Charm City Baltimore Real Estate: Baltimore, Maryland Real Estate & Homes

I don’t usually lift large sections from local media, but this article in the Baltimore Business Journal by Rachel Bernstein, caught my eye:

Baltimore was named one of the top cities for young professionals to work in, based on cost of living, educational opportunities and the city’s nightlife.

The survey was conducted by Madison, Wisc.-based Next Generation Consulting. The report broke down cities into three population categories — Baltimore in the largest city category for those with more than 500,000 people — and evaluated them based on assets the report deemed as important to 20 to 40 year olds.

Among the other cities in Baltimore’s category, San Francisco was named No. 1. Baltimore was named No. 7, beating out Portland, Ore., New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles.

The seven indexes of a top city, or “Next City,” are average earnings, dedication to education, cleanliness of the city, around town, nightlife, cost of lifestyle and safety and diversity of the
population, according to Next Generation Consulting.

Baltimore residents have historically had an inferiority complex about their city compared to their more cosmopolitan neighbors in Philadelphia and Washington. But in the last ten years, the city skyline has grown and spread across acres of what once were parking lots and hinterlands. Neighborhoods have revitalized, and a burgeoning arts and entertainment scene has developed — whether its theatre in Mt. Vernon, fine arts and art galleries in Fells Point and downtown, or live music in Fells Point. Baltimore now has one of the most heavily populated downtown areas among cities its size, with the re-development of old office buildings into modern apartments and condos and the return of grocery stores and even big box retail to the Inner Harbor. And never forget about the added life that the tens of millions of Inner Harbor visitors, sports fans, half-dozen new hotels, and an expanded convention center bring to the city.

Baltimore’s affordable housing certainly provides one of the most important boosts to this type of favorable publicity. People can afford to live here, and live well. That’s a message that really needs to be told, and its studies like this that will tell it better than an ad campaign or promotional gimmicks that the public doesn’t always trust to be accurate. Young, first-time homebuyers have been the rock on which the budding recovery of our housing market is being built — the very buyers that are covered in this survey. The timing couldn’t be better for this type of news.

Baltimore is moving from the classification of “big small city” to “small big city”  and its about time.

Recent economic statistics and recent opinion polls are showing a peculiar dissonance in the public mind.

On one hand, economic news lately has been predominantly positive. Unemployment, while bad, has not risen as fast as had been predicted and there is even some evidence that its slowing and may be in the process of turning around. Housing news has been (and I feel will continue to be) positive, as residential resales and new home construction have both increased at surprising rates this spring. Even media outlets that tend to look on the dark side all the time (are you listening, Baltimore SUN?) have written headline stories on the positive trends that are developing. It would seem that economic stimulus, an increase in positive consumer sentiment, and other factors are turning this recession faster than had been predicted just six months ago. Great news, right?

Then how can the news be explained that a growing number of people are dissatisfied with the performance of the new administration and are losing confidence that the stimulus and the new government spending, regulation and other initiatives aimed at the recession will work? It would seem that the evidence is all around them, that it will — and is working — right now.

I have a couple of theories. First is simply that as a nation our ability to wait for good things has been severely diminished over the last 30 years. If its hard, if it takes awhile, and if it requires personal sacrifice, we don’t like it. We lose patience quickly, and blame the very people whose policies and principles are necessary to achieve the goal. Second, as a body politic, we have not yet managed to shake the poisonous habit of the last decade of shouting doom and gloom and twisting reality simply to fashion a hammer with which to beat up the other side. This has begun to achieve Orwellian dimensions… no matter the reality, no matter the truth… simply say the lie often enough and some people will believe it. And as more people join the Falsehood Chorus, more people believe. Passionately.

In my own personal life, I’ve seen friends who I have always credited with being smart, reasonable people become raving lunatics by repeating things that they have heard that are simply ridiculous. And believing them.

This gives me unease, both for the future of the efforts to curb this recession and return us to economic health, and for the future of the country. But as long as the public rewards the liars, the lunatics, the hatemongers, the loud and bombastic over the truth seekers and the reasonable explainers… we will be condemned to travel the wrong paths.

The recent statistics published by the National Association of Realtors — that pending sales of existing homes rose 6.7% in April over the previous year — was the first time in the last several months that highly publicized statistics actually agreed with the experience I was having, out in the trenches. Finally the stats publicly confirmed that people *were* returning to the marketplace and putting homes under contract. Throughout April and May I’ve been busier than I have been in years, and put in five contracts worth about $1.4 million total … one of which has now settled. And as I look around my office, I’m hearing tales of similar activity. My colleagues and I were running crazy, but none of the national statistics were showing it.

So this is real *good* news, but its also *real* good news. Statistics don’t always show what’s going on beneath. And the media — for whatever reason — prefers to trumpet bad news over encouraging developments. If this manages to keep going through the hot months, we will have a genuine recovery under way, with declining inventory and stabilizing home prices. I just hope that if that happens, the people who decide what news *is* will decide to let everyone else know. I’ll certainly be broadcasting it to anyone who will listen.