John Hopkins 21st Century Cities Initiative released its third Baltimore Area Survey report, and while Baltimore area residents feel physically safer, they worry about the local economy.

Crime has declined substantially in Baltimore City since 2023 – both homicides and non-fatal shootings have dropped by 50 percent, and feelings of personal safety have been on the rise.

Compared to 2024, the share of Baltimore City residents feeling that their personal safety had increased grew by 9.2 percentage points this year, from 14.1 percent to 23.3 percent.

In 2023, 35.8 percent of Baltimore City residents reported that crime had gotten worse in their neighborhoods during the previous five years. By 2025, that percentage dropped to 24.5 percent.

“This is really pointing to the fact that the crime rate that has dropped– the efforts by especially Baltimore City to address crime have really paid off, not just in the statistics, but also in how people are feeling in their neighborhoods,” report author and Faculty Director of the 21st Century Cities Initiative Michael Bader said.

However, Bader says vacant buildings remain a substantial problem in Baltimore City – almost three in five residents report that vacant buildings are at least a small problem in their neighborhoods.

Baltimore-area residents are feeling particularly pessimistic about economic conditions – only about one in eight Baltimore-area residents thinks that economic conditions in the region are good or excellent.

About a third of residents report that the Baltimore-area economy is in poor shape, and 45 percent of residents think that the U.S. economy is in poor shape.

Employed residents are more concerned about losing their jobs compared to years prior as well, with respondents who didn’t worry at all about losing their jobs plunging by 15 percentage points compared to 2024.

“They are also worried about if they did happen to lose their current job, about being able to find a new job in the future,” Bader said. “What you can see is a shift from year to year in the growing sense that finding a new job will be more difficult. This has already started to be the case last year.”

Food insecurity has also worsened among residents, boomeranging to the same levels seen in the 2023 survey results.

Almost thirty-seven percent of Baltimore-area residents experienced food insecurity this year, approximately ten percentage points higher than in 2024.

Bader says the increases were most acute among Black residents.

“One of the findings from last year that was particularly exciting was showing that Black residents in particular had seen their food insecurity levels drop, and unfortunately, what we saw this year was they rebounded back to the same levels that we saw in 2023.”

The findings follow lapses in federal food assistance during the longest federal government shutdown in history this year, as well as increased demand at regional food banks.

Bader says a separate report will be released in the coming months solely focused on how Baltimore-area residents feel about cost of living.