Moving to Baltimore
Posted by admin
(originally posted in May 2004)
I am Chris, and I just bought a rowhouse in Baltimore City. I made this website to share my adventure with the rest of the world, and to inspire and educate those who want to take on a similar challenge. This is a work in progress… I started it in May of 2004, while training for the Army in Missouri (Incidentally, NOT at my house) I’ll start with some background information and details about how I ended up owning a rowhouse. If you feel inclined, donations are greatly appreciated.
I grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland, just outside of Washington, D.C. The details of this are not influential to my rowhouse, so I will simply state that Baltimore was where my Mother was from, where her family was from, and where almost all of our relatives still live. Holidays involved driving to Baltimore or its suburbs, but other than family events, We did not leave Montgomery County very often.
I attended college at the University of Maryland in College Park, and developed a very intense and sometimes silly sense of state pride. The truth is, I love this state, it’s history, it’s people, it’s climate, it’s scenery, and all of the adventures I have had and will have within its funky borders. Towards the end of college, I began to start thinking about where I would go after graduation, and the obvious choice was Baltimore. It’s where my family is from, going back 4 generations! Sometimes I feel like it is where I “should have” grown up, although I love Montgomery County very much. Either way, it is a very different part of the “Maryland Experience”, closer to the bay, closer to the harbor, closer to history.
During the summer of 2003, I began making as many trips to Baltimore as possible, some for visits to family members, some to help my uncle with odd jobs at his company, some to have lunch with friends who were already doing “the Baltimore thing”, and some just to go drive around Baltimore! I had never really “hung out” in Baltimore… I had no idea where the nice neighborhoods were, or where good bars or resturants were. Occasionally, over the past few years, I had ended up in Canton or Federal Hill on weekend nights, but I never really knew where they were, and how they ranked in the city. I started looking at online listings and wondering how in the hell I would ever be able to afford a house. I had saved up a bit of money, but that wouldn’t last long with a big mortgage.
Suddenly, it all came together. Shortly after I got a new job at a construction firm in Baltimore, a friend of a friend who lived in Locust Point needed a housemate. I had been to her housewarming party a year earlier, again not knowing where I was except that it was Baltimore and there were rowhouses. I moved in in mid October, and started my Baltimore adventure.
Locust point is a historic neighborhood. Right now, it is in the middle of a huge change, and with that change comes controversy. Locust Point was “discovered” not too long ago, and is undergoing the same type of “urban renewal” as Federal Hill and Canton have gone through in the last two decades. A few years ago, most of the residents had lived there their whole lives, and had family histories going back several generations in the neighborhood. Now it’s a different picture, with new, younger, richer people buying houses, fixing them up, and raising property values. However you want to look at it, I am one of the newbies… (I have come to grips with the notion of being a yuppie… sigh…) I take some honor in the fact that I intend to live here, and participate in the community, and take pride in the city… I am not simply looking at dollar $igns.
After only a few weeks, I realized that this was the place for me. It is right near t
he interstate, there is plenty of space to park, it’s safe, well lit, and is literally minutes from downtown and seconds from the harbor. I could not understand why it wasn’t already like Federal Hill. After doing the math, I figured out that I could barely afford to live in Locust Point. Just a year earlier I could have afforded a very nice house and had plenty of cash to spend on fixing it up. At the end of 2003, I had set my upper limit at $135,000. In some neighborhoods, this amount could get you a few blocks of rowhouses, virtually identical to the ones I was looking at here. In Locust Point however, this would buy you something “run down” but liveable. Empty shells were going for $100,000. “Well maintained” houses were going for $150-170k, and newly rehabbed houses were running in excess of $200,000! These did not include brand new rowhouses (which are really just side-by-side 3 level apartments) which sold for over $300,000 before they were even built. Just to shine some light on how fast home values were rising, my landlord’s home had risen in value over 70,000 dollars in under 2 years! I knew I had to act fast.
There were decent houses in my price range on the outskirts of Canton, and in the southern part of Federal Hill. I looked at a few, but I had already set my heart on Locust Point. It is such a tiny neighborhood, and is surrounded by water, and industry, and, literally, a loop of train tracks… that is just cool!
One Response to “Moving to Baltimore”
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March 1st, 2008 at 7:39 am
Hello there rowhouse baltimore. I made a baltimore rowhouse blog (not knowing about yours) to follow my renovation, so hopefully people don’t get too mixed up with us. Best of luck with your addition!