Maryland Business

By: Robbie Whelan

If you’re standing on or near the corner of North Avenue and Belair Road in Baltimore, you have a 1 in 7 chance of being a victim of a violent crime. At least that’s what Dr. Andrew Schiller, a geographer and founder of NeighborhoodScout.com has found in a recent study.

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Two sections of Baltimore made America’s “25 Most Dangerous Neighborhoods” list, published by Schiller using FBI crime data from 2005, 2006 and 2007, synthesized with population numbers and (according to a description of his methodology) controlled to account for exceptionally violent or peaceful years.

North and Belair is a warzone, apparently, as is Orleans Street between I-83 and Central Avenue.

The thing I find a little strange about these neighborhoods’ inclusion in the list is that even though NeighborhoodScout is marketed to residential homebuyers (the slogan is, “The right order is everything. Find your perfect neighborhood first”) , neither of these two neighborhoods is particularly residential.

The Route 40 corridor is filled with small-scale industrial outfits and car repair shops, and although there are a few public housing projects in Schiller’s area, we’re not exactly talking about a place where people go looking for their first home. North and Belair, similarly, is right in front of the city’s municipal cemetary, which is huge, and just north of the newly-revamped American Brewery project. Sure, in nearby Berea there are tons of vacancies and serious drug violence problems, but Schiller’s definition of the neighborhood includes only about 12 rowhouse blocks.

More important, I think, is this — from the why-is-this-report-important? section of Schiller’s methodology description: “Developers, marketers and retailers frequently use NeighborhoodScout’s data to determine the underlying characteristics of a neighborhood’s commercial viability or demographic appeal prior to investing in a project or opening a retail location.”

The Orleans Street neighborhood includes Oldtown Mall, a once-busy retail destination that the city is currently pumping money into by acquiring properties and trying to find a developer to clean it up.  So I suppose the city, in its search for an investor to turn Oldtown around, hopes that no one “frequently” looks at Schiller’s list for advice on where to buy.