Buying Into Baltimore

Washington Transplants Are Streaming North to Grab Budget Prices

To hear Falita Liles talk, you would think she had died and gone to heaven. But all the University of the District of Columbia librarian has done is move from Washington to Baltimore.

Thousands of Washingtonians each year are moving north from the Capital City to Charm City, attracted by cheaper housing, ethnic neighborhoods and urban amenities they say are lacking here. The ex-Washingtonians have leveraged the appreciation on their D.C. homes to buy larger and, they say, live better in Baltimore.

The migration has been aided by Live Baltimore, a largely city-funded nonprofit that since April 2002 has spent about $350,000 to market Baltimore to Washingtonians, quietly luring prospects with nearly monthly free happy hours in and around the District.

The message is simple: Hello, D.C. Balmer wants you! Ditch the hip, high-priced District and its trendy, almost-as-pricey inner suburbs. Say goodbye to Ballston, hello to Bolton Hill. Adios, Capitol Hill. Federal Hill awaits you. So long, Mount Pleasant. Hello, Mount Washington.

Statistics are telling. This year through June, the average price of a home sold in Baltimore was $170,000, compared with $532,033 in the District. A four-bedroom house in Baltimore averaged $273,000, compared with $1,098,500 in Washington. Small, attached houses of two or fewer bedrooms cost an average in $183,505 in Baltimore and $417,540 in the District, all according to numbers from Metropolitan Regional Information Systems, the region's real estate multiple listing service.

In his 2003 inaugural address, D.C. Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D) set a lofty goal of 100,000 new city residents, but the population -- 558,010 by the latest count -- keeps going south, or, er, north.

Baltimore's population, 632,214, isn't what it used to be, either. However, Mayor Martin O'Malley (D) claims to have all but halted the decline. D.C. ex-pats are part of the reason. In 2004, the most recent year for which figures are available, 6,931 people -- 40 percent of those who left the city -- moved to Baltimore, making the city the leading destination for departing Washingtonians.

"It's absolutely delightful," Liles gushed. "You're less likely to hear 'what do you do for a living' and people caring about your bank account. It's so much cheaper than D.C. It's very walkable, unlike my old neighborhood, where there was nothing to walk to."

Liles, 39, lives on South Madeira, a narrow street ("It's so European") of two-story rowhouses in the East Baltimore neighborhood of Butchers Hill. A family from Rockville lives across the street.

Around one corner is a Polish American bar. Around another is Salt, a hip new restaurant. Liles lives about a block from 106-acre Patterson Park. Fells Point, with its shops and nightspots, is a 10-minute walk, the reviving neighborhood of Canton 15 minutes.

Liles moved in December from a 612-square-foot condo near the Rhode Island Avenue Metro station. She got $220,000 for the unit, for which she had paid $160,000 just two years earlier. Her larger, though still smallish, Baltimore rowhouse cost her $219,000.

Like many of the newcomers, she had been to a Live Baltimore event in Washington, where she met O'Malley. "He was showing me various libraries," she recalled. "I definitely started mulling, getting some Baltimore Zip codes, doing some play [Internet] searches."