Baltimore is still relatively expensive and is (locally) still widely regarded as a dangerous city that most people don't want to go to, quirky or not. There's a reason that most of the tech jobs in the general area are around the DC suburbs (and pushing further out each year).

There's still incredible problems with getting good engineers to come to the general area as well: Baltimore/DC has SF-level cost of living but not nearly the amenities of the Bay Area. The weather here sucks most of the time, the general culture leans suit & tie, the traffic is just as bad if not worse, you don't have the redwoods/beaches/outdoor things nearby that many engineers tend to value. Moreover, there's still a major stigma against working remotely out here that hurts many East Coast businesses when looking for software folks.

I disagree, it is extremely affordable compared to SF (A good amount of nice housing for 200-300k) and Tech salaries are largely the same as SF.

Speaking of Baltimore, as someone who knows almost nothing about it other than what I saw watching "Ace of Cakes" and from what I see when the city comes up in the news, I came across this map today [1], which left me wondering what is going on there.

It's a map of all murders in Baltimore, filterable by time period, race, gender, district, zip code, age, and cause of death. There are also some yearly charts below on the page.

What is going on with murders? 164 in the last six months, and they seem to be spread widely over the city, with just a couple murder-free sections (including one decent sizes one in the north part of the city, between 83 and 139).

Is those SF like art quirky culture areas, and the tech company areas, in the apparently murder-free areas?

For comparison Los Angeles has had 150 murders so far in 2015, even though it has 6 times the population [2]. Los Angeles county, with 16 times the population of Baltimore, has had 332 murders so far in 2015, so just over twice as many as Baltimore in the last 6 months.

(Both of the sites I cite are pretty interesting. Anyone happen to have a list of similar homicide exploration tools for other major cities?)

Note: I'm not trying to rag on Baltimore. Just astonished at the number and the geographic distribution of the murders there.

[1] http://data.baltimoresun.com/bing-maps/homicides/index.php?s...

[2] http://homicide.latimes.com/neighborhood/la-city/year/2015

Baltimore has very serious and endemic issues with crime, drugs, poverty and government -- all of which combine to result in an extremely high murder rate. The numbers have improved since the historic peak in 1993 (353 murders), and Baltimore is no longer the #1 city in murders per capita in the US, but it's still not good.

If you're interested, there are several excellent explorations of the particulars of Baltimore's problems (which are present, usually to a lesser extent, in many other cities) from David Simon:

  - Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets (book)
  - Homicide: Life on the Streets (TV series)
  - The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood (book)
  - The Corner (TV miniseries)
  - The Wire (TV series)

The vast, vast, majority of the murders are drug and gang related and are confined to the bad parts of town on the east and west sides of the city. It looks like a large swath on the map because Baltimore used to be the third largest city in the country and is currently at half the population it was at it's height. The good areas are around the inner harbor, Fells Point, Canton, Federal Hill, as well as from the harbor running north to the JHU undergrad campus area, around Charles Village and Hampden. Personally I've lived here 10 years now and never felt unsafe. Another positive is that unlike SF single women outnumber single men by a large margin.

http://www.baltimoresun.com/features/baltimore-insider-blog/...

I agree, but for very different kinds of startups.

Baltimore can be anything it wants to be, but what it's aiming at right now are a batch of far more conservative startups than you'd likely see in the valley.

B2B, marketing, government and fortune 500-based startups have every much the right to succeed in Baltimore as anywhere else, and with access to DC, certain markets are even better suited to Baltimore than to SF... but from everything I've seen, it would be a great deal harder to make something like Twitter work for a Baltimore-area VC, and where SF is killing it is in understanding the potential of network-effect startups that don't necessarily deliver immediate value, and to my eye, Baltimore VCs aren't remotely ready for that sort of gamble.

Shortmail and Sickweather are probably the closest I've seen to breaking that trend to date, but Shortmail's already shuttered, and I hope that doesn't sour the pool.

> right on the ocean

No, it's on the Chesapeake Bay.

If crime didn't matter, New Orleans' tech scene would blow up a lot more before ballmers.