WASHINGTON — It’s no secret that it’s expensive to live in the D.C. area, so a Baltimore-based ad campaign is encouraging more people to move there, and commute to the District.
As the D.C.-area job market continues to perk up, houses and rental properties get more expensive, causing many workers to look for homes outside the District. The campaign by Live Baltimore, a nonprofit organization that promotes living in urban Baltimore-area neighborhoods, is aimed at attracting workers who can’t afford D.C., but want to live in an urban setting, The Baltimore Sun reports.
Although housing prices could be lower in Baltimore, commuters face high transportation fees and long commute times. Developers are working to build more housing convenient to MARC stations, The Sun says, hoping to cut down commuting time for D.C. workers.
The Sun says that the latest Internal Revenue Service data shows more than 500 people moved to Baltimore from Washington in 2014. In the same year, only about 80 people moved from Washington to Baltimore.
And while the number of people commuting from Baltimore to D.C. remains small, it has doubled in recent years from about 3,000 in 2009 to about 5,940 in 2013, according to American Community Survey estimates from the U.S. Census.
“We were just trying to make the argument that the difference of a train ride might be several hundred thousand dollars,” Steve Gondol, executive director of Live Baltimore, told The Sun.
