Ah yes, admitting where the limits of my background are paints a bullseye on anything left I would say, as opposed to limiting my contributions to smug commentary on others. Cute.

I could see that perspective, and I honestly don’t know the regional history to the extent you’re describing. But considering the active klan here, the enormous number of confederate flags in the schools in western maryland/Frederick co and on the shore at least, my lived experience in the state when not in private schools/with people not “from here” has always shared more in common with my father’s in NC than my mother and husband from NY (who both a generation apart thought the klan was “over” before moving here). Our public high school vehemently referred to the civil war as a war of northern economic aggression, all the way through AP US history. That, to me, is a meaningful and modern reflection of values and ideals in the state that wouldn’t be common in most of the north east.

Ha I actually had to Google this because I didn’t know that. Neat. Well the mason dixon line is our northern border. That’s what I was getting at.

Ah that’s very true.. I guess I got stuck on the LGBTQ friendly bit.

This is a really good answer. I’ve never been to Missouri so the relativism is something I can’t reflect on.

You’re leaving Missouri because you feel unsafe and your best option is …Baltimore? Where the public schools can’t afford air conditioning? Not Portland or SF or Boston or Austin? I mean don’t get me wrong we are rounding a decade here and there’s plenty of good, but Baltimore has no infrastructure for protecting anyone because there’s such willfully inappropriate spending, and we are literally a case study of redlining with national attention for police corruption. I don’t think the specific issues you’re citing are better here. I mean I grew up riding the bus with the daughter of the local grand wizard. Maryland has some liberals, but we are palpably the northern most historically southern (as in south of the mason dixon line) state. Edit: “southern”

Lol there are multiple black Subarus on my street with the same model. One is mine. One doesn’t lock its doors. I found that out the hard way with a hand full of bags!

The random anonymous public. Now, and forever. 🤷‍♀️

God does this resonate with me ha

Locust Point = lp. Yes it’s been very slow in the west Towson market and things move in hours. It’s wild.

We bought in LP in 2016 and have not relocated yet, despite our best efforts. We started out with a very wide geographic search image - basically anything over .5 acres built before 1980 and within 45 min of work. But time and again, we would go places to see a house and drive around and not really like the environment, and living far up 83 would be very difficult for my husband who works in EC and is a lifelong city dweller. I also just really hate burbs (it turns out..). On the flip side, getting any lot of that size in Baltimore city means astronomical taxes.

So, all of that to say, we are now pretty committed to finding something within the beltway in Towson. It has a great mix of short commutes for us, access to restaurants/delivery and things, but finding larger lots isn’t difficult and taxes aren’t as high. I grew up going to the Recher, so I feel pretty oriented to that area compared to others in the county. That’s very likely to be where we end up. We put offers on houses regularly when they come up, but the market for living there is still pretty hot.

It’s the socialist republic of Montgomery county for a reason lol

Idk what’s considered pricey but we paid $310k for something recently renovated in LP. If you wanna live in the newest development, yeah maybe, but the row houses are very affordable

It is and it isn’t. I mean the stats aren’t somehow inflated or anything. Things are as bad as those numbers say, but the maps of crime in the city go a long way to contextualizing those numbers. If you are planning to be driving south regularly, I’d consider a southern neighborhood like Locust Point since getting across the city is annoying depending on the time of day. There are plenty of neighborhoods like that where people still walk their dogs at night, have a few neighborhood watering holes, even leave their front doors unlocked while they’re around. But it’s a city and you should be conscious about your actions and risk. In terms of the real experience living here, the main minor crimes that have happened to me or i have seen are basically nuisances/social crimes that are symptomatic of the city’s larger decay and history of systemic disenfranchisement - packages may get stolen if you leave them out, people will come by and try to open all the cars and steal stuff out of your car if they can or if something is very visible, there are groups on motorcycles who will speed past you doing wheelies and making a lot of noise, occasionally car theft or people breaking into and trashing businesses, and lots and lots and lots and lots of panhandling/squeegeeing- that sort of thing. My dog walker got jumped and battered pretty severely in fed hill in the middle of the day and went through the whole fuss to report the guy and testify against him only to see him back out on the street a few months later because baltimore is catch and release, so she stopped walking dogs in that area. That to me is the worst thing. I work at hopkins and in that area there are fairly frequent robberies and assaults. I travel with a buddy if I have expensive stuff on my person when I leave work and walk to the garage in east baltimore. The medical campus wants us to use security escorts after a certain time but I never have felt it was necessary since I don’t leave that late. People talk a lot about crime seeping from areas of lots of social issues to areas that are generally considered better invested and safer (we’d been looking at houses in Roland park and it seemed to come up at every open house, for example), but i have to say personally I just haven’t seen that. Maybe it comes out in the numbers, but I think it’s just a concern about future property values in the area. People who find the petty stuff too much of a nuisance to live around tend to move to the county, which is more suburban-rural. There’s petty stuff out there too but land doesn’t do crime so fewer people per foot means fewer bad actors per foot means fewer incidents that impact any one resident.

I will end by saying my childhood best friend just moved from an Annapolis burb to Sykesville because she couldn’t stand the pretension there anymore. She still works in the city and just commutes. So I think you’re reasonable in looking outside of that immediate area. Baltimore can be great, but I think like any city you just have to pay attention when you are living around that many people.

We are just in the process of moving out of Locust Point but it was fantastic for us when we were in your position - I commuted to college park, my husband commuted to Ellicott city, and we were young professionals in the city with no kids. Fed hill has a bit more nightlife but I prefer the slightly calmer pace or LP personally. If you want walkable coffee shops, ceremony coffee is excellent in that area though. :) can’t go wrong with either

Di Pasquale’s is the only local one I like. We go to Juliet’s Italian market when it’s a real occasion.

In general I liked it. I was there before the first of the two more recent floods, so there was a lot to do on main street. It’s slowly coming back now but that transition has been tough. The CSX line is very loud, but the people I met were lovely and it’s nice to be central to 40 and 70 and 29 for getting around.

I lived in Frederick, Bethesda, Oella, and Locust Point all when commuting to DC. Locust point is particularly easy because there’s an entrance to 95 that doesn’t involve crossing any congested areas at all.

Taqueria El Sabor del Parque does delicious tres leches and flan. Best I’ve found in this area. The dessert I loved most was the chocolate pot topped with evoo at Faddensonen, but they don’t make it anymore.

Corner pantry

Hahah it’s true.

Yeah my understanding was they’re rendered null by the fair housing act but it felt..off.. that someone in 2014 felt compelled to “address “ it with a cover letter

Oh hon, this isn’t even the worst of it. We saw a deed in Baltimore last week that limited individuals living in a certain neighborhood from being non-white in fairly enumerated terms, and it wasn’t renounced by the neighborhood until…2014! The house sold in under a week for more than a million dollars. 😐

Dear science over nonsense, We are out numbered. Signed, someone who values the same.

I guess your perspective really depends on what you think the test tells you and what you think HYPMS should value and what getting an education from a place like this means.

If you see HYPMS admissions as a kind of emblem to say you’ve maximized certain modifiable factors about your childhood education, then yes, this looks like it’s not so great for white or Asian people. But there comes a point where candidates of a certain caliber just look identical in all measurable ways. And at the point where you have more people like that applying than slots, there are other values that come into play. For example the community as a whole being more diverse is thought to benefit the education of people of all races who attend.

I’m not sure what people are worried about for the sake of high performing kids. If they aren’t going to undergrad at a place like this, they’re not going to magically become low performing kids. I don’t have data on this but I would imagine a high performing student who doesn’t attend one of these schools is likely to pay less tuition, have greater value added (https://www.brookings.edu/research/using-earnings-data-to-rank-colleges-a-value-added-approach-updated-with-college-scorecard-data/ for example), and potentially go somewhere like this for graduate school if they want to. Or somewhere that actually does what they’re passionate about better than these schools do. They’re very likely going to be fine if they don’t burn out, and if they do, they would have in a place like this too.

What I think rubs people the wrong way about this is that there’s a perception that maximizing every modifiable factor is somehow “earning” a spot that you’re then entitled to on some level and losing to a minority kid. That’s just not how that works. Admissions rank your application on many factors (including legacy in some cases), but all of them will tell you that some aspect of who gets in is just random. There are still too many maximal candidates. And some aspect is about being unique and interesting not just maxing out. So given that, would I rather go to school with a perfect distribution of who maxed out on a single test score? Or rather that the company I pay for my education values a bigger picture of what constitutes a good community for learning? I think I care more about the latter.