Did we count this right – did the Washington Post Magazine just print 3,017 words on rats in Baltimore? With humorous illustrations of rats eating Utz chips?

What to make of Karen Houppert’s “Oh Rats – there’s one thing about Baltimore she can’t get used to“?

Putting a rodent-esque twist on the strange tendency of the Post of late to burn major journalistic calories mocking Baltimore, this article condescends with the best of them. Baltimore readers, in comments, are already taking offense.

Tanika White, for instance, questions one of Houppert’s central claims: that she saw a rat every single day (except one) for an entire semester of walking to the night class she taught at Hopkins from her home in Charles Village.

“I know many people in Charles Village, and even they say this DAILY rat sighting she claims is surely hyperbole,” White writes. “But of course the editors at WaPo – who love, love, love to print anything that disparages Baltimore – would find this kind of science fiction believable.”



You’ll find the obligatory rat stat in here: “According to CitiStat, the reported rat rate increased from fewer than 10 rats per 1,000 residents in 2002 to 60 per 1,000 in 2009,” she writes. “A Baltimore City Health Department report that year noted that ‘the rodent infestation rate in Baltimore is six times the national average.’”

But did the Post really have to pump up their rat story with all this:

“Imagine a city of rowhouses built for 1 million people, a Rust Belt town whose boom and bust pattern followed the expected trajectories for steel mills and shipbuilders during the two World Wars. Then, riots on the heels of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s death led to white flight in the ’60s and ’70s, leaving a population of 621,342 rattling around in a town built for a million. Now visualize vast swaths of the city where thousands of rowhouses are vacant, boarded up and ready for rodent habitation. . .”

“I like Baltimore. . . except for the racial segregation. And the failing schools. And the homicide rate. And the rats.”

Oy veh. Maybe the most important factoid is the author’s confession that she prefers Brooklyn to Baltimore – and wishes her spouse never dragged her here.