Buying Into Baltimore

She's renting out her two-bedroom condo in Washington, while living in the six-year-old, three-bedroom townhouse she bought for $230,000.

Her family wasn't happy about her move. "They weren't that familiar with Baltimore," she said. "Though it's less than an hour away, they felt it was worlds away. And because they didn't have family in Baltimore, they were worried about someone keeping eye on me. They had a lot of fears.

"When they saw the house and neighborhood, they felt little better. Now they even come to visit me. Before I'd have to come back to D.C. Now they love the neighborhood."

Parker, who grew up in Prince George's County, has an undergraduate degree from Howard University and a master's from American University. "I still consider myself a Washingtonian. I think I always will be," she said.

John Campagna is also a native Washingtonian, as he says, "born and raised, bred, steeped in D.C." Now he and his wife, Vivian, an Alabaman who moved to the District from New York, are Baltimoreans.

Their 1906 Victorian house in the District's Palisades neighborhood had appreciated 60 percent in three years; they sold it last year for $725,000. They paid $389,000 for their Baltimore house, which is 50 percent larger.

Campagna, 45, a stockbroker, already had Baltimore clients, which meant he drove up occasionally. "We had friends who'd moved up from the D.C. area to Federal Hill and were raving about it," he said. He began scouting neighborhoods, checked out the Live Baltimore Web site and took one of the group's semiannual neighborhood bus tours.

Campagna still commutes two or three times a week -- a 90-minute trip that includes light rail, train and Metro. Driving can be problematic, with two-hour trips when traffic is bad. However, Campagna also has clients and an office in Baltimore, which helps.

The Campagnas live on Falls Road in the Mount Washington neighborhood, in a former millworker's house. The old mill, within walking distance, has a Whole Foods and a Starbucks. Their 1900 home is five or six houses inside the Baltimore city line -- "a close-in suburb," he said.

"I love how colorful Baltimore is," said Vivian Campagna, 34, a former Joffrey ballet dancer, and mother of Lila, eight months. "I loved living in D.C., but people are very real here. We like that it's rough around the edges. I think it's great people still smoke in Baltimore and you see people with tattoos, not trendy kids but part of the culture."

There is, amid all the exultation over moving to Baltimore, not a sense of loss over leaving Washington but one of slight foreboding, a fear that the increasing presence of Washingtonians could cause a change for the worse. Said John Campagna, "I hope we don't ruin it by moving up here."