Baltimore is a city of contrasts. Maryland’s only major city, it is
a nationally important port and transportation center, and the hub
of a prosperous metropolitan region increasingly integrated with that of Washington, D.C. Its downtown is the civic, cultural, and employment focal point of the region, and Johns Hopkins provides it with one of the nation’s premier universities. The city’s Inner Harbor, home to the National Aquarium, museums, and entertainment and shopping venues, draws thousands of visitors each year. Its excellent museums, symphony orchestra and opera company continue the city’s strong arts tradition, and it boasts major league baseball and football teams (and attractive new stadiums). At the same time, Baltimore has been buffeted by the forces affecting America’s older industrial cities: middle class migration to the suburbs, low-performing schools, out-migration of jobs, and racial disparities in income and employment.

Those contrasts, with Baltimore’s location and its active foundations and nonprofit institutions, make Baltimore an ideal site for policy studies. The city is within easy reach of the Maryland state capital and the nation’s capital. Baltimore exemplifies the interaction of governmental, corporate, and nonprofit responsibility for public problem-solving that the MPP program teaches. And together, Baltimore, Annapolis, and Washington comprise a great policy laboratory.

Dubbed “Charm City, U.S.A” as part of a 1970s marketing strategy to boost civic pride and attract tourism, Baltimore has gained a reputation for it quirky and colorful personality as a big “small town” whose claims to fame include being dubbed “the beehive hairdo capital of the world” and home to celebrities as diverse as movie director John Waters, journalist H.L. Mencken, writer Edgar Allen Poe and jazz legend Billie Holiday.