Deindustrialisation

Baltimore has a homicide rate that's roughly seven times America's national average, and rates for other crimes (aggravated assault, theft, that sort of thing) while not in keeping with the high murder rate are still higher than the national average. A third of the occupants of Baltimore proper (which has a population three times larger than the city itself) are in housing projects, either towers or state-owned terraces. A quarter of the population lives below the poverty line. Obviously, there's some stratification - the majority of the crime and poverty is concentrated into a few districts, usually those closest to the decaying industrial centres. While the middle class, especially the white middle class, of Baltimore has been making an exodus to the surrounding towns since the mid-sixties (the city's population has dropped between five and ten percent every decade since 1960, compared with a massive growth period between 1900 and 1940), the poorest sections of society have fermented into a destitute underclass.

The city grew up on trade and heavy industry, first as a port in the maritime age, and naturally progressing to a dockyard and industrial producer as America's industrial revolution kicked off. It became a massive labour centre, eventually the second most populous city in the Union, but with the postwar shift of focus of America's economy from production to services, Baltimore - like the rest of the rust belt, many of whose cities are also home to high crime and poverty rates - was left with a large population and a shrinking source of capital. Although it's home to six FTSE500 companies today, four of those operate in the financial sector and the remaining two are high-end manufacturers.

So, as a setting for a show like The Wire, Baltimore is a good choice for two reasons: firstly, and most trivially, because it's so unpleasant. If the show is about a failed American experiment, then surely Baltimore, with its abnormally high murder rate, is a prime example of that failure. Secondly, however, because it represents in one rusting and momumental motion the one-sidedness of American capitalism and the resistance of that system to meaningful change. The wealth that created Baltimore is still visible in the show, perhaps most notably in its beautiful neoclassical courthouse - if not something built around 1792, when the city was founded, then certainly modelled after the great age of American revolutionary architechture. The courthouse, however, is the enclave of more or less corrupt bereaucracy and legal inefficiency, set up more as an obstacle than an arbiter to most of the black characters. Any money - new money, active money - in Baltimore is on the harbour, mostly in development (an area of the economy closed to those without massive capacity for initial investment) and new businesses which, given America's recent (and socially irresponsible) trend for outsourcing, are unlikely to act as labour sources for the city's well of unskilled labour.