By: Elizabeth A. Evitts

During a tour of Sonia and Curtis Eaddy’s 1890s rowhome, the conversation quickly turns to plaster. “They just don’t make it like they used to,” Curtis says, staring at the ceiling. When the Eaddys purchased this house in the 300 block of North Carrollton Street in 1992, the original crown molding was just one of the historic details that the couple admired. Ceiling medallions of intricate plaster were crumbling from neglect, but Curtis did his best to restore the original architectural work while blending in new construction.

Sitting in the living room, the Eaddy’s talk about their love affair with historic preservation. Outside, a heavy spring rain slaps against the front windows and a green light, the atmospheric wonder that often accompanies change-of-season thunderbursts, makes the linen-yellow interior of their home feel that much warmer. Vintage furniture decorates the room and Blue, their Shepherd puppy, sleeps in a ball on the polished hardwood floor.

We often hear the stories of people like the Eaddys who went in against the odds to reclaim the architectural wonders of a neighborhood and in doing so revivified a moribund area. These individuals saw potential in trash-filled lots and the ghostly shells of vacant homes, and ignored the cynics who insisted declining city neighborhoods don’t recover. Sonia and Curtis Eaddy had a vision for Poppleton. And now, after many years of lovingly detailed labor-updating the kitchen and installing porcelain tile, uncovering slate fireplaces, stripping and refinishing all the original trim-the Eaddy’s three-story West Baltimore house is well under way to becoming a showcase of urban revitalization.

Five months ago, the City of Baltimore said it wants to tear it down.

In November of 2004, the City Council, with the support of the Poppleton Village Community Development Corporation and the Village Center of Poppleton, passed an urban renewal amendment to take by eminent domain 526 properties on a U - shaped, 13.8-acre parcel of land. According to the bill, the properties, which include those of both homeowners and renters, are being acquired and disposed of for clearance and redevelopment of new housing. This plan is part of an expansive urban renewal vision for West Baltimore, which is bordered by West Mulberry to the north, Martin Luther King Boulevard to the east, West Pratt Street to the south and North Carey Street to the west.

After an expedited three-month search, Baltimore Housing (made up of the Department of Housing and Community Development and the Housing Authority) announced last month that it plans to partner with New York-based La Cité Development, a company with a radical vision for Poppleton that includes capitalizing on the celebrity of Susan L. Taylor, editorial director of Essence magazine and a principal in La Cité. This is the first project for the company in Baltimore, and the first development of this scale for the newly formed corporation.

Community members and preservation advocates are questioning the removal of so much historic housing stock just blocks from downtown. They argue that the hot real estate market for city housing, coupled with incentives for homeowners and a smart approach for large investors, could spark a revitalization of West Baltimore without mass clearance-the sort of rebirth represented by the Eaddys. Poppleton raises the tough question of what to do with struggling urban neighborhoods: When do you rehab and when do you rebuild?

 

Urban Renewal: Take One

By the 1850s, West Baltimore was a diverse neighborhood with a mix of working- class and wealthy residents and a breadth of architectural styles. The infamous Boss Kelly, who ran the West Baltimore Democratic Club in the early 1900s, made his home on West Saratoga Street. H.L. Mencken lived there. So did Edgar Allen Poe.

Decline began when the middle class gradually succumbed to the siren song of the emerging suburbs, and the deterioration was expedited by the first wave of government-funded urban renewal thirty years ago: high-rise public housing went up, Route 40 bifurcated Poppleton, and the realigning of traffic along Martin Luther King Boulevard blocked its Eastern border.

Sonia Eaddy, 40, grew up in Poppleton and remembers when the neighborhood was still vibrant. She and her cousins would walk to the corner store to buy sunflower seeds and gather in front of their grandfather’s house to play jacks and hopscotch. “One thing about growing up in the inner city: You could sit out on the front stoop and somebody’s always walking by,” she says.

Sonia and Curtis moved out of Poppleton to raise their young children. As the children grew older, the family of seven began looking for a new home. The Eaddy’s had a choice of where to live. They hunted in the county, but Sonia didn’t much like the suburbs. “It was too secluded,” she says.

She decided it was time to come home. “This block was just always special to me,” Sonia says of Carrollton Street, and she and Curtis bought the house in 1992. For years they rented to tenants and worked on the rehab before they moved in two years ago.

People told Sonia she was crazy to come back. Her aunt, who still lives in Poppleton, warned her of the vacant houses and the police helicopters circling at night. But Sonia believed in the neighborhood. “People want to move back into the city and they want to buy houses,” Sonia says. “It will push crime away, because you will have home ownership again.”

Just down the street from the Eaddys, Tony Brown has lived his entire life in the same house. Brown also has fond childhood memories of Poppleton when it was a working-class community, but he says his neighborhood is suffering. He believes the impact of Route 40 construction was an especially hard blow. “The community really started to change when they built that ‘highway to nowhere,’ because it moved a lot of people out,” Brown says.

In 1990, Poppleton was named an empowerment zone and the federally funded program created the nonprofit Village Center of Poppleton on West Baltimore Street to increase economic stability and job opportunities for the community. Tony Brown joined the Village Center about six years ago and helped create the mass clearance plan for Poppleton. His own house is slated for demolition. “Developers don’t want to do a ton of rehab, and here, we have a lot of vacant land. It’s better to tear down and rebuild,” Brown says. “I’m one of the community leaders, and I still have to sacrifice like everyone else.”

 

Urban Renewal: Take Two

If the first wave of urban renewal thirty years ago was spurred by big, government-funded projects-housing towers, stadiums, highways, and convention centers-the second wave is happening in the name of developer-driven housing. Across the city, pockets of housing and parcels of land are being amassed through programs like Project 5000 (Baltimore Housing’s effort to return 5,000 vacant and abandoned properties to productive use) , and being made available for private, market-driven development. The City says this is a new approach that moves away from the overly subsidized projects of the past and opens up the city to growth. Some neighborhoods will be slated for creative infill and rehabilitation, while other areas, like East Baltimore and Poppleton, will be marketed to developers for large-scale projects predicated on clearance. This is part of the City’s efforts to play to the strengths of the housing market. “We want market discipline in all these projects,” says Douglass Austin, Deputy Commissioner for Development for Baltimore Housing. “We don’t want to be doing things that can only happen if we’re heavily subsidizing the entire development.”

Poppleton presents an intriguing opportunity for new development because it offers, potentially, a large plot of contiguous land. The City already owns, or is in the process of owning, 358 of the 526 properties in the clearance area. Once the remaining properties are purchased by the City, the entire plot would be turned over for private development.

Several other factors aligned to make Poppleton ripe for redevelopment. The University of Maryland recently jumped across Martin Luther King Boulevard to expand its campus with a new Biotech Center. Large tracts of land for development became available when public housing towers were imploded in the 1990s. The property was redeveloped with two mixed-income Hope VI townhome developments.

Meanwhile, Metroventures, a Baltimore-based development company, has had surprising success with their new Camden Crossing project in the neighboring Washington Village Empowerment Zone. The neo-traditional market-rate houses developed on an 8-acre brownfield site sold out in 30 days at prices higher than expected. The average went for $250,000, and 65% of the new homeowners are transplants from D.C. suburbs. “ Baltimore is becoming an alternative to Washington, D.C.,” says Suzanne Graham, Metroventure’s vice president. “We looked at communities in Alexandria, Virginia, for example, and produced something of quality that would attract a 35-to-45 professional market. With the competition, you have to build what people want to buy.”

What the market wants, many say, are amenities not available in existing city houses. Consultant Rachel Edds is a former Baltimore City planner who worked with the community to consider how a housing plan could fit into its revitalization. She helped draft the Poppleton Housing Strategy for the Empowerment Baltimore Management Corporation, a report that notes the high number of D.C. commuters looking to Baltimore as a bedroom community. “The market is in the right place to get people into Poppleton,” Edds says. “But you have to provide people who have a choice of where to live with the amenities they want, like garages and larger kitchens. Some people just want a new house.”

“A bedroom community for D.C. is a suburb,” says Roberta Brandes Gratz. Gratz, an award-winning journalist and urban critic who sits on Mayor Bloomberg’s New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, has spent her professional life studying cities that have successfully revived and writing about them in books like The Living City: How America’s Cities are Being Revitalized by Thinking Small in a Big Way. “If Baltimore wants to be its own city instead of a stepchild to Washington, than this is absolutely the wrong way to go.” Replacing old housing with new because “that’s what the market wants” is another myth Gratz says needs to be dispelled. “The market clearly shows that there are scores of people like the Eaddys gravitating daily to retrieve genuine urban housing, and you are certainly seeing that in Baltimore with the accelerating prices of your existing housing and the people moving into your regenerating neighborhoods where that housing exists.”

Baltimore City has a different vision. In July 2004, the same month that the urban renewal amendment was introduced to the City Council, Baltimore Housing issued a Request for Qualifications (RFQ) to seek developers capable of navigating a wide-scale development of vacant land. The RFQ said the City would use its full authority to acquire all properties within the 13.8-acre area and offer the site to developers for new, high-quality housing. It called for a “market-driven project that includes a small percentage of affordable units” aimed at attracting residents in the competitive regional marketplace.

The urban renewal amendment for Poppleton, which did not officially pass the City Council until November 2004, says the clearance will happen to create “substantial affordable housing” while “promoting historic and architectural preservation.” Of the 526 properties to be acquired for clearance, the City estimates that roughly 134 are occupied. Some forty houses are owner-occupied while ninety-six are rental properties. (The City says it will work with any displaced homeowners who want to relocate back into the neighborhood.)

The language of the two documents has clear discrepancies about the purpose for taking and clearing the Poppleton properties. Austin says that the balance between affordable versus market-rate housing in the new development has yet to be decided. A city housing official involved in the project, who wished to remain anonymous, stated that sections of the renewal amendment language were incorrect and must have been left over from prior amendment proposals.

By the time the renewal amendment officially passed the City Council on November 4, five development teams had already responded to the City’s RFQ, which had a deadline of October 28. Respondents included Enterprise Homes, Inc., Pennrose Development Company, and La Cité Development.

The massive scale of clearance outlined in the bill took preservationists and some community members by surprise, and the specific list of properties slated for demolition sparked serious concern. “We found out about the city’s urban renewal plan last fall and we had not known anything about what was going on,” says Johns Hopkins, executive director of Baltimore Heritage, a nonprofit historic and architectural preservation organization.

The City’s Commission for Historical and Architectural Preservation (CHAP), now under the umbrella of the Baltimore City Department of Planning, had been called in late to the game and did not release its initial findings from a Poppleton Historic Resource Survey until December 1, 2004. “They were a bit of an afterthought,” said a city official in Baltimore Housing who wished to remain anonymous.

CHAP surveyed the clearance area and found that properties marked for demolition included the Boss Kelly rowhomes on West Saratoga Street and the Sarah Ann Alley Houses, a fully occupied set of homes that represent “an endangered building type” in Baltimore. They identified properties that are eligible for listing on the National Register and the Baltimore City Landmark list, and they noted that a National Historic Landmark (the Edgar Allen Poe House and Museum on Amity Street), while not slated for demolition, borders the clearance zone.

Baltimore Housing says that it is reviewing CHAP’s findings and considering amending the list of clearance properties.

The CHAP report raises serious questions as to how this urban renewal plan will be financed. If any federal funding is used in the clearance of a recognized historic area, Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act is triggered, which requires federal agencies to review projects where their funds or actions could have an impact on historic properties.

Austin says that Section 106 won’t be an issue because “we’re not going to use federal funds for any demolition or the acquisition or the relocation,” but he also admits that the City does not have the estimated $6.8 million to buy the remaining properties and relocate residents. “We don’t have enough out of our own coffers to cover this with everything else that we’re doing,” Austin says. An official at Baltimore Housing speaking anonymously said that it would be difficult to acquire the remaining properties without some federal assistance.

In spite of the questions over preservation and funding, the City is moving forward quickly. Baltimore Housing announced in April that after a careful review of all respondents to the Poppleton RFQ, the most qualified was La Cité Development, a New York company whose directors include Susan Taylor, editorial director of Essence magazine, a lifestyles publication with a circulation of over one million that profiled City Council President Sheila Dixon in its March 2005 issue.

The La Cité proposal for Poppleton not only committed $1 million toward the purchase of properties, it also offered a sharp departure from the current design trends popping up in nearby developments. “We didn’t want a cookie-cutter approach,” Austin says. “We think that we can really push the envelope in terms of what houses can sell for and what design standards could be applied.”

La Cité plans to leverage Susan Taylor’s celebrity status and media connections to bring high-profile architecture to the neighborhood. Their team consists of Davis Brody Bond, a New York architectural firm, and WestPac Investments, a California-based developer. Their team also consists of the The Poppleton Village Community Development Corporation, which has a financial stake in the new housing project.

While the Housing Department is quick to note that La Cité was selected based on its qualifications and that its housing concept is in no way final, it did say that the La Cité vision for the neighborhood is what sold the department on the firm. The proposal suggests high-density mid-rise buildings that will include a limited number of specialty units dubbed the “Susan Taylor Homes.” They will explore developing a series of “Christie Brinkley Homes” as well. The company’s proposal also says that La Cité is in conversations with Magic Johnson and Canyon-Johnson Urban Fund about bringing in their branded theaters and retail.

“The Magic Johnson mall that sits on 125th Street in Harlem is a total Anywhere U.S.A. development,” Gratz says. “And to name housing after someone who has no connection to Baltimore is a real slap in the face to Baltimore.”

La Cité would not go on record about specifics surrounding its future plans for Poppleton, stating that any definitive comments on the design or cost of the homes would be premature. “It is a brand-new concept for Baltimore, and the Susan Taylor and Christie Brinkley homes bring a fresh twist to the neighborhood,” says Claude Hitchcock, the company’s local attorney at Gordon Feinblatt. “We’re happy we’ve been chosen, but we’re very careful not to say more than the facts warrant at this time.”

For her part, Sonia Eaddy is still trying to understand the facts. Because Poppleton community organizations were a part of the La Cité development team, they were not neutral in this debate. So while Sonia Eaddy was attending community meetings last winter to discuss with her neighbors the need to fight for their homes, the organizers of those meetings were already aligned with La Cité and working to rally their community for destruction. This kind of partnership is not unprecedented in City development, but it can impede residents from getting a full picture of the plans for their neighborhood. The community is usually represented on the City’s review board when selecting a developer during the RFQ process, but no one from the Poppleton community participated because their Community Development Corporation had a stake in one of the proposals. The City did not find an alternative way to represent the citizens’ views. Baltimore Housing would not release the names of selection committee members.

“I’m not against urban renewal,” Eaddy says about this process. “You need people investing in the community. What I’m against is tearing down good, solid houses.”

So is Roberta Brandes Gratz. “For any city today to condemn an owner-
occupied house is nothing short of a travesty,” Gratz says. “The fact is, in sheer economic terms, this is wasteful and expensive. In social terms, it’s totally inappropriate for the regeneration of authentic place.”

While the La Cité plan promises exciting, contemporary design and high-concept architecture, grafting large swaths of new development onto an historic urban neighborhood is often an untenable model that kills the true vibrancy of the city. “What they will create with this plan is an isolated island that will not connect or relate to the surrounding neighborhoods. It will not regenerate a neighborhood,” says Gratz.

“You in Baltimore, you’re one of the stars of being smart way back, when you killed a highway coming through the city for all the right reasons,” Gratz adds. “Don’t forget the success of those dollar houses [that revitalized Otterbein in the 1970s].”

The City says it will move forward quickly with Poppleton development. Now that La Cité has been selected, another round of conversations will begin with the community about specific plans for the housing and the possible salvage of historic structures. In the meantime, Sonia and Curtis Eaddy continue renovations on their home and wait to learn their fate.



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