Poppleton: A Neighborhood in Waiting

For the Indypendent Reader with Michael Kaplan

Bulldozers stationed in lots slated for redevelopment in West Baltimore’s Poppelton neighborhood represent the first step forward in a long-delayed and underfunded plan to revive the historic area. A sign, surrounded by overgrown bushes and weeds, proudly displays a map of the neighborhood promised by a redevelopment zone. Now five years behind schedule, the underfunded and overly-ambitious urban renewal plan has left residents uncertain of their neighborhood’s fate. Like the sign, Poppeleton also suffers from neglect.

Sonia, a community activist living within the urban renewal zone, refused to sell her house to the City in 2005, when the redevelopment plan was being formulated. Instead, she and a handful of other homeowners questioned the wisdom in demolishing historic homes instead of simply helping the current residents to rehabilitate them. Like others in the neighborhood that decided to stay, Sonia and her husband trace increasing neighborhood problems to government neglect.

Sharing a picture of her street from that time, Sonia reminisces about the once-vibrant neighborhood she grew up in. Poppleton’s streets, once lined with trees, are today filled with potholes. But Sonia has not given up on their neighborhood, and continues to work for its revival.

Public services are slow and sub-par. The vacant street corners are used as dumps for mattresses, construction equipment, and other bulk trash, often by people from other parts of the city. Sonia’s calls to the City to have the trash picked up go unanswered, so she and others often pull out shovels and go pick it up themselves. Many of the vacant lots and homes are owned by the City, but Sonia says no one comes to look after them, to clean them up, or to mow the overgrown grass.

Andrea, another homeowner who lives a few blocks away, has similar issues with the City. She points to a row of vacant houses across from her home, “I call the city to board up those homes…but they haven’t responded.” The windows on the houses are smashed open, allowing easy access for drug dealers who hide their merchandise there, or users that need a place to get high. A vacant lot separates her house from another City-owned block where some of the houses are buckling, ready to fall, but Andrea’s complaints go unanswered.

The drug trade is a major concern for Sonia as well. Next to her house is a small public park, its rusty swings frequented by her grandchildren and others from the neighborhood. She says she has called and written the City many times, asking for new equipment for the children, “Other parks have nice things for their kids, why can’t we?”

In a backyard next to the playground, around half a dozen young men lounge around, some tending to a pigeon coop. The owner, an elderly woman that was hospitalized recently, could not keep the dealers from using her home for their trade. Sonia tells stories of encounters between the neighborhood’s kids and the dealers. On one occasion, two children found a stash of drugs in the area by accident, landing their parents, who Sonia says were users, a free supply.

Many homeowners have moved out, but, enticed by impending buy-outs by the City for its redevelopment plan, continue to keep their homes in Poppleton. As a result, Sonia says, there is little that can be done to keep the drug dealers from using the stoops of her neighbors’ houses for the trade, even as the demand produces lines of customers.

A History of Broken Promises

Poppleton has seen more than its share of failed redevelopment plans. Four decades ago, a plan to connect I-95 with I-70 called for the construction of a highway through the neighborhood. Three thousand people were displaced from the area, their homes razed and replaced with part of an interstate. The plan would ultimately fail, as the largely upper-class populations of Federal Hill and Fell’s Point, slated to suffer a similar fate, fought the development and won. Poppleton, however, was left cut off from neighborhoods to the north.

Opportunity seemed to be knocking on the neighborhood’s door once again in 1996, as Baltimore was selected to be a part of an ambitious redevelopment effort by the federal government. Over the next decade, Poppleton and five other neighborhoods in Baltimore received a $100 million grant meant to revitalize some of the most blighted areas in the country. In addition to the grant, businesses in the designated zones received thousands of dollars in employee tax credits, and homeowners were to receive loans to aid in rehabilitating their properties.
Residents were to be trained for the thousands of jobs to be created by new investment across the city, but Poppleton seemed ill-equipped to muster the grassroots leadership needed for finding and directing funding to those that needed it. Baltimore Street became a dividing line for a largely race-based fight between the mostly white residents of Hollins Market and their neighbors to the north. The political battles often resulted in fist-fights, shootings, and lawsuits. When an organization, the Village Center of Poppleton, was finally formed to administer the program, it did not include any members from Hollins Market, and was almost entirely run by a single resident. The group would suffer multiple federal audits and fines, and two years of suspension from the Empowerment Zone program. Both current and former residents accuse the group’s leader, who eventually moved out of Maryland, of misusing the more than $2 million it received in funds.

By 2000, 24% of Poppleton’s residents had left, and its median household income fell to about $13,000, making it one of the poorest areas in Baltimore.

City and Empowerment Zone officials tout the $300 million development of a Biopark by the University of Maryland at the south end of the neighborhood as a success of the program. Expected to create hundreds of jobs, the Biopark agreed to provide up to $300k in annual grants for neighborhood projects. The Village Center, though, instrumental in securing community approval for the project, did not prove to be a reliable partner for the neighborhood grants, and the funding remains largely unused.

The other venture spurred by the Empowerment Zone, though, is far from being realized. Announced to much fanfare in 2004, the ambitious 13.5-acre, $100 million redevelopment project is a partnership between the City and New York-based La Cite Development, LLC. The plan, which would see the redevelopment of 524 properties into mixed-use residential and commercial units, was brokered by the Village Center and another for-profit spin-off, the Poppleton Village Community Development Corporation. But, as with a myriad of other similar projects in the city, no mention was made of just how economically mixed the new community would be.  More than a hundred properties still needed to be purchased, including 93 occupied homes. At the time the project was announced, 25 homes were still occupied by their owners in the area.

But like so many other revitalization projects in Baltimore, the La Cite project dropped off the City’s radar.

Historic Structures at Risk

In 2005, Baltimore Heritage, a nonprofit historic and architectural preservation organization, asked the City to ensure the preservation of a number of historic areas in Poppleton. Based on a survey by the City’s own Commission for Historical and Architectural Preservation, they recommended the creation of a number of historic districts in the area. The Boss Kelly Historic District in the 1100 block of W. Saratoga Street would preserve a row of houses built in 1830-1845, including the home of “Boss” John S. Frank Kelly, a powerful figure in Baltimore’s political history. Just north on Sarah Ann Street, another district would encompass the two blocks of unique alley houses dating from the 1860s. Baltimore Heritage also recommended remaining houses in the 900 and 1000 blocks of W. Saratoga Street, the 1000 block of W. Fayette Street, and the east side of the 300 block of N. Carrollton be preserved and rehabbed as needed, noting that their historic nature would be highly marketable.

In addition, almost a dozen structures were identified as possible listings in the National Register of Historic Places.

“We got involved in the proposal several years ago, without response from the city, and then the project seemed to stall out,” says Johns Hopkins, the Executive Director of Baltimore Heritage. He says he had not heard any updates about the City’s development plans in Poppleton since 2005.

For their part, the City and La Cite point to an agreement they made with the Maryland Historic Trust whereby a handful of structures would be saved from demolition. They say the 1100 block of Sarah Ann Street and the Boss Kelly row house will be preserved, along with the 1000 block of W. Fayette Street.

Profit From Displacement

Some of the structures recommended for preservation are in terrible shape, but it is important to note that in other parts of Baltimore, like Fell’s Point–areas where historical homes are considered assets–dilapidated homes have been preserved, rehabilitated, and marketed successfully.
Sonia and her husband live in one of the areas Baltimore Heritage recommends be preserved, and have put in significant financial funds and labor to rehabilitate their home, only to receive notices by the City about the redevelopment plan shortly thereafter.

When the plans were first announced, Sonia and other residents were skeptical about the City’s motives and believed that they wanted to lure young professionals, which would ultimately marginalize families like hers. La Cite, when asked about specific designs for the new homes, said the first phase of construction “will consist of studios to 3-bedroom apartment units,” but that they “are currently not ready to release additional information.”
In fact, the actual plans seem to be as vague as they were six years ago. In a 2005 interview with The Daily Record, Claude Edward Hitchcock, an attorney and spokesman for the development team, said the project would build “condominiums, apartments and townhouses–retail space and office buildings of no more than five or six stories”. He went on to say what they were going to want “is to somewhat pepper that area [Poppleton] with middle- and upper-income people, people who will be working in the Biotech Park– the Washington, D.C. market…We’re looking at a Starbucks kind of retail space, supermarket, movie theaters, cleaners.” Hitchcock, who has represented parties in zoning issues for more than a decade, was implicated in a 2006 case for working with Utech, a contractor run by the sister of former Mayor Shiela Dixon that turned out to be a front for winning the City’s quota of minority contracts.

Sonia questions what would have happened had she agreed to sell her house to the City. Like many other residential development plans, Poppleton homeowners were offered a “fair market value” for their homes in exchange for leaving. When the properties were ready for occupation again, those residents would be the first to hear about them. But the La Cite plan has four phases, and the first phase has only just broken ground, five years behind schedule. If homeowners would have left back then, Sonia asks, how long would they have to wait to come back to their neighborhood? When asked about a current timeline, La Cite said they “envision it will take approximately 5 years to complete all buildings” in the first phase.

The City says they have spent about $10 million on acquiring and clearing property in the area so far, and expect to need another $10.2 million for the remaining 75 properties, 11 of them owner-occupied. When asked why the process took so long, La Cite said the City’s acquisition process is taking longer than expected. The City, when asked the same question, said La Cite is still “in the process of obtaining their financing commitments in order to purchase the property”.

The City did buy dozens of properties in 2005, and a handful in 2009. Homes sold to the City in the 1990s often went for less than $10k. In the Fall of 2005, though, dozens were sold to the City for anywhere between $340k and $580k.

A Baltimore Housing spokesperson said the City has “sent out periodic mailings and has provided updates to property owners as they request them,” adding that “notices were sent out recently…and public meetings were held.”

No one that we spoke to in Poppleton could recall hearing anything from the City for the last few years. If any communication is going on, Poppleton’s residents are being kept in the dark. It can be added to the long list of grievances being suffered by this historic, now forgotten neighborhood.