London_Calling
Pleasant and unpatronising
No doubt.Crispy said:
we love the wire but......
- Thread starter feerd
- Start date
SpookyFrank
Don't swallow the cap
Crispy said:
^ that
Also, it was cool
Look! You can get a 3 bedroom house in Baltimore for $40,000!
With the exchange rate as it is, that's about 15p!
http://baltimoresun.2.homescape.com...ult_state_id=54902&filter_product_id=29290048
With the exchange rate as it is, that's about 15p!
http://baltimoresun.2.homescape.com...ult_state_id=54902&filter_product_id=29290048
London_Calling
Pleasant and unpatronising
Click on the mini photos underneath, and also scroll through them. The last one is totally Hamsterdam.
London_Calling said:
I know... but still!
And look at this one! $15,000!!!
http://baltimoresun.2.homescape.com...d=54902&page_num=3&filter_product_id=29647253
How hard is it to move to Baltimore?
Actually, looking at the photo for the first one, the giant SUV parked outside clearly belongs to a player.
ovaltina said:I know... but still!
And look at this one! $15,000!!!
http://baltimoresun.2.homescape.com...d=54902&page_num=3&filter_product_id=29647253
How hard is it to move to Baltimore?
A
fucking hell at those prices we could club together and set up a time share.
....or maybe not
i read an article on what the people of west baltimore thought about the wire, one of 'em said 'the only unrealistic thing about the wire is that no-one watches the wire'
true dat etc
mhendo
Aussie in San Francisco
Buying a cheap house in Baltimore is easy. As your link suggests, there are plenty of cheap houses available. Hell, when i arrived here in 2000, there were over 10,000 (!!!) uninhabited (abandoned, boarded up) houses in the city, and things haven't changed that much. Baltimore's population at the end of the 1950s was about 950,000, and it's now about 650,000, and those 300,000 departures left plenty of empty real estate behind.I know... but still!
And look at this one! $15,000!!!
http://baltimoresun.2.homescape.com...d=54902&page_num=3&filter_product_id=29647253
How hard is it to move to Baltimore?
Actually, looking at the photo for the first one, the giant SUV parked outside clearly belongs to a player.
The first problem you have is the condition of the house itself. Any house that's been uninhabited for years, or even decades, is going to need some major work done. There might be problems with the foundations, you'll need new electricity and plumbing throughout the building (folks like Bubbles have probably stripped all the usable metal from the house, including piping), and the roof probably hasn't been retarred in years. Most Baltimore row houses have pitch or tar roofs, and need a new coating every few years. My next-door neighbor owns a roofing business, and he's always busy after a big rainfall.
Even if you can get past all those issues, though, there's an even bigger hurdle to face. That house doesn't cost $15,000 just because it's run down; it costs $15,000 because it's in a part of the city where no-one wants to live. I'm renting a row house right now in a neighborhood filled with mainly young professional families and college students. If a house in this neighborhood was, for some reason, run down like the one in the ad, you can bet your life it would still be going for much more than $15,000. As they say in real estate: it's all about Location, Location, Location.
Baltimore experienced something of a real estate boom from 2000-2006 (like much of the US), but that boom was largely confined to certain neighborhoods. Many parts of the city are no better, and no less dangerous, and no more desirable, than they were 10 years ago. You can see from the picture in your ad that the house for sale is boarded up, and so is the house next door. I'd be willing to bet that the majority of the houses on that block are boarded up. And when a block is like that, the houses often end up getting used as shooting galleries (both guns and drugs), and the block goes to hell. I could drive you past block after block in parts of Baltimore where you'll see nothing but boarded-up row houses. They're worth so little now that the owners, in some cases, have completely abandoned them, skipping out on their property tax obligations because it's not worth paying the taxes to keep the house.
In 2007 alone, there were five murders within 5 blocks of the $15,000 house on Prospect Street, and another dozen or so within another 10 minutes walk. The $40,000 house on South Pulaski Street is also not far from where the "action" is. Both of those houses are in Baltimore's Western Police District, the one made famous in The Wire. If anyone doubts the reality of the sort of thing portrayed on the show, go to the Baltimore City Paper's Murder Ink Map, where you can view the distribution of city homicides since 2006. Click on the red indicators to see the details of each murder. It's grim reading.
mhendo
Aussie in San Francisco
Those actors all do good American accents, in my opinion.
What they don't do very well, though, is Baltimore accents. White Baltimoreans, especially from working class backgrounds, have very distinctive accents, especially on some of their long vowel sounds. On The Wire, it's mainly some of the extras and bit parts who are clearly native Baltimoreans, and who get the accent down.
DotCommunist
So many particulars. So many questions.
Dillinger4
Es gibt Zeit
But if you moved there you could be Omar, DC.
Either that, or dead.
Either that, or dead.
DotCommunist
So many particulars. So many questions.
I've lived on some rough estates, but Baltimores rough areas make the worst of em look positively quaint
