Baltimore was named one of the top cities for young professionals to work in, based on cost of living, educational opportunities and the city’s nightlife.

The survey was conducted by Madison, Wisc.-based Next Generation Consulting. The report broke down cities into three population categories — Baltimore in the largest city category for those with more than 500,000 people — and evaluated them based on assets the report deemed as important to 20 to 40 year olds.

Among the other cities in Baltimore’s category, San Francisco was named No. 1. Baltimore was named No. 7, beating out Portland, Ore., New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles.

The seven indexes of a top city, or “Next City,” are average earnings, dedication to education, cleanliness of the city, around town, nightlife, cost of lifestyle and safety and diversity of the
population, according to Next Generation Consulting.

Baltimore residents have historically had an inferiority complex about their city compared to their more cosmopolitan neighbors in Philadelphia and Washington. But in the last ten years, the city skyline has grown and spread across acres of what once were parking lots and hinterlands. Neighborhoods have revitalized, and a burgeoning arts and entertainment scene has developed — whether its theatre in Mt. Vernon, fine arts and art galleries in Fells Point and downtown, or live music in Fells Point. Baltimore now has one of the most heavily populated downtown areas among cities its size, with the re-development of old office buildings into modern apartments and condos and the return of grocery stores and even big box retail to the Inner Harbor. And never forget about the added life that the tens of millions of Inner Harbor visitors, sports fans, half-dozen new hotels, and an expanded convention center bring to the city.

Baltimore’s affordable housing certainly provides one of the most important boosts to this type of favorable publicity. People can afford to live here, and live well. That’s a message that really needs to be told, and its studies like this that will tell it better than an ad campaign or promotional gimmicks that the public doesn’t always trust to be accurate. Young, first-time homebuyers have been the rock on which the budding recovery of our housing market is being built — the very buyers that are covered in this survey. The timing couldn’t be better for this type of news.

Baltimore is moving from the classification of “big small city” to “small big city”  and its about time.

On one hand, economic news lately has been predominantly positive. Unemployment, while bad, has not risen as fast as had been predicted and there is even some evidence that its slowing and may be in the process of turning around. Housing news has been (and I feel will continue to be) positive, as residential resales and new home construction have both increased at surprising rates this spring. Even media outlets that tend to look on the dark side all the time (are you listening, Baltimore SUN?) have written headline stories on the positive trends that are developing. It would seem that economic stimulus, an increase in positive consumer sentiment, and other factors are turning this recession faster than had been predicted just six months ago. Great news, right?

Then how can the news be explained that a growing number of people are dissatisfied with the performance of the new administration and are losing confidence that the stimulus and the new government spending, regulation and other initiatives aimed at the recession will work? It would seem that the evidence is all around them, that it will — and is working — right now.

I have a couple of theories. First is simply that as a nation our ability to wait for good things has been severely diminished over the last 30 years. If its hard, if it takes awhile, and if it requires personal sacrifice, we don’t like it. We lose patience quickly, and blame the very people whose policies and principles are necessary to achieve the goal. Second, as a body politic, we have not yet managed to shake the poisonous habit of the last decade of shouting doom and gloom and twisting reality simply to fashion a hammer with which to beat up the other side. This has begun to achieve Orwellian dimensions… no matter the reality, no matter the truth… simply say the lie often enough and some people will believe it. And as more people join the Falsehood Chorus, more people believe. Passionately.

In my own personal life, I’ve seen friends who I have always credited with being smart, reasonable people become raving lunatics by repeating things that they have heard that are simply ridiculous. And believing them.

This gives me unease, both for the future of the efforts to curb this recession and return us to economic health, and for the future of the country. But as long as the public rewards the liars, the lunatics, the hatemongers, the loud and bombastic over the truth seekers and the reasonable explainers… we will be condemned to travel the wrong paths.

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So this is real *good* news, but its also *real* good news. Statistics don’t always show what’s going on beneath. And the media — for whatever reason — prefers to trumpet bad news over encouraging developments. If this manages to keep going through the hot months, we will have a genuine recovery under way, with declining inventory and stabilizing home prices. I just hope that if that happens, the people who decide what news *is* will decide to let everyone else know. I’ll certainly be broadcasting it to anyone who will listen.

All you have to do is look at other cities where such a structure has been removed to see that it could be wildly beneficial. One city with which I’m very familiar is Boston. The Central Artery divided center city from the North End for several generations, and when I first moved to Boston in 1984, talk was just beginning about the “Big Dig” that would rip it down, replace that stretch of Interstate 93 with a tunnel, and a wide boulevard would be built on top, ending the harrowing experience of crossing beneath the highway over a desecrated street pattern, to walk or drive from one part of the city to another. Despite what you think of the results in Boston from a financial and quality of construction standpoint, the results of the “Big Dig,” finally complete twenty years later, (alas, long after I moved away) have proven its merits when it comes to knitting the city back together.

But Boston is not Baltimore. Boston has a multi-prong, comprehensive mass transit system that is used by hundreds of thousands of commuters every day. Traffic and parking in that colonial city convinced people generations ago to take public transit to work and leave their own vehicles at home. The investment in the Central Artery tunnel was made with a world-class transit system in place and functioning well.

Baltimore has practically no public transit. Its bus system is pathetic. Its one heavy rail subway serves Owings Mills and Johns Hopkins Hospital and very little in between. Its one light rail trolley system is unfriendly to city dwellers because its route takes it through a lightly populated river valley to the suburbs, north and south. Amazingly, the two rail systems do not connect. There is a plan on the boards to create another light rail line from east to west that might connect to the other two, if the money is there. But that plan is in serious jeopardy because two short sighted communities would rather drown in carbon monoxide from the cars choking their streets.

Spending a billion dollars to tear down a highway, and make the automobile congestion even more abysmal, is true insanity.

Spend a billion on a comprehensive, functional, convenient light rail transit system that knits the existing communities of the city together and gets people out of their cars. THEN talk about ripping down highways — because then, and only then, will you not need them.

Offered at $174,900

A great value at $174,000

First the specifics: Fannie Mae has always had restrictions on condo lending, in particular the requirement that the developer own less than half of the units in the building. That requirement will now be greatly increased, so that a developer will have to have sold at least 70% of the units before Fannie will guarantee the mortgage. The new rules will also require that a purchaser have at least 25% downpayment to avoid paying a closing cost penalty of .75% of the loan — no matter what the purchaser’s credit score. It keeps going. Fannie now will not back the loans in an existing condo association where 15% or more of the residents are behind on their condo fees, or where a single outside entity owns more than 10% of the units.

The mortgage giant defends these new policies as being careful with the taxpayer’s money by not taking responsibility for loans made in speculative or failing condominium developments, while ignoring the fact that these tightened rules make it more likely that currently healthy communities will be weakened. In many cities, condominiums are the least expensive option for home ownership and serve as the entryway for first time homebuyers, so these rules are making it tougher for new purchasers to enter the housing market and help drive down the excess inventory that has been built up over the last three years.

The inventory of unsold condo units will only swell as projects currently under construction start to open sales offices. According to the National Association of Realtors, the United States ended 2008 with a fourteen month supply of condominiums on the market, the highest backlog since they began keeping records ten years ago. In 2009, industry sources estimate that another 93,000 brand new units will enter the market across the country — a whopping 12,000 of them in the greater New York City market alone. Not only will these units be more difficult (if not impossible) to sell given the new guidelines, but even some of the pre-sold units may not settle since lenders now have these new rules in place that will “de-approve” buyers who thought they had a loan locked in. Never mind the fact that these units may also be worth significantly less than their pre-construction pricing a year or two ago.

Sometimes that Law of Unintended Consequences is a real bitch.

A study by Moody’s Economy.com gives even better news. They have found eight markets around the country where home prices relative to rents are within 5% of historic levels, leading one of their economists to predict, “The bottom is coming into view.”

While we’ve heard that phrase before over the last few years, its nice to have a fresh reason to believe it might be true this time.

Later, as a guest on Chris Mathews’ HARDBALL, Mr. Santelli went further, advocating that people in trouble simply be allowed to fail. He added, dramatically, that he’d be willing to “bite the bullet” and let both of his neighbors go into foreclosure if necessary because he wasn’t planning to sell his home. He would ride out what he considered the small amount of collateral damage to his home or his neighborhood, because he wasn’t planning to sell anytime soon. The next day, on the same program, he began to finally tip his hand when he used the term “redistributionist” to describe the goals of the plan. Mr. Mathews moved in for the kill: it turns out that Mr. Santelli is a Republican who voted for John McCain.

Mr. Santelli engaged in manipulative, insincere populism, and his premise and description of the results were simply wrong.

I’m sure that in the lovely upscale suburbs of New York and Chicago, the million dollar plus homes on large lots could indeed survive several foreclosures without significant hits on property values. The neighborhood probably won’t see an  increase in drug havens, increasing street crime, physical deterioration, or other negative results. Investors won’t swoop in to snap up the lavish homes, slap on a new coat of paint, and then stuff them full of tenants who have no ties to the neighborhood and have no real stake in maintaining it. In short, I’m sure that in Mr. Santelli’s neighborhood he could let the country’s housing market go down the toilet without too much discomfort. It makes it very easy for someone in his position to wrap himself in populist rants of “unfairness” to thwart a solution that will mitigate the terrible consequences for the rest of us.

So, Mr. Santelli, since you’ve made it clear you don’t give a damn about the rest of us, why don’t you just go back to your lovely home in your lovely neighborhood, build a very, very, very tall fence, buy lots of assault rifles to fortify the ramparts, and never come out again. I can tell you that the rest of us will not miss you.