SE Baltimore will see more low- and very low-income housing, thanks to a grant from the Federal Home Loan Bank of New York.

If one of my children turned up dead in a Baltimore housing project, you’d better believe I’d never give up on finding out what happened.

Baltimore’s Housing Authority posts a puff piece on their website, crowing about their recent victory in court that overturned a lead paint judgement against the agency.  A warning to others who have similar lawsuits against HABC?  Pretty tasteless, any way you look at it.

Baltimore is in dire need of workforce housing — and not just for teachers.  Hopefully this new development will be affordable for more working taxpayers.

A Federal judge has sided with the City of Chicago in its fight to hold banks accountable for maintaining and securing vacant homes.

Editorial in today’s Cleveland Plain Dealer outlines a unified effort to curb Ohio’s vacant home problem.

Other news in Cleveland — Habitat for Humanity is getting ready to foreclose on 25 homes, saying homeowners are 38 to 40 months behind in mortgage payments.

“Occupiers” in Buffalo try to tackle that city’s vacant home problem.

More arson in Detroit — this has been going on for at least two years.  Hopefully the person or people responsible will be caught and held accountable.

As a planner, I can not tell you how many times I have been to redevelopment meetings in struggling and blighted communities where consultants or planners propose turning around a neighborhood by adding a Starbucks, a wine shop and a deli. These businesses might turn a neighborhood around but…for whom?

In another post, we are discussing the plight of Pigtown — a Baltimore neighborhood that seems to defy improvement, year after year, decade after decade.  I’m of the mindset that the folks who want to improve the neighborhood have been doing so with the attitude of “Just one good restaurant will do it” or “We can be the next Federal Hill”.  And this is the wrong way to go.  But it’s not just Pigtown — this problem is city-wide.

While I agree with the blog author that one man’s blighted problem is another man’s neighborhood — I don’t agree that the problem is unique to African-Americans, nor do I agree that a blighted mess is a good thing.  Nobody in their right mind, regardless of race or income level, would agree that crime and vacant homes make for a great place to live.

However, Baltimore, like many rust belt cities, is a city of neighborhoods.  At one time, most had their unique characteristics — things that made the neighborhoods a place to raise families and put down roots.  Instead of capitalizing on these things, current city planning “wisdom” dictates that we all need to live in a black-granite-cherry-floor cookie-cutter facsimile of what used to be thriving neighborhoods — the HGTV-ing of Baltimore, if you will.

I agree wholeheartedly with the author when he says:

If you only see the neighborhood as a problem, you will replace instead of rebuild. And without understanding or more importantly caring about a neighborhood’s culture, what gets replaced could be very important to the fabric of the existing community.  A blighted community may seek out help from planners and consultants to help turn around their neighborhood because they feel that there neighborhood and it’s culture is something worthy to be saved. Not replaced.

We need sensible planning that puts neighborhoods first, and since neighborhoods are made up of people, start developing for the taxpayers we have — and stop spending time, money, and energy into luring new taxpayers from elsewhere.  Preserve and protect the uniqueness of our neighborhoods, while opening the doors to new residents — other cities have done it, and quite successfully, I might add.

Why hasn’t Baltimore learned from these other cities and developed human-scale master plans for our neighborhoods in need?

Property Owner:  John & Valerie Moyer, 4 Ferndale Avenue, Glen Burnie, MD 21061

City Council District and Contact:  District 10, Ed Reisinger

3539 3rd Street, Front

Property Owner:  Sunshine Village, LLC, 1405 Park Avenue, Unit 10, Baltimore, MD 21217

Resident Agent for Sunshine Village, LLC:  Marc J. Cohen, 1405 Park Avenue, Apartment 1, Baltimore, MD 21217

City Council District and Contact:  District 10, Ed Reisinger

Hit hard by the real estate slump, the former owner of this much-touted “green building” project sold it, and neither owner ever saw their project come to fruition.  The City condemned this building, and it continues to deteriorate — due to inactivity by its current owner, who has owned the building since 2008.  This same owner has also been the subject of City action, due to the damage he caused to a neighboring home on another of his building sites.  Time for this property owner to be put out of business.

769 Washington Boulevard

769 Washington Boulevard, condemnation notice

Property Owner:  Rudwan & Eileen Abu-Rumman, 287 North Drive, Severna Park, MD 21146

City Council District and Contact:  District 10, Ed Reisinger

3571 4th Street, Front

Property Owner:  Laurel N. Okonkwo, c/o Mary’s Gaze, LLC, 1714 Tilia Way, Mitchellville, MD 20721

City Council District and Contact:  District 10, Ed Reisinger

3573 4th Street, Front

3573 4th Street, Side view

I have an affection for a great city. I feel safe in the neighborhood of man, and enjoy the sweet security of the streets. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I had an interesting conversation with @MairZDoatz today on Twitter.  She mentioned something I had been thinking about, but hadn’t bothered to write about — because surely nobody else cared about this.  How wrong I was.

She was saying how unpleasant it is to walk through downtown Baltimore, and I agreed.  I was downtown last weekend shooting buildings and random street scenes, and it struck me how empty downtown was, especially since it was a nice day — a Saturday, too.  The downtowns of other cities are full of people on a Saturday afternoon.  Shopping, eating, going for walks — but Baltimore was empty, as if everyone fled the city, only to return during the week for work.

Then I was reminded of another day I walked downtown, down Pratt Street to be exact.  It was around 8 AM on a weekday — I was going to take the CCC Purple Route to my then-job in Mt. Vernon.  Immediately I noticed the emptiness of the sidewalks — I kept wondering where all the people were.  Have you ever walked through Manhattan at 8 AM on a weekday?  Downtown Boston?  Chicago? There are hundreds of people, walking to work, walking to get coffee  — there are people everywhere, and this scenario is played out in every city across America.  Yet, Baltimore seemed desolate.  As if people drive here, park in the underground garage, and don’t come out until it’s time to go home at 5:30.  Why is this?

Forget about our shrinking population for a moment, and concentrate on just the streets and buildings.  Have you ever noticed the sidewalks on Pratt Street are uncomfortably wide?  The buildings are set far back from the curb?  Have you ever looked hard at the buildings, and noticed how out of scale they are?  Look at the picture on this website — see how out of scale the taller buildings are to the smaller buildings?  The streetscape, one can only imagine, is unfriendly and imposing to those walking on the sidewalk below. Baltimore’s streetscape downtown has similar problems — few historic buildings (due, in part to the fire that swept through downtown at the beginning of the 20th century, and then due to poor planning in years following the fire), and towering office buildings that are so removed from the streetscape — there’s nothing to anchor the downtown, to give it a sense of place at the street level.

As I walked along the city last weekend, I was amazed at the lack of street-level retail.  Most of what I saw included banks, convenience stores, office-worker lunch places (closed on Saturday), and a lot of parking lots and parking garages.  Walking along Pratt from MLK, most of the buildings are owned by the University of Maryland — or they’re apartment buildings, again, with very little street-level retail except a few sports bars.  Great for tourists, but why isn’t there anything along those streets for residents?  Where are the grocery stores, the pharmacies, the boutiques, and restaurants that don’t serve mixed drinks out of Solo cups?

It all comes down to human scale development.  Buildings placed closer to the curb, narrower streets with bike and transit lanes, and a sense of place.  Baltimore’s downtown has none of this, although it could happen if our City Council would quit with the “get rich quick” mentality, and really think about what people do in cities.  Convention centers are great, but we have one.  And it’s fine for now — let’s concentrate on what people need right now, in order to stay here, or in order to come here and put down roots.

I was reading someone else’s blog, and came across a paragraph that really struck a chord:

To achieve long-term sustainable urban forms and neighborhoods, we ought to be developing infill and new urban projects parcel by parcel, plot by plot.  Too often, an ‘all-or-nothing’ approach is  taken with new projects and if the entire development cannot be financed and built at once then nothing happens at all.  This can result in large blocks of prime urban land sitting vacant for years on end (see Cincinnati’s riverfront from 2000-2009 or Indianapolis’s old Market Square Arena site at present.)

You can add Baltimore’s downtown to Cincinnati’s riverfront and Indianapolis’s old Market Square, don’t you think?  Cities are not “all-or-nothing” places, and developing them doesn’t work with “all-or-nothing” plans.  Do we really need a Royal Farms downtown, around the corner from a 7-11 and CVS?  Or do we need another grocery store, restaurants that inspire a true food culture, and housing that people can afford?

In order to make a sustainable Baltimore, we need to apply human-scale principles — because buildings don’t make cities — people make cities.

Unfortunately, Baltimore City’s housing situation hasn’t changed much — some of the properties featured here in the blog have been rehabbed, which is great.  But so many of them remain vacant, the owners simply refuse to fix the problems.

Our most popular posts have been ones where the solution seems simple, on the outset:

• A commanding officer in the police department owns a run-down vacant — why hasn’t this been fixed up?  He’s in a position of authority and respect — he needs to do the right thing.
• Howard Street remains blighted and vacant — businesses and residents moved out years ago, yet the City would rather hand the buildings over to out of town developers and others who won’t do anything with them.  Why can’t these buildings be made available to artists and small businesses owners who are looking for live/work properties?  It would improve the neighborhood, and generate tax revenue.
• Our Wishlist for Baltimore offered ideas and opportunities for conversation — yet the ideas generated by residents and community members have continually been ignored by the City.

I think the saddest post for me as the founder and editor was the one that brought attention to the living conditions of an elderly woman and a couple of children who visited from time to time.  The landlord did nothing to ensure the safety and well-being of the tenant, who was forced to move in order to escape abuse and theft.  I can honestly say that post kept me awake at night, and I still think about it.  I’ll never understand the cruelty we can inflict on each other, in the name of money and greed.

My wish and most sincere hope for the next year is to see solid, sustainable changes in this city — and I can’t do this by myself.  I need our elected officials to take a step back and look at this city as an outsider would.  I need our elected officials to make a pledge to the taxpayers, and promise the problems we’ve discussed for the past three years will be given more attention — and solutions will be developed and implemented.  Baltimore’s housing market is in the tank, and if this city is truly concerned about generating more tax revenue, our elected officials need to stop talking, and start listening — listen to your constituents.  Let us help you make this city better, stronger, and put this city on a path to success. Car races, new convention centers, and more programs that are old programs rehashed don’t make cities better.  Taxpayers make cities better, and Baltimore needs to start listening to its taxpayers.  Help us help you to be the great city it can be.

And it starts with housing.

Thank you all for a great three years, and I hope for an even better three years, and many more after that.

xoxoxo,

Slummy

Much has been made of the City’s plans for Baltimore’s “Superblock” area, with grandiose plans for large box stores and shiny new office buildings.  (And yes, sadly — probably some overpriced condos as well.)  If you walk up Howard to the 300 and 400 blocks, towards Mt. Vernon, you’re struck by the beauty of the buildings — and the few businesses that remain.  Wig stores, a clothing store, carryouts..Planned Parenthood, and an abandoned theater that should cause the City’s government nothing but shame.  The vast majority of the buildings have been long-abandoned, flipped, condemned, sold by the City, and abandoned again.

Howard Street ruin

What a wonderful neighborhood this would be for artists and musicians — close to the light rail, close to downtown and MICA, and tons of empty buildings begging for repair.  Instead, the neighborhood is being held hostage by the City and developers who don’t give a damn.  It makes you wonder if this demolition-by-neglect is being done on purpose.

Some of the buildings along Howard are viable, and should be preserved — some, unfortunately, have been allowed to rot to the point where they’re probably structurally unsound, and will need to be destroyed.  It would be nice, however, to see the City start to think creatively about its downtown, and stop with the “box store and condo” development model.  Workforce housing, artist housing, housing for real people who pay taxes and want to stay in Baltimore long-term — that’s what Baltimore needs.  That’s what Howard Street could become.  That’s what we should demand.

It’s always fun to read posts or letters in the Baltimore Sun from bad property owners who feel the laws and regulations are unfair.  Perhaps doing the right thing would make things more fair?  Just a suggestion.  And for the record, no, we don’t think the City should be using funds for affordable housing to demolish…housing.

A man in Cleveland decided to shoot a documentary about abandoned homes in that city, as a way to create awareness about the problem.

Apparently, people in Monterey County, California can’t agree on what “homeless” means. I didn’t know there were any grey areas.

The town council of Sheboygan, Wisconsin, is smarter than the Baltimore City government.  “A significant relationship exists between vacant buildings and increased calls for service for police services, higher incidence of fires …”  Wish someone in our City Council would publicly say that, and do something about it.

An Ohio Senator wants banks to stop walking away from foreclosures.  Do any Maryland senators want the same?