It's pitch black, near midnight, on a recent New Year's Eve. A handful of hooded figures move stealthily along the edge of a vacant grass lot at the corner of Oliver Street and Greenmount Avenue. One of the figures hunches over in the shadows; there is a spark, and then they scatter. Seconds later, a sonic-sounding boom is followed by a colorful spray of fireworks igniting the sky and reflecting in shards of broken windows in rowhouses on Brentwood Avenue. The display attracts neighborhood kids, who appear seemingly out of nowhere, doing wheelies on bikes and screaming "Happy New Year!" A cop car screeches to a halt on Greenmount Avenue. More fireworks go off, this time from a warehouse rooftop. The illegal revelry stops only when the police helicopter circles above, shining a blinding white beam on the dark streets below.

Over the years, this vacant lot at 1500 Greenmount has seen a lot of activity. Located on a central corner, across from the Green Mount Cemetery and on the eastern edge of the Station North Arts and Entertainment District, the land has hosted illegal fireworks displays and drug deals, soccer games and bike races. It has served as event parking for the nearby artist warehouse, Area 405. When the grass gets high, it has been a sleeping shelter for the drunk or the homeless. Mostly it has served as a shortcut for neighborhood folks—a mix of low-income residents, artists, and college kids—who wear a diagonal path through the underbrush on their way to someplace else.

In October of 2006, the City's Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD), who owns the property, officially offered the land for development. In a request for proposals, the HCD said it was looking for a "real estate developer to develop, own, and operate the site," which they estimate to value $266,600.

Brad Rogers, cofounder of Baltimore Landmark Homes, was instantly intrigued. Rogers saw the lot as an excellent opportunity to do something environmentally friendly and architecturally unique in the city, something that could foster the spirit of an arts district and be a part of the neighborhood at large. He had a thought: shipping containers.

"Two things are converging right now," Rogers said recently from his office in Hampden. "In the green-build movement, there's a renewed interest in modular and pre-fab housing, and there are great improvements in that regard. And the idea of shipping containers is a hot topic because they are both modular and recycled."

Rogers looked to other projects, like London's Container City, that have successfully transformed used shipping containers into affordable, stylish housing. The containers, which are in abundance in the marketplace right now and easily acquired, come in standard sizes of 8 by 8 by 20 feet or 8 by 8 by 40 feet and can be stacked and configured to create myriad building forms.

Rogers called upon Baltimore architect Kathleen M. Lechleiter for design help. Lechleiter created a conceptual plan that includes sixteen two-story, three-bedroom, live-work units that are about 1200 square feet each. The homes have vaulted 24-foot ceilings in the center and would sell for around $220,000. Rogers also wanted to include some aspects of street-level community space, so the team designed a common area and a theater. A roofline that resembles a Quonset hut creates a striking frontage along the busy Greenmount Avenue. "We wanted something very dramatic and different in order to draw attention to this site and have a creative reimagining of what is possible in urban design," Rogers says.

Rogers becomes animated when he talks about the architectural possibilities for this location. When asked if he thinks the City will go for such an unusual design, his face darkens a bit. "I don't know. I try not to let that deter me."

Rogers would have every right to be discouraged. This is not the first time that Baltimore Landmark Homes has gone out on a limb and responded to a City-issued RFP with a different kind of design concept. In 2005 the developers created an environmentally friendly proposal for the Woodberry neighborhood that was supported both by the community and the housing commission's own review panel, which included a member of the community. The HCD then disregarded the panel and the community's wishes and awarded the project to Savannah Development Corp. Chris Shea, an official of the HCD at that time, was quoted in the City Paper in May 2006 as saying that his department's panel was inexperienced and in the future, he said, community members would not be allowed to sit on review panels.

It is not surprising then, that members of the Greenmount West community are very concerned about the City-issued RFP now under consideration in their neighborhood. In fact, both community leaders and the City's own planning department expressed concern that the HCD was offering this significantly placed lot at this time. According to a city planner who works with the neighborhood, Greenmount West is in the process of creating its own "small-area plan," which would update the severely outdated Urban Renewal Plan written for the area in the 1970s.

Greenmount Avenue is also seen as a key target area in the City's new Comprehensive Master Plan, adopted last year. The plan notes that this corridor is an important link to Station North and a prime area for mixed-use, transit-oriented redevelopment. Any City RFP should certainly support the overarching vision of the community and its own Master Plan process.

Yet it is that outdated Urban Renewal Plan that is given as a reference point for potential developers in the HCD-issued RFP. The document makes only cursory mention of the Station North Arts and Entertainment District. It is, by all accounts, a pretty basic outline of requirements with little directive about specific goals or community development guidelines by which the entries will be judged.

The Department of Planning and the Greenmount West Community Development Corporation (CDC) say they will have their small-area plan completed by September. In it, they will outline the goals and priorities for land use in the neighborhood. "We're looking to create a mixed-income community," explains Eric Goods, founder and executive director of the Greenmount West CDC. Goods says that his organization had several discussions with the City about the disposition of land in and around Greenmount Avenue, and requested that the HCD wait until their planning was complete. "We weren't successful at having the department delay the RFP," Goods says. "The RFP wasn't connected to any community-planning initiative at the time that it was released. There may have been other drivers that influenced the release, but they didn't really say why. There was not any communication with the community in a tangible way."

This points to an interesting conundrum in Baltimore. Our planning department, which is responsible for, well, planning and community dialogue, is not always in lockstep with the Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD), who has the power to sell and develop City land. In fact, HCD will sometimes move forward on offering land for development without consulting the planning department, let alone the community in question. The lot at 1500 Greenmount is a prime example: When the HCD issued a request for proposals for the lot, it came as a surprise to both the planning department and the community leaders, who were working in tandem to create that small-area plan.

The RFP did not require potential developers to consult with the community, but some of the respondents, like Baltimore Landmark Homes and ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), did on their own accord. (Coincidentally, the Greenmount West CDC has also been considering shipping containers as a possibility for a community center, following concept approval by the New Greenmount West Community Association.)

Charlie Duff, director of Jubilee Baltimore, a major investor in the Station North district, also responded to the RFP, in spite of some consternation over its timing. "We think that the City is ill-advised to be offering this site now, all by itself," Duff says. "We think that the City should be saying that Station North needs a coordinated effort, and the City should be a full partner in this and should not be a hands-off partner."

Duff also thought the language of the RFP was not sufficient. "It was the standard, basic RFP language, nothing very important. And Station North needs more than that. It could serve as an example for Baltimore development and become a model neighborhood."

Goods attended an HCD meeting held in November 2006 to educate interested developers about the site. "There wasn't much direction for developers," Goods says. "Mostly, the City said what it didn't want."

Goods says he asked the HCD representative whether the winning developer would be required to work with the community, and the answer was no. "We just found that very interesting, that there wasn't a requirement to coordinate with the community on this development."

The HCD has since told Urbanite that it will work with the community. In a statement issued through Acting Communications Director Tania Baker, the department said: "We elected to slow down the review process for the 1500 Greenmount proposals, as the planning department has embarked upon a master planning process for the Station North/Greenmount West area." The statement also said that a community member would be allowed to sit on the RFP review panel and that "once a developer is designated, the developer will be expected to work fully with the community."

The Station North/Greenmount West area offers a rare opportunity—to champion the entrepreneurial spirit of the artists that live and work there, to foster civil ties with the longtime neighbors, to create, in essence, an inclusive urban enclave. Community members believe that they are at a tipping point. Sharon Ellerbe, a member of the Greenmount West CDC and a longtime resident of the neighborhood, worries that they could head down the slippery slope of the dreaded "G" word. "It's a wonderful community and we don't want gentrification," Ellerbe says. "We have been working with the City, and we've been working with the developers, but somehow, some way, they don't hear us. We don't have a lot of money, we just have a lot of ideas. And we could become a model neighborhood."

—Elizabeth A. Evitts is Urbanite's former editor-in-chief.