As another commenter said, calling it really close to Hampden is a stretch. Baltimore is a city where walking a few blocks can put you into a much different area. Ashburton is a solid 10 minute drive or hour walk from Hampden.

Ashburton itself is pretty nice. The homes are nice, neighborhood is kept up, and I would feel safe in the direct neighborhood. Hanlon park has been getting renovated. Commuting to key parts of the city/county is easy from there.

The concern is the surrounding areas. Ashburton is only a few blocks tall/wide. Once you go out of those blocks, things can change pretty quickly. The area north is more concerning. I know people who used to work at Hilton Elementary (directly south of Ashburton), and they had overall positive things to say.

IMO: The Niche scores for a neighborhood like Ashburton are worse than I would personally expect based on my personal experience.

I could be wrong here, but I think it gets a C- because it is only considering public schools, it doesn't take into account the Baltimore School Choice program, and I'm also not sure how it determines the school it rates the score on.

Assuming it works directionally like GreatSchools/Zillow... It will tell you schools in Wyman Park get a 6/10 for Elementary/Middle and then a 1/10 for high school. That would put you somewhere in C- territory.

So yeah. Not ideal. All of these websites would potentially scare prospects looking to move to these neighborhoods with families...

As I've dug more into this tonight, the nightlife ratings seem inflated nearly everywhere. Thank you for commenting and adding your input!

As someone who has done very little digging into the topic: Can you elaborate a little on why the school data is so bad? Are sites like GreatSchools the same way?

The nightlife ratings are a little odd. If I understand their scoring properly, it sounds like Wyman Park benefits from being so close to Hampden, Charles Village, Remington, and the Rotunda. Those give them a ton of restaurants, a decent number of bars, a large college/young adult population... Those all play into how that gets calculated.

Definitely right inside of the neighborhood lines though, it's a lower nightlight grade.

As someone who has not spent time in the Butcher's Hill neighborhood specifically but I've been to surrounding areas, are there certain things worth specifically going to the neighborhood to check out? Are you surprised with the #2 ranking?

I think that's just the default that the map shows at that zoom level... I linked the link in another comment if you wanted to see more details or see if you get the same result.

For those unfamiliar with Niche, I will link the overall Baltimore page below. If you scroll down half way, you will find the neighborhood map I posted and you can look at the profiles for each neighborhood if you wanted more details vs just the image.

https://www.niche.com/places-to-live/baltimore-md/

According to Niche's website, they outline all the different items and data sets that go into their ratings.

https://www.niche.com/about/methodology/best-places-to-live/

That being said, the ratings overlap very closely to a poverty/median income map.