6 Easy Ways to Make a City More Livable

Brown suggests six solutions that Baltimore, or any city for that matter, "can do right now to make people say, 'Hey, this place is alright'." His list includes: low cost transit improvements, 20 mph neighborhood zones, complete streets, small public plazas, and street art (which as the video below shows, it already does quite well).

The final element - positive street life, says Brown, is a result of the rest. "Getting off the train from DC into downtown Baltimore is disheartening and a buzz kill.  Aside from the sorry state of Penn Station, most of this has to do with how abandoned our streets are, even during lunch and dinner hours. Streets are people’s first impression of a city, and when they’re filled solely with cars rushing by on wide one way streets at 45mph, it says something negative about our city. Go to NYC. Go to Philly. Go to DC or even parts of Pittsburgh and see how their streets are also outdoor performance theaters, playgrounds, cultural conduits, window shopping opportunities, and bicycle skyways. A quality street does more than one thing well. A street that does many things well becomes magical."