Catonsville less so, it still has a bit of old town left to it, but most of the time nowadays when you talk about Catonsville people are going to sprawl mall on 40 not what is left of the small town on Frederick.

And even that Catonsville is one street surrounded by single family setback houses with quarter acre yards. Its not got the density to support anything but car dependency.

Towson though. Its population tripled from under 20k in 1960 to 1970, and since then has just turned into a giant shopping center. Rosebank is better suited to be closer to a walkable city, but again, a lot of these areas are singular main streets surrounded by setback detached single family houses with driveways and garages.

In theory, sure, you can rezone entire towns and have developers bulldoze single family housing to put up 5 over 1 mixed use after you build a subway through it. Thats kind of what has happened around a lot of DC metro stations like Silver Spring or Clarendon. But those are islands, they are tiny strips of urbanism made possible by the train but then still are surrounded by a sea of car culture impermeable and incompatible with the urban ambitions of the core around the station.

Downtown Baltimore still has the opportunity to be that, to be a true livable, dense, walkable city. The zoning changes are less severe, and while a lot of rebuilding is needed, a lot less of it is pissing off white boomers who don't want to lose the sprawl suburb they bought into half a century ago. It just makes way, way more sense to put fixed infrastructure into the city itself first, make it livable, and then grow out from the core than to try to retrofit areas that exist only in opposition to the urbanism we are seeking to achieve. The white flight sprawl is only there because it doesn't want to be Baltimore. Trying to turn it into a city like Baltimore is fighting a mental battle from a losing opening position.