured into redevelopment of various neighborhoods. For some people that doesn't matter, proximity to high crime areas still scares them off and they want nothing to do with a dysfunctional city with persistent problems (fair enough, I can understand it myself). You just need to be aware of this, Baltimore is not for everyone). And of course there is the tax issue, property taxes are very high compared to the surrounding suburbs. [/quote]
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