I would imagine that for someone choosing between transit and driving, a mandatory transfer from subway to bus is going to push them towards driving instead of transit.

Given Harbor East's better location for car commuting at the end of the JFX, its (presumed - I don't actually know) better parking situation, and the fact that most commuters are no longer in the office five days a week, I would think that people that would have taken the subway when they were downtown five days a week will prefer to drive than subway + bus if they only have to be in Harbor East two days a week.

Fair point about more people living near Harbor East, though - why take the subway when you could walk? I'd love to see a more thorough analysis of where and how commuters move around the city.

> More people working from home so there are less people commuting to T-Rowe/Hopkins Hospital

I wonder how much of this is also the hollowing-out of jobs in the old downtown - a lot of companies have relocated to Harbor East in the last few years, which the subway doesn't serve. Given that the subway is so poorly integrated with the rest of the city's transit system, it would make sense that if commuters vanish due to relocations + WFH, so does most of the line's ridership.

The only time the state asks for proof of insurance is at the point where you go to register the car. When you buy a car from an honest dealer, they apply for paper plates at the moment of purchase, which requires you to have insurance.

However, you can buy a car from a private party, sign the title over, and just not apply for plates, temporary or permanent, from the MVA. You would do this if you didn't live in Maryland and were going to title the car in a different state, as the MVA won't give temporary plates to people who don't live in Maryland.

So let's say you (a Maryland resident) buy a car from a private party. You can get a Maryland title without needing insurance. But, you can't get plates from the MVA until you prove to the MVA that you have insurance. You don't want to pay for insurance. What do you do instead? You buy fake temporary tags from a guy off Craigslist and drive around uninsured.

Strictly, no, but I imagine that most of those temporary tags you see are fake as a three-dollar bill. If the MVA never gets your temp tag number, it can never get angry at you for not having insurance...

Keeping temporary tags on your car is a way to avoid paying for car insurance and the 6% titling tax. I'm not surprised at how common this practice is given that city car insurance rates are barely affordable for well-off, safe drivers. Unfortunately the city police have more important things to do than enforce vehicle registrations...

I wonder if some of Torrance's opposition isn't economic, but cultural - poor Black neighborhoods have a long and sad history of getting the short end of the stick when the government decides to 'improve' the city (see Preston Gardens, Cross Keys, the Highway to Nowhere, what's currently going on in Poppleton, anything referred to as slum clearance, etc). I'd be wary of policy designed to make development easier if those policies always seemed to end up hurting my community in the past...

I think you'll have a tough time convincing Roland Park and Guilford residents that they need to make their neighborhoods more accessible to 'affordable' housing when the people who live there largely bought there because it wasn't affordable to the sort of people they don't want to live near...

As far as the city zoning code goes: the single-family zones (R-1 through R-4) explicitly ban multi-family properties. Multi-family are already allowed in zones R-5 through R-10 (including basically all the rowhouse neighborhoods), but isn't always economically feasible, as converting a house from SF to MF requires a zoning variance plus conformation with parking regulations. The zoning variances are issued at councilmembers' discretion, and I believe that parking regulations require off-street parking to be provided for all units if you have more than three units on one lot - which is tough to do with rowhouses. Both of these requirements introduce uncertainty into the conversion process, which makes investors less likely to make the conversion happen.

Dorsey's bill would allow for by-right conversion in all zones (so explicitly allowing multi-family in current single-family zones, removing the need to provide parking, and removing the need for a variance), which would lower the costs associated with converting single-family houses to multi-family units.

My guess is that if Dorsey's bill were passed, you would see a large wave of condo and apartment conversions out of existing rowhouses.

Edit: to actually answer your question - yes, I think it would help alleviate the concentration of multi-family housing. I think Torrence's concern is that the logical choice for multi-family conversions would be houses in neighborhoods where poor people currently live, and that freeing up developers to drive up prices in poor neighborhoods is only going to hurt the people living there (via unaffordable rent hikes for renters and unaffordable property tax bills for owners). I don't necessarily agree with Torrence, but my guess is that's his concern.

Torrence's objection to calling Dorsey's bill 'city-wide' is that Roland Park and Guilford (among other wealthy, majority-white neighborhoods) have covenants that explicitly ban the conversion of single-family houses (attached or detached) into multi-family units. Legalizing by-right conversions of single-family into multi-family without enabling it to spread into all corners of the city concentrates any growth pressure that may exist into the places where it is legal. Thus, any growth will only occur in less-wealthy, less-white places, accelerating gentrification and displacement in poorer neighborhoods while preserving the neighborhood character and property values of already-wealthy (largely white) neighborhoods.

I find this position frustrating, especially because West Baltimore's housing stock is on the average fairly large, as it was the wealthy side of town back in the day. Big houses throw big bills, and conversion of 4000 sq. ft. rowhouses into three or four 1000 sq. ft. condominiums would help ensure that folks with lower incomes would be able to afford to purchase and maintain their residences.

Assuming you don't care about getting money for it, WYPR accepts car donations.

https://www.wypr.org/membership/2020-02-12/donate-your-car-to-wypr

+1 for Carlsons. They have a second location in Severn, just south of the airport, if you don't want to drive all the way to Annapolis.

For what it's worth, OP specifically said that she was looking for walkability in her post. While the houses in Res Hill are very nice, and I agree it gets a worse reputation than it deserves, I wouldn't exactly call it walkable. There are no businesses in the neighborhood save for Dovecote Cafe, and it's surrounded by parks, a busy freeway, and other staunchly residential neighborhoods. Most everything you might want to do or buy is going to be in Hampden or CV or Station North or Mt Vernon, so if you're looking for walkability, why not live in one of those neighborhoods and save yourself having to drive everywhere?

The thing about the neighborhoods on the South Baltimore peninsula (Federal Hill, Riverside, Locust Point) is that, with the exception of a handful of blocks, they were built as housing for the working class. In the days before everybody owned a car, employees of the waterfront docks/factories/warehouses needed to live near where they worked. Their houses were not grand and never had much in the way of architectural details - they were two stories, six rooms, plain façade, stamped steel cornice, maybe 1400 sq. ft. if you're lucky. When the upper-middle classes discovered that living near the water was actually quite pleasant once all the industry moved away, they bought old working class houses, gutted them, and redid the interiors to match modern tastes. There are almost no houses similar to the ones in Park Slope or Prospect Heights on the South Baltimore peninsula, and those that do exist are highly unlikely to still have their original interiors.

If you want Park Slope or Prospect Heights in Baltimore, you need to look at the Charles St corridor heading north out of downtown - this has always been where the city's money lived. This is where you find the 5-6000 sq. ft. mansions for the city's elite, along with alley housing for their servants. Once you get far enough north, the rowhouses give way to single-family mansions that I would argue compare favorably to the housing stock in any East Coast city.

Just know that there are tradeoffs - for instance, the tony northern neighborhoods generally do not have great public elementary schools (with the notable exception of Roland Park EMS), as most of the residents have the funds to send their kids to private school. Canton, Federal Hill, and Locust Point have good public elementary schools - but you're not going to get the architecture you want. And this isn't even taking into account commuting, walkability, shopping, cultural amenities, etc. I'm sure you'll find something that you'll be happy with, but there will be tradeoffs - unfortunately that's how Baltimore is.

All of the neighborhoods you've listed there are solid choices for a couple first moving to Baltimore. If you want grander rowhouses with more architectural detail, have a look at greater Charles Village (including Abell and Oakenshawe), Mt Vernon, or Bolton Hill. Those will probably be your best bets for good architecture + walkable + decent transit + diversity. I would also tentatively recommend Union Square - you can get huge Italianate rowhouses for not much money, the community association there is top-notch, and your commute to UMB would be a fifteen-minute walk down Lombard St - but the neighborhoods to the south and west are legitimately rough and I don't know what your tolerance for sketch is.

For what it's worth, I live in Bolton Hill and see a good number of kids of all ages around - from babies to "Congrats, grad!" signs in windows. It's more residential than Mt Vernon and Charles Village while still being within a 15-minute walk of most of Mt Vernon. I love it here and (assuming I can ever afford one of the massive houses) can easily see myself here for a long time.

edit: speling

Not quite - the original plan was for I-70 to run more-or-less directly on top of the Gwynns Falls through Leakin Park down to meet with I-95 between the Caton Ave and Washington Boulevard exits.

I-170 would have split off I-70 near where Hilton Pkwy meets Edmondson Avenue and run to MLK through West Baltimore. It would have largely served the same purpose as I-395 - getting commuters from downtown to the freeways further out. I-170 got built before the route of I-70 was finalized, and when I-70 got canceled in Baltimore City they got rid of the I-170 name (which actually did appear on signs for a while) and replaced it with US 40.

Here's a link to a map of what it would have looked like. Note the planned extension of I-83 through Fells and Canton to I-95 that also never got built.

Fun fact: the stubs for the on/off ramps from I-95 to the proposed I-70 near the Caton Avenue exit were built and you can see them on Google Maps.

edit: clarity & adding links