Bay View was a working-class neighborhood built around a rolling mill, and the rolling mill closed in 1929, and Bay View kept being working class because working-class neighborhoods don't stop being working class just because the work changes. The mill is gone. The lakefront is still here, which in 2200 means Bay View has something valuable: direct water access in a district where the housing is cheap enough for Tier 1-2 residents. This combination — lakefront plus poverty — has made Bay View the Corridor's most active informal port. Not the automated cargo platforms. Not the licensed commercial docks. The kind of port where small boats arrive at odd hours with cargo that doesn't have customs stamps, and the neighbors don't see anything because seeing things is a luxury that requires someone to report to.

The residential streets still follow the grid laid out in the 1870s, but the houses on them have been modified beyond their original architects' recognition. A typical Bay View home is a 19th-century frame structure with a 21st-century solar skin, a 22nd-century atmospheric processor bolted to the roof, and a basement that serves as either a workshop, a smuggling cache, or both. The yards have been converted to food production — hydroponic racks and protein vats that supplement the residents' nutrient paste rations with something that actually tastes like food. Bay View feeds itself, which is unusual for the lower tiers and provides a degree of independence that the corponations find mildly irritating and the residents find essential.

The commercial strip along Kinnickinnic Avenue — 'KK' to everyone who lives here — is a dense row of small businesses that have survived every economic transformation since the sovereignty transition: bars that serve actual alcohol (brewed locally, unlicensed, variable quality), repair shops that fix things the manufacturers designed to be replaced, and food stalls that serve the best fish fry in Milwaukee using fish that comes from the lake and requires a degree of courage to eat. KK is where Bay View's social life happens, and the social life of a working-class lakefront neighborhood is loud, communal, and fueled by cheap beer and mutual suspicion of anyone who doesn't live here.

The lakefront itself is Bay View's defining feature and its most dangerous asset. South Shore Park — what's left of it after the lake level rises of the 2060s — is the staging area for the informal port. Boats come in from the lake at night, dock at improvised piers, offload cargo, and leave before dawn. The cargo is everything: medical supplies too expensive to buy through licensed channels, augment components from the Circuit, food that isn't nutrient paste, and occasionally people. The informal port is not organized by any single entity. It's a community operation, maintained by consensus, defended by collective action, and governed by the understanding that if anyone talks, everyone suffers.