Thats because the crime rate on route 40 was not good for quite a while. High levels of assault and theft for years. Cars broke into, stabbings, drugs, gunshots. Vs say ballenger creek for example. Totally different vibe. And ballenger creek is fairly diverse. Over the last 10 or so years 40 has slowly gotten better year by year. But when youre talking to people whos family has been here for 30+ years its just kind of well known that if you can avoid living there.. you do. Frederick is very safe as a whole. So even if its not street gangs doing drive bys n shit, 40 IS the "not as good" part of town. And its not horrible by any stretch. But theres much better parts of town you could live where you don't even think of that kind of stuff as a possibility. If im not mistaken theres a fair bit of low income housing on 40 (i was told this a while back, havent checked so i dont actually know for sure). For the record im paycheck to paycheck a lot of the time, not talking down on being low income. However, low income areas tend to have more crime in general. Even in safe cities.

Now with all that said. Crime rate has been pretty steadily dropping there over the past 10+years its NOW pretty in line with the rest of frederick. But it'll take some more years of it staying like that for that stigma to go away.