My phone was nearly dead last time I caught a train there, so I sat on the floor like a goblin for like 30 minutes while I used one of the 2 floor outlets randomly located next to those marble columns.

I guess in the past I used the outlets at the Java Moon Cafe but it’s closed for renovations.

Yeah, I agree on the random violence part. Seems to be on par with other cities we usually get compared to. Actually, since the yuppie hordes haven’t taken over Baltimore’s majority-AA neighborhoods, there’s probably less of the stuff of the genre you hear about in DC- where fans are literally getting shot outside Nationals games and the like. (Can you imagine if that happened here? The reaction would be so different.)

Baltimore has a poverty rate of 21.2%, comparable to Columbus (19.5%), Houston (20.5%), Pittsburgh (20.5%) and Atlanta (20.8%), and less than Philadelphia (24.3%) and Cleveland (32.7%), to name but a few. All of those other cities have significantly lower violent crime rates than Baltimore.

Even “safe” East Coast cities have a lot of poverty- see Boston (18.9%) and NYC (17.9%). source: US Census Bureau 2021 and FBI Crime Data 2019).

There aren’t consistent or serious penalties for criminal behavior in Baltimore, which means the culture bred by poverty has an outsized influence on the lived experience here. We just let our problems fester more than other places with a similar proportion of miserable assholes.

Downvoters have never seen a map of the redlined neighborhoods in Bmore. Short story: if you’re a Redditor in the city, the neighborhood you’re in was probably redlined. And many currently rundown parts of SW/W/NW Baltimore originally got the same Yellow loan rating as Hampden and Charles Village. Some even got Blue. The more you know. Source