Sitting on the stoop is very very common in Baltimore. Every night when driving home I’d see the mothers braiding the kids’ hair. In the German section of Baltimore, the housewives famously scrubbed the front stairs every single day. Many neighborhoods gather outside every night and the kids play and the parents/grandparents talk.
But yes, there are often young men sitting outside smoking.
I live in an apartment building and no smoking in the building, so many people gather outside the backdoor and smoke. They often look like homeless gathering, but they actually live here.
Not everyone works a 9-5 shift. They may work other shifts, which makes them available during the day. Or they work a job where they have to work on Saturday and/or Sunday, so their days off are sometime between Monday-Friday. Lots of possibilities.
Owl- I sympathize. It is very stressful worrying about your kid’s safety.
I think the best way to manage this is to remind your kid that the safety measures are there to keep student’s safe. Period. Which means taking the van service; calling for a security escort late at night; following the routes laid out by campus police and not trying to shave three minutes off the walk by taking a shortcut through a dark apartment building’s parking lot.
At the end of the day, the biggest danger to college kids is OTHER college kids or themselves. Drinking and blacking out. Assault. High on something or other and falling off the dorm roof (which is noted- everywhere- The Roof is not safe" but kids party up there anyway). Etc. So continuing the dialogue with your kid about safe habits, walking with a friend, not having earbuds in while moving around campus, not using an ATM at midnight, AND not drinking to excess which is both dangerous as a habit and reduces the ability to make good choices would be my suggestion.
Is your kid’s roommate tuned into safety issues, i.e. an ally here?
While I agree that all cities have similar areas to avoid and feel safer in, and you need to take appropriate precautions, Baltimore is a little different.
Philly and NYC have plenty of residential areas mixed in, and Philly, for one is very walkable.
Back in an economic geography class (I am hazy on the years) I learned that Baltimore planners deliberately created a straight road from the affluent suburbs (Towson etc) down to the office district and deliberately bisected the town, to push lower income and racial minorities to east and west Baltimore. That segregation (of all types) made it much more difficult to have integrated areas to walk around, like you find in Philly.
As a result, there are a lot of “bubbles” but not a nice cohesive city center.
BUT- I was recently on a college campus for work. Urban campus, big campus police presence, all the bells and whistles.
What did I see? Students walking in the early evening (when it’s dark) with earbuds in, looking down on their phones. That gets a D in “situational awareness” by most security pros. Back door of a dorm (which I could see led to the communal laundry area) propped open with a big rock. Yes, eventually the combination of the security patrol and an observant student would get the door shut-- but why oh why would students at an urban campus bypass the swiping system, the human guards at the front desk, etc. just to make it easier to pop in and out of the building while waiting for the laundry to dry? It makes no sense. Oh- and my favorite- students “swiping in” uber eats and other food delivery service people. It’s too much trouble to go down to the lobby and wait for your tacos? Don’t expect your fellow dorm mates to swipe in total strangers so they can wander the buildings at will. That’s insane.
So the true danger to a college student is the carelessness of college students, not a random stranger smoking at 3 pm on his own doorstep. Maybe he’s a pharm tech at the university hospital whose shift starts at 6 pm. Maybe he’s a food service worker at your kid’s college whose shift starts at 5 am to start the waffles and pancakes, and he’s done by 1 pm. College campuses and their hospitals require 24/7 staffing in a lot of critical functions- so to criticize someone for “hanging out” during the day is to essentially say “My kid’s college shouldn’t be hiring folks from the neighborhood. They should hire people from leafy suburban areas with gated communities who need to commute in at 5 am”. No, doesn’t typically work that way!
My kid at USC was in one of those huge private apartment buildings right on the edge of campus which is NOT a great area safety-wise to say the least. And inside those long long corridors, the doors did NOT automatically lock when shut. You had to use a key to lock it from the outside when leaving.
Guess how many doors remained unlocked???
Now yes, there was security to enter the building but…what the heck!?!
Yep, that’s Baltimore. You can drive by row houses at any time, day or night, and there are people on the stoops. It’s definitely urban living and not for everyone. And everyone smokes (or did).