There are ethnic enclaves and a revitalized Inner Harbor. Johns Hopkins is there, and its campus police are now "real" police. There are some fairly ritzy areas, some gentrified, some just old and nice. My aunt used to have a house in Fells Point that she gutted and restored, I took karate at a Boy's Club in Highland town, and really liked Little Italy. Those are on the east side. I grew up down in and around Dundalk.
There are rowhouses, I guess they still call them that. In the 'burbs they were starter houses when I was growing up there. I later heard they were somehow trendy. The inner city was poor when I was a kid and decrepit to a large extent when I lived there, and it was decrepit when I last visited there 20 years ago.
They recently had the bit of corruption scandal where the mayor had written a book and it was profitable in ways that constituted malfeasance.
West Baltimore was in the news a few years ago. It's the area where Freddie Gray died. In the aftermath of the Gray killing and such, west Baltimore was under the microscope. Its murder rate was high for a similar city, and the area was described as having crushing poverty, failing schools, and very high unemployment. Numerous politicians called for a lot of money to be spent there to bring down the high unemployment rate, repair infrastructure and do something about crumbling houses--the vacancy rate was high, and abandoned buildings are just bad. After Gray's death, the crime rate increased, one side saying it's because of anger or hopelessness and others saying that the Balto. City police reduced their presence so that the locals would just run wild. (There's probably a third and a fourth side, too, but those are the two I remember.) How it's changed since 2017, can't say, but the pictures and footage I saw from then was a barely updated version of what I remember from the '70s through the '90s.
Cumming's district also includes the NW section of the city and a lot of Howard County, but I'm not so familiar with NW Baltimore and think of Howard County as scattered suburbs. Living on the east side of Baltimore, I had reasons to go downtown, sometimes west towards DC and north to Towson or even head out towards Harrisburg, but no real reason to go NW very often. The few times I did the Beltway relieved me of the slow slog through the city, so I'd just go around it.
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