Take the subway to Upton, a station on Pennsylvania Avenue in West Baltimore, and when you emerge onto the street, you may think you have arrived in a scene of The Wire, an old hit HBO show. Young men hang around, a few hawking drugs. Speak to Malik, a 40-year-old man selling knock-off Ray-Bans from a bin bag, however, and you will quickly be disabused of the idea that nothing has changed. “Where you are standing, try about ten years ago, you couldn’t hear yourself think,” he says. “It was all guys shouting ‘red top’, ‘red top’, ‘yellow top’, ‘yellow top’.” Now, he says, “it is all cleared out. I don’t know what’s going on. It’s gentrifying I think. Shit looks nicer, know what I mean?”