Anna Custer played tour guide as the bus she was in wended through Baltimore. Look, the Ritz-Carlton Residences. There, Camden Yards. Now coming through Fells Point, the last place where Edgar Allan Poe had a drink before his demise.
And most importantly:
"When you are leaving here to go to Aberdeen, you're looking at a 30-minute drive," she said.
Her bus and one in front of it were filled with people preparing for a move from Fort Monmouth in New Jersey to Aberdeen Proving Ground in Harford County, part of the national relocation of military jobs known as "base realignment and closure," or BRAC. Custer - executive director of the nonprofit Live Baltimore - hopes to persuade them to come a little farther south and settle in the city.
The group bused down 33 workers and spouses and put them up at the new Hotel Monaco for a weekend of neighborhood sightseeing. They were a small part of the Buying Into Baltimore event on Saturday, which drew hundreds from the region for home-buying workshops and peeks at homes priced around $180,000, but Sunday they got their own BRAC-only tour through neighborhoods as pricey as Roland Park and Homeland.
"It's a good opportunity for us to be able to showcase the city," Custer said.
Live Baltimore is competing against communities closer to Aberdeen Proving Ground - Harford, for instance, as well as Cecil and Baltimore counties - and it doesn't have an easy task. John and Stephanie White, a husband and wife who work at Fort Monmouth, have heard chatter from colleagues that suggests they think of Baltimore as a third-world country. "Do they have running water?" is, they swear, among the questions that have been asked. The perception is of drugs and crime, period.
"I think they watch too much of 'The Wire,' " John White said, referring to the HBO drama that showed the city's struggles. Walking through a leafy Homeland neighborhood to see a house on the market for $779,000, he added: "They need to come down and check it out themselves."
"The Wire" was on Live Baltimore's list of talking points last weekend. But it's not just the televised reputation of Baltimore that staffers have to overcome. They need to sell workers on a city with a property tax rate more than double any of the counties' rates, and offer reasons against opting for a closer suburban neighborhood with higher public school test scores.
