Review of Not in My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City by Antero Pietila

*Not in My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City* by Antero Pietila (2010). Published by Ivan R. Dee.

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

I recently fell into a spell of unemployment probably during the worst time to be unemployed, as it was very hard to find a job. I was applying to hundreds of jobs, getting interviews, but no offer was manifesting for me in the near future. So during this time, I had a lot of free time, and spent a good chunk of it chipping away at the blog.

I was born and raised in Baltimore County, Maryland, although my parents were originally raising my first sister in Baltimore City while living in a house shared with some other Iranian couples. After that, they moved into Section 8 housing in Owings Mills before we settled where we are today, but Baltimore City has always been a special place in my heart. I grew up with my father’s stories of being an ice cream truck owner and taxi driver in the city, even if his stories weren’t always positive.

It was after I moved back from New York City, during the COVID-19 pandemic, that I began to think more about how. wanted to learn more about Baltimore and its history. I kind of knew it just from living here and going to school in the area, but I was also acutely aware that there were biases in the perspectives I was fed.

So I wanted to find more books and resources about the history of the area, which is something I had to pursue deeper in graduate school at Towson University. I began picking up books at the school’s library, but also bought some on my own to build up my own personal library.

Not in My Neighborhood is one of the books I picked up for my personal collection. I bought it during the pandemic, when I first had the inkling of an idea of the research I wanted to do, but I didn’t get around to reading it until graduate school. Something I’m also really good at lately is procrastinating on the books I want to read—sometimes it takes a few years before I get to them.

But when I did start reading this, I was prepped and ready to handle what it had to say. Let’s get into the review now, as the introduction is getting a little long!

A comprehensive look at the history of housing discrimination against certain races and ethnicities in Baltimore, Maryland.

This is a book to show one of the earliest examples of legal and codified housing discrimination in the United States. Fair warning: if you’re not used to reading history or more academic inclined books, then you’re probably going to want to split this one up into several different sections while you read because you may find it dense.

As Pietila outlines in the book, Baltimore is a very good example if you want to study housing discrimination. In the United States, after the Civil War and the rise of Jim Crow, housing discrimination in general became more pronounced as Black Americans were able to have more access to income and movement. This dramatically increased during the Great Migration (see: Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns if you want a great book on that).

In Baltimore specifically though, Black and Jewish communities were harmed by the legal system in place. If you look at the Black butterfly and the current setup of housing in the city, you’ll see the impacts of these laws and systems that everyday people were forced into.

The way zoning worked is that Black and Jewish people were completely locked out of certain parts of the city. Fueled by the racism and bigotry of the early 1900s, these communities could literally not buy property except in areas that are now considered ghettos. That led to more systemic issues, as even today those neighborhoods literally do not have grocery stores or even parks for people to access greenery or shade.

Pietila goes beyond the distant past to Baltimore’s recent history as well, as there’s been a major white flight out of the city and the increase of drugs and other prominent issues in certain neighborhoods. For years Baltimore has had a negative population growth, with more people leaving than coming into the city, even though I think this is starting to shift in 2025.

This is because of the housing zones and discrimination. The rise of the suburbs after World War II and the depiction of the average American lifestyle had white Baltimoreans going into Baltimore County and the surrounding areas. Pietila goes deep into how various factors created these situations, from highways to blockbusting.

Overall Thoughts

I enjoyed this book a lot and thought that it was very thought provoking, even if I was familiar with some of the history being discussed throughout its pages. I do think that there might be some issues with readers not as familiar with Baltimore and its landscape. The maps are helpful, but you really need to be familiar with the landscape in order to fully grasp this book.

However, despite that, this is a necessary read if you want to understand a city that has been demonized in American popular culture and media. I think Baltimore gets a bad rep that is undeserved, especially as a lot of the issues that are present in the city were created by white men in power who did not care for what was happening to their Black, Jewish, and now Latinx counterparts.

I want to read more on Baltimore in the modern day, especially with the influx of Latinx immigrants in certain sections of the city, but I think this is a great primer for those looking to dive deeper into the subject of why Baltimore is the way it is. I’ve been arguing a lot lately that if we even had decent public transportation people could have access to more opportunities, as this is a car dependent city when a lot of people don’t even have cars.

Definitely go read this book if you’re interested in what it has to say!

Follow me below on Instagram, Goodreads, and Letterboxd for more.