HarborPoint Park Sneak Preview

The Allied Signal chromium plant, shuttered in 1985, was still standing on what is now known as HarborPoint, when representatives from Honeywell, now the owner of the plant, and members of the now defunct Fells Point Waterfront Coalition huddled around a table in Allied's administrative building on Wills Street to discuss the future of the peninsula. Allied Signal had entered a consent decree that included clean-up and careful monitoring during the demolition of the old plant. 

The Allied Signal Site ca 1970 (HaborPoint website)

Back in 1992 the topic was the future use of the site and for the Coalition leaders, it was clear as glass, that all 26 acres of the peninsula should be a park. Too contaminated the site to do anything else, they thought, plus it would only be just to compensate for the pollution that the processing of Chromium has caused on this site almost 200 years. The dominant contaminant was hexavalent chromium that, when airborne, can get in the lungs and cause major health problems, or when solved in water contaminates the harbor. 

However, Honeywell had invested too much money into the cleanup efforts to leave the site as a park. In addition to their top-notch environmental engineering team, they convened a consulting team of planners and architects to explore potential development. One of the team members was Bill Struever, who had completed his first major industrial redevelopment project in Canton at the time. Another was Marty Millspaugh, who had been the head of Baltimore's Charles Center-Inner Harbor Development Authority. Another was David Benn, an architect working for Struever and I who worked as his project manager. 

HarborPoint overall development rendering (Beatty Development)

The meetings with the Coalition continued for nearly two years, resulting in a compromise that carved out a 6-acre "filet mignon" piece of the site for a future park overlooking downtown, a public promenade surrounding the site, and several additional smaller green network elements. The entire plan was adopted as a Planned Unit Development (PUD). Bit by bit, buildings appeared on the cleaned-up site, built on top of an environmental cap, starting with offices and later including apartments and a hotel. After a split from H&S Bakery owner Paterakis, a partnership between Beatty Development Group and Armada Hoffler Properties emerged as the master developer of HarborPoint.

Now, some 33 years later, with Allied Signal but a distant memory, the development team embarked on the last phase of its development. The area carved out for open space has served partly as a surface parking lot and partly as a very successful pop-up park dubbed "Sandlot", for its artificial beach, which included beach volley lots, an array of wooden decks and planters, and drink and food containers. 

Phase III is scheduled to kick off in March 2022 and will include the new global headquarters for T. Rowe Price, the mixed-use Parcel 4, and Point Park. Ultimately, Phase III will deliver 470,000 SF of new office space, 500 new residential units, approximately 60,000 SF of new retail space, a new 159-key extended-stay hotel. (Beatty news release Jan 5, 2025)

Point Park as seen from the upper promenade (Photo: Author)

With that the park is finally becoming a reality. A ribbon-cutting ceremony will be held on May 1 for Point Park, a new public waterfront park that is slightly smaller than originally negotiated but high in quality. While Mahan Rykiel Associates (MRA) had been the landscape architect on the Ayers Saint Gross team for the master plan and several other open spaces on the site, iO Studio founder Richard Jones is the landscape architect for this park. He split off from MRA in 2017 after almost 18 years . On Earth Day, he showed me his masterpiece before the full opening of the park, which, like everything else on HarborPoint, has undergone extensive vetting by the Baltimore Urban Design and Architectural Review Panel (UDAAP). 

There was a time when architects tended to look down their nose at landscape architects, whom they considered exterior "decorators". Those days are long gone. Landscape architects are fully engaged in landscape urbanism, occupying a good part of urban design. In the case of iO Studio, even the world renowned architecture firm Kohn Pederson Fox (KPF) didn't pick their own landscape subconsultant but collaborated with the Richard Jones" firm, which Beatty Development had retained in a competitive request for qualifications. The result is that the landscape design around the new T. Rowe Price headquarters building and the design of the park are seamlessly conceived as one cast. 

The T. Rowe Price atrium looking out to the water
(Photo: Author)

The new 4.6-acre park, referred to as Point Park but which Jones would prefer to call "Chromeworks Park," is defined by a large circle and two pathways that partly circumscribe it, with one path becoming a part of it. One path is the famous Baltimore Promenade, winding its way here from the Museum of Industry via HarborPlace, continuing all the way to the Korean War Memorial in Canton. The other is an upper-level pathway that follows the outline of the T. Rowe Price building, extending into the trapezoidal space between the two wings of the complex. Inside the circle is a large lawn that currently serves as the home to a flock of Canadian geese. Outside the circle, Jones arranged a set of landscapes and features that evoke the historic chromium works that began processing chromite ore mined at Soldiers Delight in Baltimore County in the early 1800s. When the local mines were depleted, ships brought in material from far away.

Jones evokes the former docks in a series of wooden piles, steel beams and walls framing gravel bays that are open to the water and planted with seagrasses. Jones mentioned that those old docks still make themselves known today because their fill over which the environmental cap was built doesn't allow loads, not even construction equipment. iO uses an entire material pallet to related to the Bay, to the industrial use, native culture and area history. There is rough hewn and polished granite, there is polished concrete, Corten steel and cast concrete, reclaimed heavy timber as well as fine gravel rolled into asphalt in the way how older streets were constructed. Aside from seagrasses there are native trees, elms, birches, maples and oaks as well as variety of shrubs. Jones who has some German roots and an office branch in Nuremberg, Germany concedes that some of the austerity and restraint of his design is influenced by what he saw in Germany, notably the rock gabion structures that stand around like sculptures.  An interesting actual sculpter is cast stainless steel in the shape of wood splintered from trees by Baltimore artist John Ruppert.

John Ruppert sculpture wood fragments
(Photo: Author)

Jones' work on the HarborPoint peninsula began with MRA and included other memorable green spaces, notably the Central Plaza, which is very successful and bustling with life at various times of the day. He pointed out that the plant materials there recall what grows today in Soldiers Delight.

Despite the success of "Sandlot," there will be no more beach, nor will there be a café or vendor to allow visitors to enjoy the exceptional views over a drink or snack. Direct access to the water is not encouraged, although it remains to be seen if people will use the simulated boat docking bays to walk toward the water. The meadow will be open for deck chairs and blankets, provided the geese do not interfere. The Baltimore Promenade was always envisioned as a string on which various pearls are strung. Point Park certainly is such a pearl and a welcome non-commercial public respite on the long journey from HarborPlace to here. Even though the park is only a small fraction of the peninsula, the surviving members of the Waterfront Coalition can be proud of their fight for meaningful open space.

Klaus Philipsen, FAIA

Central Plaza: People love it (Photo: Author)

Upper level pathway along the T. Rowe Price building
Note the various paving materials (Photo: Author)

The upper pathway follows the T. Rowe Price building into the
open courtyard (Photo: Author)

The courtyard is open to the public and adds to the public green spaces
(Photo: Author)

Observing the Patapsco River from the Promenade which is elevated to level 13'
1' higher then the required elevation for flood. (Photo: Author)

Cage rock ("gabions) as sculptures of sorts (Photo: Author)

Gravel pathways are part of the rich material palette (Photo: Author) 

Parts of the pathway circle are lined by granit strips that symbolize a timeline
(Photo: Author)

Granit strip, gravel path and Corten Steel gate meet in an area where a
playground may rise in the future (Photo: Author)

The visual bands of differentiated plantings with gravel instead of mulch
simulating the old Chromewerks load docks (Photo: Author)

Gravel and rocks play a large role in theming the park and are supposed to provide a
low-maintenance surface (Photo: Author)

The local tree species, once they grow up, will become important place-making elements
(Photo: Author).

Gabions and steel gates with the T.Rowe Price HQ in the
background (Photo: Author)

Detail of the steel sculpture (Photo: Author)

The transition area from the Central Plaza to the Point Park 
upper level (Photo: Author)

Special Benefits Districts - Good or Bad? (The Case of Midtown)

Complaints about sanitation, lack of green and crime are perennial in Baltimore. City Hall seems to be too cash-strapped and too disorganized to provide its citizens with the basics of safe and clean streets and public spaces. 

Special clean up services for an extra tax (Photo: Midtown)

Enter the special benefits district legally anchored in the City Charter Article 14 in which owners and businesses within certain boundaries agree to pay special taxes to get extra services. Baltimore has a whole bunch of those districts including downtown (managed by the Downtown Partnership), Charles Village, Midtown, the Waterfront Management District, the York Corridor Business Improvement , the Port Covington Community Benefits and the South Baltimore Gateway Community Impact District as well as the Baltimore Tourism Improvement District and four Arts and Entertainment Districts (which are not regulated in Chapter 14). 

Most of the actual improvement districts are located in the more affluent areas of the so-called "white L". The sheer number of those districts would suggest that a whole lot of property owners in the better areas thought that city services are bad enough to warrant extra tax payments. 

Right now one of these Baltimore Districts is in question because the usual quadrennial renewal with a vote in the City Council somehow didn't happen: Midtown, an area that includes Charles-North, Bolton Hill,  Madison-Park, and Mt. Vernon-Belvedere has about 14,500 residents. The district includes several high profile areas along Charles Street, the Cultural District and Penn Station.

We live in Bolton Hill and the Midtown Benefits District is a huge help keeping our green spaces clean and maintained. We do the planting, they mulch, clean up trash and clean up any park debris we ask for. Generally within 24 hours (Comment on the Banner website)

 As it is with benefits districts, only property owners can vote (One vote per parcel).  In Midtown there are 4000 or so owners who received a ballot to vote this district back into existence. The vote is successful if 58% of all voters opt for yes. The Midtown special benefits district exists since 1996. The Baltimore Charter says this about the district:

Midtown Map (Midtown)

There is a Midtown Community Benefits District Management Authority, referred to in this subtitle as the “Authority”. The purpose of the Authority is to promote and market the District, provide supplemental security and maintenance services, provide amenities in public areas, provide park and recreational programs and functions, and after its establishment, other services and functions as requested by the Authority and approved by an ordinance of the Mayor and City Council.[...] The Authority shall: (1) not be or constitute or be deemed an agency of the City or the State of Maryland; (2) to the greatest extent allowable by law, be deemed a special taxing district, and therefore a governmental body, both politic and corporate, exercising only such powers as are provided for in this subtitle;

Midtown safety patrol (Photo: Midtown)

This and other districts have an executive director, staff and a board. In Midtown the Charter stipulates that the board includes a member appointed by the Mayor, one council member, representatives of each community association, and at large members. At least two thirds of the board members must be "owners or representatives of property owners subject to the tax imposed by the district". The tax levy is $0.132 per $100 of a property's assessed value which amounts to an annual budget of  $ 2.17 million. The annual report for 2024 lists clean-up, tree planting, workforce development and greenspace design as the main activities.

The trouble that the Midtown district currently inadvertently encounters puts a spotlight on the question why we have so many special districts and if those are really useful, a question that is rarely asked when those districts have become like another skin of local governance.

What may have been an issue in the 1980s and 90s when these districts were created may not apply anymore today. For example, Baltimore's current Mayor has put a lot of additional money into Recreation and Parks; the 2025 budget calls for $21,066.6 million, up from $16,095.5 million in 2023. Would that increase not allow better maintenance of street trees and pocket parks?  

Equally, the City is forever trying to improve trash collection, recycling and efficiency of trash collection. Is the effectiveness of those efforts obscured by crews of additionally paid workers cleaning up behind the city workers? And what about disadvantaged neighborhoods that don't have the extra street cleaners? The problem of inequity is obvious: While the Charles Village and Midtown appear relatively clean, neighborhoods in the black butterfly are drowning in trash. 

Baltimore's trash stands out. At times Baltimore is called the trashiest city in America.This appears to be more a problem of resident's behavior than one of failing services. This article shows which would indicate that "upstream" measures would be more effective than the most "downstream" of all measures, the clean-up of the tossed materials.

Trash in an alley behind Baltimore Street (SUN photo)

Crime in Baltimore City has gone down significantly, especially murder and violent crime. But quality-of-life-impeding crime such as brazen muggings, robberies and car-jackings have spread across the city regardless of the special districts and cannot be prevented by benefits district workers. 

Owners and residents in the Midtown district harbor a number of misgivings according to a recent article in the Banner. Some think economic development and work force training have distracted the group from its core mission. The effectiveness of the much larger Downtown Partnership has also come into question in recent years. Downtown has fallen on hard times after COVID, just as in many other cities. However, many residents and business owners were angered by the new electronic billboards, decisions to move festivals around and failings at this year's restaurant week.  

Do initially nimble and highly motivated local initiatives calcify over time, befallen by the same ailments of inertia, procrastination and bureaucracy as the general government? Shouldn't the special districts be a temporary fix until local government gets its act together? Wouldn't a full vote every so often be good not only for Midtown all districts?

As it is, having to recreate a special district after 18 years is a unique Midtown experience. It will be interesting to see how the vote will come out. It could be a bellwether on how people feel about their general city services and about the idea of piling special services on top instead of fixing the regular government instead. 

For folks pondering how to vote their ballot or what they should think about these special districts in general, I conducted some research. The most obvious pros and cons that apply, no matter where a district is located.  

Adding additional jurisdictional layers and separating service delivery functions into separate organizations can contribute to “a pathological phenomenon… that there are too many governments and not enough government” (Polycentric Governance)

Trash complaints over time. None of the listed neighborhoods
has a Improvement District (SUN graphic) 

Advantages of Special Districts

1. Limited services and extra cash allow a special focus on clean, green and safe 
2. Owners and residents in the district have someone to go to that is more local than city government
3. Flexibility: The district's board can decide quicker and more flexibly how the collected money should be spent
4. Special districts are relatively insulated from the political agenda of city hall
5. The district allow special branding, visibility and marketing which can enhance property values

Disadvantages of Special Districts

1. In spite of guaranteed baseline services at the creation of the district, it is possible that standard city services in the district decrease because the district provides them better
2. The district board and governance is oriented to private interest and doesn't represent the public in the same was a generally elected city government
3. The extra tax increases the already high property tax burden and may not be affordable to low income homeowners
4. The benefits districts are in many ways an additional layer of governance in response to ineffective local services
5. A multitude of benefits districts can lead to fragmented city planning

Klaus Philipsen, FAIA

Resources on Community and Business Improvement Districts

BIDs fare well

Self-Organizing Special Districts: A Tool for Community Change and Development

Polycentric governance and the impact of special districts on fiscal common pools

Improvements for Whom?

Poe Museum: Can Poetry Become Architecture?

Architecture can be like poetry, but is the reverse also possible? Baltimore architect Davin Hong of re:vital Design is trying to do just that. His job: Design the Edgar Allen Poe Museum in Baltimore. More precisely, the expansion of the Poe House from the early 1800s which is listed as a National Register Landmark but hemmed in by the Poe Homes, Baltimore's first public housing development, built in 1940 for African American families. The complex of 288 homes is slated for demolition and redevelopment. In the process, additional land for a Poe Museum expansion has been carved out, also with the help of Hong, who in 2019 with his firm Living Design Lab, took part in a planning charrette that created basic redevelopment options.

Poe, a multi talent lived for four years on Amity Street
(Poe website)

In a tiny brick house on Baltimore’s North Amity Street in 1833-1835 Edgar Allan Poe wrote some of the early stories that would make him the father of the modern short story, and create and define the modern genres of mystery, horror and science fiction. (Poe Baltimore website)

Hong had time to develop his approach, the demolition of the Poe Homes has not yet started and the Choice Grant from the federal government is in jeopardy. Last week Hong presented the fruits of his translation of poetry into architectural form to the Baltimore design review panel UDAAP. 

The challenge of translating the poetry of Poe into architecture originates with the fact that the Baltimore museum doesn't have a lot of objects to exhibit. These are mostly on display in Richmond's Poe museum located in Richmonds oldest building, the Old Stone House on East Main Street, a far more accessible location than the one in Baltimore. Boston, Richmond and Baltimore each claim some part of the poet who never stayed too long in one place. Baltimore has the advantage that Poe not only lived in the Poe House on Amity Street for four years but also died in this city, his grave next to Westminster Hall. Like Poe's life, his death and even his gravesite had its mishaps, mysteries and confusion.

The Poe Museum extension as seen from Lexington Street
(Re:vital Design)

Hong told the Baltimore Business Journal his vision is "a post-modern reading of Edgar Allan Poe's work through architecture that borrows from Poe's writings". Designing museums is an art that has come a long way from dusty shelves and static glass vitrines to today's interactive multi-media experiences allowing a lot of variation in how and what to communicate with a visitor. 

“Of the innumerable effects, or impressions, of which the heart, the intellect, or (more generally) the soul is susceptible, what one shall I, on the present occasion, select?” (Edgar Allen Poe, “The Philosophy of Composition”)

Hong, at heart a modernist, is unlikely to design in the gothic style, even if gothic is often used to describe Poe's writing style. In his presentation to Baltimore's design review panel UDAAP he describes his goals in prosaic terms, such as "creating a new space for operations, storytelling and exhibits", or "expand the museum's service to community and make the museum "a landmark destination in Baltimore City" In conversation it becomes clear, however, that Hong also sets on mystery, allusion and melancholy as themes, in part this becomes clear in accessories such as the cloudy, gloomy sky Hong selected for his renderings, in part in the architecture itself. 

Overview sketch of the program elements (Re:vital Design)

An innovative architectural move is Hong's use of a double wall that acts like a longitudinal divide that bisects his composition and his program. He says that the wall creates a datum line that defines his Poe garden which mirrors a small park across the street that is part of the La Cite development across Amity Street and calls the wall a backdrop that hides the larger portion of the program, notably the auditorium. He also calls it a threshold, supposedly one from where one enters the combined two open spaces or from where one enters the lobby structure which he describes as an object within the open space. The other pieces of the assembled spaces in front of the wall consist of the historic Poe house, the structure next to the Poe home that will become an exhibit of the Poe Homes development, and a courtyard. Behind the wall are the gallery and an auditorium with an industrial style saw-tooth shed roof optimized for solar panels which he dubs "the Raven". 

When, indeed, men speak of Beauty, they mean, precisely, not a quality, as is supposed, but an effect—they refer, in short, just to that intense and pure elevation of soul—not of intellect, or of heart—upon which I have commented, and which is experienced in consequence of contemplating the “beautiful.” [....]
Beauty of whatever kind in its supreme development invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears. Melancholy is thus the most legitimate of all the poetical tones. (Poe, “The Philosophy of Composition”)

The phantom house reimagines the original twin house with a
metal scrim (Re:vital Design)

An interesting move is Hong's "phantom house", in which he at the same time preserves the two story neighbor of the Poe House that dates back to the Poe Home development  and also evokes the façade and roof of  the "twin building" that mimics the lost half of what originally formed together with the Poe house a two story duplex. The phantom historical "ghosting" happens via a metal scrim floating in front of the brick building that will accommodate the Poe Homes exhibit. The scrim consists of words and letters of various sizes with punched out ghost windows symmetrical to those in et Poe Home.

Hong's Poe Garden plays with the composition and details of the cemetery next to Westminster Hall on Greene Street in subtle ways. There is no Poe "toaster" nor a tombstone, but the plant selections, the paving, the brick color and the play with letters casting shadows on the lobby wall are supposed to

The proposed Poe garden takes clues from the burial ground 
at Westminster Hall (Re:vital Design)

instill a sense of melancholy. The garden leading to the courtyard could well be the entrance to all the museum elements, whereby the lobby would be entered from behind instead of the front. However, that is not what the architect intends. Instead he enters the lobby from West Lexington Street. The double wall has to traversed via a bridge if one wants to get from the lobby to the gallery or the auditorium, a glimpse of charred wood walls and possibly sinister shadows is supposed to be a bit spooky without being as crass as a carnival haunted fun house. The double wall accommodates also a stair to the basement in which Hong allows a departure from modernist cleanliness in favor of brick vaults and vaulted ceilings evoking catacombs. The effect is that it looks like as if the architect had placed his modern assembly of spaces on top of a historic excavation. The auditorium can double up as a community gathering space with ct access to a small outside patio.

The entirely windowless outside of the auditorium is clad in recycled plastic shingles that look like grey slate, another touch of autumn and gloom. Daylight comes from the shed roof.  

Proposed auditorium (Re:vital Design)

Seen one by one Hong proves in each of the program components that he is a great designer with a firm grip on proportion and excellent placemaking skills. While the multitude of volumes, materials and styles certainly fosters "multiple readings" as the architects set out to achieve, and also reflects the many talents Edgar Allen Poe possessed, one has to wonder if there isn't too packed into this relatively small project.  Given that the client is a non-profit that still has to raise funds for the construction of the project using Hong's drawings, and that the project is still far from a ground-breaking, one can expect that the one or the other idea will be purged towards more clarity, possibly resulting in a loss of mystery, ambiguity and poetry.

Klaus Philipsen, FAIA   

 Davin Hong's UDAAP presentation can be viewed here.  All images below are from Re:vital Design.

Current setting

Design Concept

First floor

Lobby as seen from entrance

Gallery

Composition of program elements

Poe Homes today

Site Plan

Baltimore Vacant Houses: Finally Progress and a Viable Plan!

Mayor Brandon Scott's administration and his Housing Commissioner Alice Kennedy seem to finally have found a recipe for reducing Baltimore's persistent blight of disinvestment and vacant houses, an issue that generations of mayors tried to tackle unsuccessfully.  

Vacant houses, a drag on Baltimore's
neighborhoods (Photo: Philipsen)

At least that was the impression one got listening to Baltimore's Housing Commissioner, Director of Finance and the President of the national organization MuniCap on Wednesday. The trio presented present the details of Scott's $3bn fifteen-year housing blight elimination plan to a rapt audience assembled in UMB's biotech center per invitation of the Lamda Alpha Land Economics Society LAI. Even retired former Housing Commissioner Graziano was impressed after quizzing the team with half a dozen or so technical questions about the workability of the innovative and nationally unique "non-contiguous" tax increment financing scheme (TIF). 

On the day of the presentation the DHCD dashboard displayed on the GIS-technology based CoDeMap showed 12,685  City registered VBNs (Vacant Building Notices). Even conceding that the number of vacants isn't an exact science (for one thing there are additionally around 20,000 vacant lots), this total is more than 20% less than the 16,000 vacant buildings DHCD had reported in 2015.

Officials from the City of Baltimore relied on technology to support their place-based intervention strategy. [..] CoDeMap, a mapping application that is based on [...] GIS. CoDeMap visualizes and analyzes housing needs in the city, neighborhood by neighborhood. CoDeMap also is a central point of access for [...] numerous databases with everything from citation data to a property's permit history. Launched more than five years ago, CoDeMap has evolved from a housing code enforcement tool to a platform that provides insights into housing, community development, and property datasets at the citywide, neighborhood, block, and parcel levels. 

In December 2023 when the Baltimore Mayor first announced his $3bn plan to eliminate vacant houses over 15 years, many yawned in spite of the giant dollar figure which encompassed 85% of Baltimore's total budget annual budget. They heard those promises before and with an instrument like a "non-contiguous TIF" there seemed to be a lot of pixie dust on this plan. Who had ever heard about this financing tool being used in totally disinvested areas on a lot-by-lot bases instead of a boundary defined area? Even that the Mayor stood with GBC and BUILD on his side, many Baltimoreans, jaded by past promises, were not convinced that this plan was real.

Baltimore Housing Commissioner speaking at a
LAI luncheon (Photo: Philipsen)

But a good year later the TIF has been approved, the first tranche of TIF bonds is about to be issued, the State has allocated money, and the block by block revitalization scheme is in full swing. Kennedy says $1.2bn of the needed funds have already been "committed".  And here they were, the money people, the Director Finance and the Municap man who advises municipalities across the nation on financial matters explaining in detail that this TIF was not fairy dust and that it was embedded in a larger strategy that DHCD has embarked on. 

For starters, the estimated total of $150 million TIF is not intended to pay entire projects but to finance the so called assessment gap that yawns between what a building costs to rehabilitate and what it could be sold for as well as infrastructure costs. The analysis showed that on average the appraisal gap is about $50k per building. With a total cost of doing the rehabilitation job estimated at $200,000, plus possible cost for infrastructure, the cost beyond the gap has to be covered by conventional loans and a mix of  City and State funds that Governor Moore promised in the total amount of $900 million, combining funds previously known as "project CORE" and BRNI ("Bernie"), guaranteed with a perpetual $50m minimum per year. 

The Mayor had not pulled the $3bn figure out of thin air or from the back of a napkin. For once, DHCD and experts had actually analyzed not only the problem (how the many vacants had morphed from "symptom of decline to driver of decline" through their impact on quality of life, surrounding housing values and Baltimore's property tax revenue) but also suggested a fix. Based on an assortment of studies they had performed detailed calculations of how much money it would take to fix the problem including buildings and infrastructure, in what sequence it could be done and, most importantly, what the funding sources could be. These studies, documents and institutions laid the groundwork, according to the Mayor's press release at the time:

Population loss comparison of industrial legacy cities
(From Whole Blocks-Whole City report)

Baltimore City / DHCD' (Framework of Community Development) czbLLC’s (Whole Blocks, Whole City Report and Analysis, prepared for BUILD) , MuniCap, Inc.,  CohnReznick, (TIF analysis), Johns Hopkins 21st Century Cities Initiative, (The Costs of Baltimore’s Vacant Housing), Econsult Solutions, (The Power of Residential Growth, for the Baltimore Development Corporation). Not mentioned in the press release is Joe Meyerhoff, a Baltimore based consultant who promoted the idea of non contiguous TIF bonds as a tool to fund the appraisal gap. 

I have written on this blog about Telesis and Sean Closkey's understanding of how to attack Baltimore's vacants problem in a systematic way which creates a ladder effect of values. Closkey now is part of ReBuild Metro which was an essential partner in the Whole City Blocks report. Principles of this approach include building from strength, working with communities and creating this stepladder of increasing value that would also allow the City to pay the TIF back. Usually, developers are on the line if the payback from incremental tax revenue increase doesn't develop as expected, there is also typically a special tax district applied to the TIF area. In this case the City can secure the first tranche with already rehabbed properties from the last two years created under "Vacants to Value", HCDC's longstanding program created under housing commissioner Graziano. Under Mayor Pugh and Young, the City had also developed a strategy for developing from strength in an attempt to bundle investment in "impact Investment Zones". This Framework has since been refined over time. 

Population loss was larger than household loss
(From Whole Blocks-Whole City report)

As Commissioner Kennedy explained, the funds to renovate cannot work in a vacuum but must be in an overall strategy which includes a strategic approach that is well coordinated with overall planning (DHCD hired several strategic planners), measures to expedite getting a clean title for vacant properties, block speculators form holding swaths of vacants through proper taxing and working through community centered and led vision plans. The history of the vacant house problem from Sandtown to Johnston Square shows that in some areas (Sandtown) the appraisal gap remained the same or grew while others managed to close it in a few years eliminating the need for subsidies (Barclay). 

The estimated upfront cost and payback over time (From the 
Kennedy presentation)

The value creation creates an ambiguous problem for existing homeowners: The assessed value of their homes goes up when a block has no vacant units left, welcome generational wealth creation but also an unwelcome tax burden, in spite of homesteading credits. The proposed solution: A one or two percent city sales tax that could reduce the property tax for every homeowner by $1000 if applied as a flat credit, would lower the tax rate for the average City homeowner ($150,00 home value) to near the tax levels of Baltimore County.  The sales tax suggestion which would align Baltimore with many peer cities, has been a legislative priority by the Scott administration during the last two legislative sessions in Annapolis but is a political longshot. .

Kennedy also noted that infrastructure frequently had been an overlooked problem that sank the cost calculations of many inner city rowhouse rehab projects. She mentioned the case of necessary alley widening that requires the relocation of electric poles, hundreds of thousands of dollars that distributed on just a few houses could make a project not viable unless infrastructure funds are set aside separately.  

From the audience came the question whether stormwater could be thought on a block or area level

Illustration of tax revenue occupied homes versus vacant ones
(Source, Meyerhoff slides)

instead of house by house, alluding to the new strict stormwater management requirements that are applied when new construction occurs on vacant lots. Kennedy said, stormwater mitigation is an issue that her department will be studying together with DPW and the parks department with the goal to create those synergies between new open spaces and new development. 

The innovative "non contiguous TIF"  approach has already drawn the interest from other cities, said Kennedy. The national ULI Magazine featured an article about it. Baltimore's successful violence reduction strategies also have created national interest recently. The last time folks came to Baltimore to study innovation was when Mayor O'Malley had implemented CitiStat. It is about time, we show America that government can, indeed, be effective. 

Klaus Philipsen, FAIA

Rehabilitated alley houses in Pigtown (Photo: Philipsen)

Previous articles on this Blog addressing the vacant house problem.

Who owns Baltimore's vacant houses and how to fix them up? (2024)

"Vacants to Value" becomes "Buy Into Bmore": More than just a name change? (2022)

One way to have fewer vacant rowhouses (2019)

Barclay's secret sauce of success (2017)

The universe and Baltimore's vacants (2017)

Can demolition of vacants add value? (2016)