Millennials, Immigrants, and the Shrinking Middle Class

Abstract

Max’s Taphouse on South Broadway in Baltimore’s Fells Point neighborhood is a local landmark. It claims “Maryland’s largest selection of draught beers, 103 rotating taps, five cask beer engines, more than 1,200 bottled beers, as well as amazing food.”¹ It is only one of over a hundred restaurants, taverns, and nightspots in this historic neighborhood east of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor to which thousands of people throng nightly, eating, drinking, and simply hanging out on the cobblestoned streets and along the nearby waterfront. Off Broadway and Thames Street, the neighborhood’s two principal streets, the side streets glisten with beautifully restored row houses, where a tiny two-bedroom row house with a postage-stamp backyard on a narrow, treeless alley was recently listed for $375,000.² Not long before writing this, I was talking to a friend, now in her sixties, who’d been born in Fells Point. When she was a little girl in the 1960s, the family moved out because “it had become too dangerous,” her father told her. Today, almost half of Fells Point’s population is between twenty-five and thirty-four years old.