On the Counterintuitive Nature of Baltimore’s Gentrification

Posted on April 9, 2015 by The Chop

Our last post was on the affordability of housing in the White L in Baltimore. Before we get started on today’s post we want to tip the hat to City Paper, who actually had used the phrase White L in print, even if we missed it. Good for them and for Baynard Woods in particular for recognizing that it’s a real thing and treating it like a real thing in print which many, many publications and websites do not.

That post was written from the perspective of a white Baltimorean because for better or worse that’s the only perspective we have. We’re not qualified to speak to the black experience in Baltimore either historically or in the present day. That said, we want all good things for Black Baltimore as well. Something we think is often lost but should be top of mind, especially in a city like ours, is that what’s good for black people is good for white people too. We’ve all got to live side by side even if we’re not truly living together, which unfortunately we are not.

But We, the Chop, are. As we said in our previous post we live in Waverly, which is about as diverse a neighborhood as you’ll find in Baltimore City, although it’s certainly majority black. But here’s the thing: when it comes to real estate, there’s really no such thing as a diverse neighborhood. Half black is black.

Of course, the National Association of Realtors will never admit that. Nor will any of the groups touting Baltimore as a model of urban renewal and a great place to move to and invest in. If you want the truth you often need to get it from an objective source, like the American Sociological Review.

In that journal last year Harvard researchers Jackelyn Hwang and Robert J. Sampson published a study of the effects of gentrification in Chicago titled Divergent Pathways of Gentrification: Racial Inequality and the Social Order of Renewal in Chicago Neighborhoods. We would contend that despite its size, Chicago can hold up to comparison with Baltimore for several reasons including but not limited to its historical significance with manufacturing and domestic migration patterns, historical segregation and race-driven housing policy as well as its current problems with concentrated poverty and violence.

What Hwang and Sampson found in Chicago is exactly what we’ve personally witnessed and continue to see here in Baltimore: all of the investment flowing into the White L. From the study’s abstract (emphasis ours):

We argue that a durable racial hierarchy governs residential selection and, in turn, gentrifying neighborhoods. Integrating census data, police records, prior street-level observations, community surveys, proximity to amenities, and city budget data on capital investments, we find that the pace of gentrification in Chicago from 2007 to 2009 was negatively associated with the concentration of blacks and Latinos in neighborhoods that either showed signs of gentrification or were adjacent and still disinvested in 1995. Racial composition has a threshold effect, however, attenuating gentrification when the share of blacks in a neighborhood is greater than 40 percent. Consistent with theories of neighborhood stigma, we also find that collective perceptions of disorder, which are higher in poor minority neighborhoods, deter gentrification, while observed disorder does not. These results help explain the reproduction of neighborhood racial inequality amid urban transformation.”

Did you catch that? It’s a fancy, fact-based way of saying what we said in our last post which caused a certain amount of pearl-clutching among the Facebookerati: that when outsiders come in and the Millennial population doubles, they’re choosing neighborhoods based on race whether they admit it or not. Here’s what Hwang had to say in conclusion of the study (source):

“Gentrification is often depicted as a process in which middle-class whites move into and thus integrate minority neighborhoods. But in fact, gentrifiers prefer already white neighborhoods; they are least attracted to black neighborhoods and see Asian and Latino neighborhoods as middling options.”

Hwang ought to know. In another study of hers last year titled Divergent Paths of Immigrant Growth: Hispanics and Asians in the Evolution of Gentrification in U.S. Cities she detailed how the presence of Asians or Latinos can signal white gentrification a generation later. When you take into account the historical presence of Koreans around Station North, or consider that Upper Fell’s, Butcher’s Hill and Highlandtown all saw their Latino populations increase significantly beginning in the 1990’s you should be having an aha moment. Acknowledging that neighborhood choice is about race isn’t the same thing as ‘making it about race.’

From a Harvard news item about the Chicago study:

“After controlling for a host of other factors, they found that neighborhoods an earlier study [1995] had identified as showing early signs of gentrification continued the process only if they were at least 35 percent white. In neighborhoods that were 40 percent or more black, the process slowed or stopped altogether.”

You really should click over and read that news item. Every quote from Hwang and Sampson is very smart and very direct and is a real eye opener when read with Baltimore in mind. More from Sampson:

“I wouldn’t want this to be interpreted as saying neighborhoods need whites,” Sampson said. “It’s saying that we have a particular history in cities in the United States, and the analysis has to be interpreted within the structure of that history. So rather than saying you need whites, I think what is needed ― and this has always been the case ― is some concerted effort to rethink urban policy.”

Yeah, we do need to rethink urban policy. Especially here in Baltimore where the current administration’s policy includes things like giving a TIF to Harbor Point while denying one for Poppleton and giving John Paterakis $200,000 to move bakery jobs away from downtown to build fancy shit, including a large hotel, while the City-owned Hilton at Camden Yards (a not-so-old project itself) lost $5.6M last year and $70,000,000 since its grand opening.

Hwang’s last quote in that news item calls for more economic diversity within neighborhoods. That’s something we’ve got very little of here in Baltimore and it’s something that can not only make a neighborhood more interesting, diverse and desirable, it improves the city overall and helps immensely with resident retention. If you live in a $300,000 house in Baltimore odds are all your neighbors do too- or that figure can be realized on the market with a quality $50-60k renovation. If you live in a $60k house, odds are all your neighbors do too, if they haven’t abandoned their property completely.

Take a second to digest that phrase: ‘abandoned their property completely.’

It’s not just Hwang and Sampson who came to that conclusion about race and gentrification. UIC researcher Janet Smith also looked at Chicago neighborhoods and found that while some of Chicago’s black neighborhoods improved, none of them gentrified. Almost counterintuitively, the accepted paradigm of richer, educated white people displacing blacks from neighborhoods has never happened in Chicago. Smith points out- rightly- that gentrification isn’t about the color of the family living next to you or about their educational attainment, it’s about millions and millions of dollars flowing into neighborhoods. Apartment buildings don’t just spring from the ground like sunflowers. Chain stores and franchises don’t just fall from the sky. Those things cost hundreds of millions and some very rich people decide exactly where to put them (with the approval of city hall) and where they decide to put them is in neighborhoods where white people are and always have been.

Smith sums it up succinctly by saying of middle class black spending power:

“Even if they have the green, they’re still black.”

We can certainly see evidence of this in Baltimore. The popular perception of our black neighborhoods still has a lot to do with crime and drugs and yes, the goddamn Wire. But we’ve also got an abundance of black neighborhoods where you can get a very nice house on a decent block at a square price- and find nothing but bullshit Family Dollars and Fast Food restaurants when it comes to retail and dining. When we look at our own neighborhood we see five or more cheap chicken places and mini marts for every Pete’s Grille and Thai Restaurant. We see a Giant that favors bulk generic junk food over the healthy organic items on offer at the Hampden Giant.

All this puts us in mind of an old blog post over at the under-appreciated site Baltimore City’s Past, Present and Future. The post is about the neighborhoods of Greater Lauraville and we can remember being impressed with it when it was first published in 2009. In fact, it’s one of the things that inspired us to start a blog in the first place. The city could use more bloggers like Spence Lean and more posts like this one.

It looks back at the history of the Harford Road corridor and notes that while it’s been historically white, the presence of black families has increased since 1990 and in 2000 was roughly 55/45 white/black. He notes, correctly, we believe that the black and white residents of the Harford Road corridor (above Lake Montebello) get along rather well because they’re almost all solid working class up to middle-middle class. At the same time the post notes the presence of what Lean calls Racist Retail: the dollar stores, bottle shops and run-down gas stations that make up the majority of trade on Harford Road despite the significant spending power of residents there. As he puts it:

“whenever an area sees a larger Black clientele [developers and investors] assume that Dollar Stores, Beauty Supply Shops, Auto Part Dealers, Check Cashing Places, and Laundromats are the only types of stores good enough for a Black Population rich, poor, or anything in between. I call this “racist retail” other examples can be found in Forest Park, Belair Edison, and Northwood Shopping Center.”

The post sort of hints at the idea that the future will, inevitably, bring change and no one’s quite certain what that change will be. Six years later in 2015, not heck of a lot has changed. You can point to Zeke’s Coffee and places like it as steps forward, but you can also point to Tooloolou and other places that came and went as a step back. Significant development like the shops at Lauraville hasn’t happened. Apartment buildings aren’t on the horizon.

Still, Lauraville continues to lure homebuyers, especially young families and newly married couples. It has constantly remained above the 35% white threshold that Hwang identified as a precursor to gentrification, although it is slightly above the 40% black threshold which prevented gentrification in Chicago. Unfortunately, this could explain the area’s stagnation in terms of development. If gentrification ever does take hold outside the White L, there’s a very good chance it’ll be along Harford Road. If.

Contrast this with Belair-Edison which is nearby and the same distance to downtown. You can find crappy retail on Belair Road too, and you can buy a lot of house for a very fair price, just like in Lauraville. The difference being that in the 1990’s when Lauraville realized a 45% black population, Belair Edison became majority black. A house near Herring Run park can be had for a very good price, but as Johnette Richardson, the head of Belair Edison Neighborhoods Inc said in a recent Sun article:

“When I think of this community, if one word had to come to mind, it is ‘survivor,’

“This is a surviving community,” Richardson says. “I don’t know too many other communities that have been hit, just beaten down by predatory practices, and yet we manage to emerge.

“You just want to fight and fight and fight for this neighborhood.”

Maybe she does but most homeowners of all races, especially when they have families, don’t want to fight and fight and fight and be a survivor. Most want to live in a place that can be described as genuinely nice and clean and safe, and want to see neighborhood investment come from top-level retailers, experienced developers, and well capitalized entrepreneurs, not from charities and endowments and the government. If that means they have to live in the county and spend more time in their cars, or move to a different city entirely they’re going to do just that, even if it’s done reluctantly.

City councilman Brandon Scott who is, so far as we can tell, one of the good ones, sums up the experience of living inside Baltimore and outside the White L almost perfectly in that article:

“Standing on a corner near Herring Run Park, City Councilman Brandon Scott points out the tidy brick house where his old schoolteacher still lives. Over in the park, some guy is illegally riding a dirt bike.

“Belair-Edison, to me, is a microcosm of Baltimore City,” Scott says. “You can be on a block like this,” he says, gesturing to his teacher’s house. “And then go two blocks over, and it’s a different story. It just depends on the people in that location.”

Which is true. There are so many fine line distinctions to be drawn you can take them down to the street, down to the block, down to the bedrooms within a particular house. It all just depends on the people in that location. Brandon Scott speaks like an insider because he is one.

Belair Edison may improve but it will never gentrify. Waverly will never gentrify. Pigtown and Union Square and Reservoir Hill will never gentrify. They won’t even improve- not without some focused policy changes at city hall. Until the city starts insisting on development plans that allow for real economic diversity inside the White L and large scale projects that will attract additional investment, interest and activity outside of it our city will continue to be starkly segregated and inequality will only increase. The large numbers of Millennials moving to Baltimore and their tech and STEM employers will not save us from that fate, they’ll only perpetuate it- as they have done and continue to do.

On The Myth of Baltimore as a Cheap Place to Live

Posted on April 5, 2015 by The Chop

It’s common knowledge that one of the great advantages Baltimore has going for it is that living here is a bargain. And common knowledge is always right, right? Every year the City Paper’s reader’s poll lists ‘because it’s cheap.’ as the number one reason for living here. Articles are always appearing about DC people who were priced out and came an hour north to save money or about Joe Blow Handyman with his vacant shell and his sweat equity. But if common knowledge and feelgood stories in the Lifestyle section aren’t enough for you you can just look at the numbers and see that the average price to buy a home in Baltimore is a mere $107,000 according to Zillow data.

But wait a minute… There’s a problem with Zillow data, and with all data that treats the city like a monolithic whole. The problem is that Baltimore is not one city- there’s a White Baltimore and a Black Baltimore and they’re pretty far apart.

We wrote a very long and detailed post one year ago about racial issues and neighborhood choice. We invite you to go back and read it if you haven’t. It goes back to the city’s founding and touches on some of the serious systemic and historical racial injustices that shaped our neighborhoods into black and white, and some of the issues of gentrification that reshaped our white and formerly working class neighborhoods.

But the conclusion is unmistakeable and inescapable- on the whole black people and white people are not living together in Baltimore City and although we wish things were different there’s no reason to believe that our racially polarized neighborhoods will ever look much different in our lifetime. According to research, white people in the US are still overwhelmingly buying in white neighborhoods, and those who buck the trend are rewarded with lower rates of appreciation, if their homes appreciate at all. As a reminder, here’s what our city looks like by race (source).

The map clearly shows why many native Baltimoreans and longtime locals often refer to The White L, which is roughly the shape described by tracing a route from Mount Washington south between 83 and York Rd to Wells Street and then East to the city line below Baltimore Street. (It also sometimes contains Pigtown, depending on the particular discussion at hand.) Add in the Harford Road corridor and you’ve got the entirety of White Baltimore. (And yes we know there are white people south of Middle Branch but we’re not including that area for many reasons.)

We’ve never seen the phrase White L in print or on any website that publishes edited content, but we’ve heard it talked about (mostly by white people) for most of our life. If you’re a white person living in or visiting Baltimore there’s an odds-on chance that your entire civic/commercial/professional experience takes place in the White L/Harford Rd.

When white people talk about Baltimore being inexpensive to live in they are talking about White Baltimore. For the rest of this post we’ll be talking solely about White Baltimore. For many years Baltimore was a bargain- in white neighborhoods the cost of a modest rowhouse was in the middle five figures and stayed low while suburbanization ran rampant. In 2015 the White L has become significantly more expensive. It is no longer cheap to live in (white) Baltimore, as we’ll show you below.

Before we get started we’d like to get this out of the way: It’s foolish to compare Baltimore to New York City or Washington DC. New York is a major world city and a bona fide metropolis. As the capital, Washington enjoys such a large number of people connected to politics or employed by the federal government that it’s entirely unique. Both of these cities are a case apart and can’t be compared very well to any other city. Baltimore’s geographic proximity to them is merely an accident. In a subsequent post we’ll look at Baltimore’s affordability relative to other cities, but for now let’s look at what it actually costs to live in White Baltimore.

The Census quickfacts sheet on Baltimore lists the city’s median income at $41,385. NPR, also using census data, has that number at $39,866. But as they illustrate our cost of living is relatively higher than the national average and that $39,866 only goes as far as $34,606 does on average. In Maryland, life is 11.3% more expensive than average.

But those numbers encompass black, white and everyone else. We looked at data on 20 neighborhoods in the White L and determined that the median income for white people in Baltimore is about $53,849. (When you throw out the renter-heavy apartment-packed, very young neighborhoods of Downtown, Charles Village and Midtown the number climbs to $59,162. (Federal Hill and Canton are actually richer than Guilford now, all with median incomes in the $70,000’s)). [Edit: CNN is better at research than we are. When they broke it down by race and not by neighborhood they arrived at a figure of $60,550. So our guess was pretty good, especially considering Station North and Charles Village are somewhat diverse.]

So let’s use $53,849 as our barometer. It may or may not be accurate as the median income of white Baltimoreans but certainly it’s a good salary for one person and as a household income total it should allow for some flexibility and choice in housing. As you can see here, it’s enough to qualify as middle class, even in the richest state in the nation by household income which Maryland is. Most lenders and financial experts agree that households should not spend more than 28% of gross monthly income on housing. That gives our white home seeker earning $53,849 a monthly housing budget of $1256 or less.

He or she could spend that in rent, but as we pointed out in a previous post the average rent for a Baltimore apartment is $1285 a month. That means the average apartment price is not affordable to someone making over $50,000 a year, which is alarming and is proof enough on its own that Baltimore is no longer a cheap city.

We want to be clear that when we talk about housing options we’re particularly concerned with long-term adult residents. It’s all well and good for a college kid to live in a 400 sq ft studio or for emerging adults in their early twenties to share a house with roommates, but these are not viable options for bona fide adults. No one is going to willingly settle for 15-20 years in a tiny studio or spend their entire lives subject to the whims of a revolving cast of roommates. A 1 BR apartment with at least 700 sq ft is about the minimum that will attract long term tenants, and it’s not unusual for a long term resident to want or need two to three bedrooms. After all, if you ever want to have children they can’t spend their lives crashing on the couch.

Without making a very long and detailed study of the market we can’t possibly come up with an accurate price for a 1BR 700sf place or better limited to the White L and Harford Road. Our best guess is $1600/mo or more. But don’t take our word for it: browse the Zillow rental listings yourself and you’ll see that staying under $1256 for that type of apartment is very hard to do. And if you happen to make less than $54,000 and can afford less every month you’re pretty much SOL.

When you look at the 70+ projects recently completed or currently in development, only three of them are outside the White L: Sagamore Distillery is one and Johns Hopkins is another. The third is Poppleton, which is slated to take almost 20 years to complete and which suffered another setback recently when it was denied a TIF by the city. Of the dozens of other projects on that list, virtually all of them are going to be very expensive class A apartments. Not only is White Baltimore no longer cheap, it’s getting more expensive all the time.

For long-term adult residents it often makes much more sense to buy a home than to pay rent perpetually. If our buyer earning $54k wanted to buy in the city with its very high property taxes and insurance rates that would give them a budget of about $154,000. (This is working backwards from the same $1256 monthly payment and assuming they’ll qualify for a 4% rate and are making a down payment of only 4%, with 3.5% being the FHA minimum. Those are very liberal terms to assume. But it includes realistic tax rates and insurance costs, which lenders also consider when handing out loans.)

Let’s assume too that we want a house which is reasonably move-in ready. If we’re going to stay for 15-20 years we’re going to insist on two bedrooms, not one. It needn’t be a brand new rehab- we won’t worry at all about things like crappy wallpaper or ugly kitchens and bathrooms. But in our search let’s toss out anything that wouldn’t qualify for financing from most banks- this means that most as-is houses as well as many foreclosures. On our budget we don’t have the luxury of an additional renovation loan, so let’s also rule out houses that have been cut up into multiple units or any other listing that has obvious problems. Here are the search results.

At a $154k budget a buyer looking for a decent home is priced out of most white neighborhoods entirely. You’re not going south of the harbor, period. You’ll find nothing south of Eastern Ave on the east side and the best you’ll do between Eastern and Baltimore Street is a very small house, possibly in an alley. Who wants to go to the top of their budget to live in an alley?

In some white neighborhoods like the Charles Street corridor the housing stock consists of such large homes that our buyer is priced out automatically. Places like Charles Village and Bolton Hill are full of 6 bedroom mansions. Likewise you’re entirely priced out of areas like Roland Park, Mount Washington and Guilford/Homeland.

You might find something in your budget in Hamden or Remington, but looking in both neighborhoods today we’re seeing a combined total of six houses under $154k, mostly under 1000 sq feet. And get ’em while you can because as we’ve seen Hampden and Remington as well as the streets north of Patterson Park are already gentrified and those little shitbox houses won’t last at that price.

With our $154k budget a buyer’s only choices to get into a decent house of any size in white Baltimore is to go near the top of the budget on what’s bound to be a sketchy block in Pigtown, or a slightly less sketchy block all the way out in Greektown. You do start to see some decent options when you go out Harford Road or to the city’s eastern edge in neighborhoods like Bayview, Eastwood and Graceland Park, but if you’re going to live within about half a mile of the city line, you need to think long and hard about which side of it you want to be on, and most people will choose the side with the low taxes and decent schools.

Of course, there is the option to move outside the white L. We bought in Waverly, which is pretty damn close to the L geographically, but as we’ll see in a future post it can sometimes feel a world away. But as we saw above the choice we made is one white people are just not making in appreciable numbers and the few who do take that option can be penalized financially in the long term when it comes time to sell.

For white Baltimore gentrification isn’t happening- it has happened. It’s a done deal. If you want a decent house in white Baltimore a realistic budget is $300,000 which, using a 28% affordability formula and the same liberal assumptions as above means your payment is in the $2400/mo range, or exactly what the rent will be on a class A 2 BR apartment in one of the 70 shiny new projects being developed inside the White L. In order to reasonably afford that at a 28% threshold your household income needs to be at or above $100,000. That’s more than double the city’s median household income.

That’s why we bothered to list all of those development projects in one place. Taken together it should be immediately obvious how far developers and the city are bending over backward to build for and sell to white people and only white people. But not just any white people- rich outsiders and especially Millennials.

We’ve always had a great deal of inequality in our city, and as we look to the future it’s incredibly frustrating to see politicians with power and developers and investors with money not only repeating most of the past’s mistakes, but doing everything they can to see to it that inequality actually increases in the next generation.

There’s a lot of hype out there. City leaders and the developers they’re in bed with can host ribbon cuttings and grand openings all they like. They can point to this-or-that ‘market rate’ (read: $1285/mo.) project and talk at length about how tech and tech companies and Millennials are such a boon. The local news will always show up to cover it. The mayor can keep reminding us that 10,000 new families are coming. But 10,000 new families aren’t coming.

City population growth is flat. According to a recent article in the Sun the city lost about 600 residents in the last year and “The Maryland Department of Planning does not expect the city’s population to top 650,000 again until 2030 and projects the city’s growth rate will continue to lag other places in the state.” Indeed, Baltimore County is growing as the city stays flat. For every Millennial who comes, there’s a Gen X’er ready to leave.

The hype would have you believe that Millennials are entirely different from their parents, and while it’s true that survey after survey has them saying they want to live in cities, or want to live in this city, what people report to surveyors is not always an indicator of how they’ll behave. For white millennials it may be a blast to live in a house full of roommates near the harbor or a shabby-chic apartment in Mount Vernon, but once they get to be 30 or older and need to start making real long-term housing decisions and planning for families of their own those without combined incomes of $100,000 are going to realize very quickly that it’s incredibly difficult to build a life in the city. Likewise those with $300,000 or more to spend need to find a way to justify spending $500, $600, or $700 every month on property taxes alone, which is not uncommon in Baltimore’s gentrified neighborhoods.

One by one, each for their own reasons most white families will continue to decide- quietly and away from the media- that the time has come to leave Baltimore City, just as they always have. At the end of the day, Charm don’t come cheap.

A Very Modest Proposal to (Slightly) Improve Baltimore

Posted on April 4, 2015 by The Chop

Our city has a lot of problems. We’ve got whole entire systems that are broken; city audits and financial oversight, education, care for the homeless, water infrastructure and billing, police overtime, just to name a few of the big ones.

But we’ve got plenty of smaller problems too. Today we want to talk about a problem that is so small as to almost seem insignificant, but which is a problem nonetheless: abandoned traffic cones.

Bear with us: we have a lot of stray traffic cones floating around the streets and sidewalks of the city. When called to their attention most residents would probably react to their presence with some version of the sentiment: ‘Who cares? It’s just a traffic cone. I barely noticed it and it’s not hurting anything. We’ve got bigger problems to solve.’

But traffic cones are ugly. And some jerks like to collect them and try to save parking spaces on their block which is a whole separate problem of incivility. Cones don’t belong on random sidewalks and the more we see of them the more it bothers us. Here, have a look at what our neighborhood looks like around Waverly:

Cones on either side of 33rd Street.

There was work going on here once upon a time. Now there’s just barrels sitting around for no reason.

More cone clutter on Ellerslie Ave.

Fit securely in a parking space? Screw it, better throw a cone in the road anyway.

Ellerslie Ave resident helped themselves to a cone.

Someone didn’t feel like removing the whole streetlamp so they just threw a cone on it.

Do you really think this cone is making this empty tree well any safer? How about planting a goddamn tree there?

Pancakes, with a side of cone.

Presumably meant to keep people from stepping on the cast iron fixture but people don’t step in raised landscaping beds- they just use them as trashcans.

Maybe if I put the cone over the meter I won’t have to pay.

Chicken box? No, chicken cone.

Hip Hop Cone and Fish.

Bad cones go to cone jail.

Cones adorn the front yards of Govans homes.

Still life of cone as seen from the blogger’s home.

Cone hidden like an Easter egg.

The saddest, ugliest cone of all.

That’s a lot of cones, and it’s just the ones we happened to pass by on a very short trip to run errands near our house on one particular morning. Citywide, there are thousands of cones just laying around on the streets. So what should we do about it? We should start in Helen Holton’s office.

This week WBAL TV’s Jayne Miller reported on Twitter that Councilwoman Holton wants $3000 in public money so that she can take a trip to Hawaii to attend a conference meant for Western US states.

That $3000 trip to Hawaii Balto City Council member Helen Holton wants taxpayers to pay for is for a meeting of states in the Western US

— Jayne Miller (@jemillerwbal) April 1, 2015

Helen Holton should be absolutely ashamed of herself. Not only that, but she should rectify the situation by channeling that $3000 into something that will make the city appreciably better. Our vote goes to cone removal.

Now, the usual way to get anything done in the city is to call 311. But what are we supposed to do? Report every stray cone one at at time and wait for DPW to come collect them one at a time? Let’s say we bring up the problem to our community association or our own councilwoman: there’s bound to be an unsatisfactory result: a lot of waiting and a long chain of emails that say ‘we’ll look into it’ or ‘we’ll draft a proposal’ or ‘contact BGE or XYZ contractor’ or ‘You can drop off stray cones at such and such locations.’

We’d like to see a more effective approach to problem solving. We recommend taking it back to the William Donald Schaefer do it now! style of governing. Would Mayor Schaefer have cc’ed a few staffers and promised to follow up in the future? Hell no! He’d take Helen Holton’s $3000 and hire someone with a pickup truck to drive around the city every day for a month doing nothing but collecting cones. Pluck them right off people’s goddamn stoops and take them all down to the Fallsway. If there were a single cone left in Waverly at the end of the month Mayor Schaefer would have happily volunteered to wear it as a hat to the next board of estimates meeting.

You can debate the merits of this plan all you want, but at the end of the day any use of $3000 is better than sending Helen Holton to Hawaii. At the end of a month city hall could point to the Fallsway and say; “We’re not perfect but at least we got all the cones off the streets. At least we bothered to do that much.”

A Summary of Current Development Plans in Baltimore- Spring 2015 (Updated Fall 2016)

Posted on March 25, 2015 by The Chop

We’ve got some things we want to say about living in Baltimore. In fact, we’ve got quite a lot to say about what it means to live here in 2015. It’s entirely too much to fit into a single post. But a lot of what we have to say involves urban development, and when we say development we want to be very clear about what we mean. Below is a partial list of building projects that are either under construction, being actively planned for or recently completed. We take recently to mean within the last year or two, not say, 2003 or 2008 or 2011, which are all also fairly ‘recent’ in the grand scheme of things. If we listed all those projects the list would be at least twice as long.

Before we get started we’d like to call your attention to a very well-reported story in the Sun recently about apartment development. Specifically, we’d like to note these important statistics:

The average price of apartment rents in Baltimore is $1285/mo.

The median rent for a one bedroom apartment is $985/mo, meaning that half of all one bedrooms are more expensive than $985.

Rents in the ‘central’ neighborhoods have increased by 6.3% in the last year and 16% in the last five years while wage growth has been very slow at only 2% over the last year.

And these paragraphs directly from the article: “More than 5,360 homes in projects with 15 or more units have been completed in Baltimore in the last five years, according to the city’s Planning Department. Another 3,232 are under construction, including 948 that got underway last year. And 2,825 more have been approved, including 1,233 last year.

The Downtown Partnership is tracking about 7,000 homes for sale or rent in Federal Hill, Fells Point and downtown to be completed by 2017. The number outstrips the demand predicted in a 2012 study for the group, which forecast a market for 5,800 units through 2017.”

The list below is limited to what’s come to our personal attention and to projects of fairly large scale. It doesn’t include things like rowhouse renovations by developers or the house-to-apartment conversions which are so numerous and popular in Central Baltimore. It also doesn’t include individual restaurants and other small businesses like Handlebar Cafe, Pen and Quill or Crossbar. A third important omission is massive scale projects that are obvious targets for redevelopment for which no plans currently exist such as the Baltimore Arena, Superblock, and Crown Cork & Seal building. It doesn’t include a multi-acre plan for Old Town Mall which is in its very early stages. It also does not include some institutional expansions at area colleges. But even so the list below represents what is effectively building a brand new city. Please note: This post will update periodically.

UPCOMING PROJECTS

Inner Harbor Master Plan. Too much to list here, including redevelopments of Rash Field and demolition of McKeldin Fountain.

325 W Baltimore St. 30 floors, 229 apartments, 100,000 ft office 7,700 ft retail 400 space parking.

Mechanic Theater 30 floors, 250 residential units, 160 hotel rooms, 107,000 ft retail.

220 W Baltimore St. 16 apartments.

1 Light St. 340 apartments, 10 floors offices, 646 space parking.

414 Light St. 44 floors, 392 apartments.

300 E. Pratt St. 430′ tower, 600 residential/hotel units, 20,000 ft retail.

801 Eastern Ave 240 apartments, 7000 ft retail.

225 N. Calvert St. 350 apartments.

25 S. Calvert St. 149 room hotel.

612 Washington Blvd. 32 apartments, 1000 ft retail.

20 E Franklin St. 41 apartments.

Mulberry at Park 68 apartments.

200 W Saratoga St. 42 room La Quinta hotel.

Lexington Market. $26 million in renovations.

Stadium Square. 293 residential units, 14,000 ft retail, 450 space parking plus two more entire city blocks of development at $250 Million.

Anthem House 275 apartments.

Hammerjacks. 2000 person concert venue near the casino.

Cross St. Market. “A full-blown Proposal.” By Caves Valley Partners.

The Pinnacle* an 18 story ultra-luxury condo tower at Harbor View along Key Highway.

1100 Key Highway* 305 Class A apartments.

Sagamore Distillery. 90 acres highlighted by 3 Million ft offices, a whiskey distillery and 10,000 ft restaurant.

Poppleton. 14 acres, 1600 homes, a school, 150,000 ft retail.

MLK at Baltimore Street. 30 floors, 300 apartments.

Harbor Point. 27 acres. Phase 1: 277,000 ft offices (completed), Exelon HQ- 20 floors and almost 1 million ft offices, 40,000 ft retail, 103 residential units, 750 car parking. 298 additional parking spaces and other improvements. Phase 2: a 16 floor 285 unit apartment building and 20,000 ft retail. Buildings totaling 337,000 ft offices and 30,000 ft retail. Phase 3: 222,000 ft apartment/hotel, 12,000 ft retail, 438,000 ft office with 16,000 ft retail, 346,000 ft apartment building with 10,200 ft retail.

Hendler Creamery Building. 276 apartments, 11,000 ft retail.

Johns Hopkins Science and Technology Park. 80+ acres featuring 1200 homes, a school, 80,000 ft retail and more.

Recreation Pier. 128 Room hotel.

Aliceanna at Central 350 residential units, 60,000 ft retail.

601 S. Eden St. 8-10 floors of retail and office space.

Canton Crossing. Four additional office towers with 200,000+ ft retail each.

4701 O’Donnell Street* A BJ’s, a Taco Bell and a gas station in the former Lenmar Building.

Pemco Redevelopment* a multi-acre site that is likely to include massive retail, including a possible grocery store, around 250 apartments and hotel.

Our Lady of Pompeii (Highlandtown) 28 apartments.

State Center. 28 acres, 2,000 residential units, 2 million ft offices, 250,000 ft retail, 300,000 ft Armory building grocery store, 550 space parking.

816 N. Calvert St. 50 apartments.

814 N. Charles St. 8 story apartment/retail building with underground parking. Also a possible second building at 1010 N. Charles.

Lovegrove St at Lanvale 85-95 apartments plus retail and parking.

Parkway Theater. 3 Screen theater and live performance space.

Penn Station. 7 acres, 1.5 million ft residential and development.

3200 Saint Paul St. 12 story, 157 apartment building with 31,500 ft retail and 162 space parking.

Northwood Plaza* Hard to find much info on this but it does appear to be happening.

Remington Row. 15,000 ft retail, 30,000 ft offices, 108 apartments, 200 space parking.

25th Street Station. Yeah, your guess is as good as ours but Seawall is serious and whatever ends up there is going to be big.

Skyview Towns* Although stalled during the recession, we’ve heard this subdivision of 42 large $300k+ houses for Hoes Heights is still intended to be built.

Cairnes Lane*, Hampden, a ‘major subdivision’ of 29 large townhouses (of the type seen lately in Greektown and near the B&O Museum).

RECENTLY ANNOUNCED (BETWEEN SPRING 2015 AND FALL 2016)

602 N Howard 100,000 square foot self storage/mixed use.

400 W Franklin 15,000 square foot office.

Congress Hotel Apartments.

Victory House 15 Apartments.

Highland Haus 57 Apartments in Highlandtown.

Fox Industries Building Apartments and yet another Makerspace.

3400 Boston Street 241 Apartments.

North Barclay Green 89 Townhouses and retail.

1000 Eastern Ave Six Story Apartment Building.

Flats at Eutaw Place 62 Apartments.

9 E 33rd Street 31,500 sq ft Apartments, 3 restaurants and a CVS.

McHenry Row expansion 224 Apartments.

Hoen Lithograph 75,000 sq ft light industrial including Spike Gjerde’s food production operations.

Schenuit Tire in Woodberry “Nothing with 18-wheelers”

Gampy’s Apartments and a restaurant.

Shofer’s Clearance Center 10 Apartments and retail.

Anthem House 2 52 Apartments. Because one Anthem House just wasn’t enough.

408-412 N Howard Street A theater incubator, cafe, retail, and 57,000 square feet of apartments.

Totman Building Downtown apartments.

Howard Station 15 story apartment building at Howard and Saratoga.

Baltimore Country Club Probably some mansions for rich people.

Apartments in Roland Park Next to Belvedere Towers.

2000 W Cold Spring Lane 16 Acres for possible development.

417-421 and 423 N Howard Street Large Scale office and Mixed use.

Pepsi Plant in Woodberry large scale apartments and retail.

PROJECTS COMPLETED BETWEEN MARCH 2015 AND NOVEMBER 2016

10 Light St. 455 apartments

115 N Charles St. 3700 ft retail/apartments.

10 N. Calvert St. 189 apartments.

26 S. Calvert St. 200 apartments.

700 Portland St. 32 condos.

7 W Mulberry St. An unknown number of apartments in a 3 story building.

505 Park Ave. 10 residential units and 7 parking spaces from converted office building.

Hotel Indigo* A $20 Million renovation to the Mount Vernon Hotel which will more than double room rates at what was the city’s most economical place to stay.

Heath St Lofts. 60 apartments.

Federal Place* 23 new townhouses on Key Highway.

Phillips HQ* Nearly 100,000 feet of commercial space.

Marketplace at Fells. 160 apartments, 27,000 ft retail.

Saint Patrick’s School (Fell’s Point) 11 apartments.

Highlandtown Middle School. 140 apartments.

Open Works. a 34,000 ft ‘makerspace.’

Centre Theater. Home to film programs of MICA and JHU as well as other creative agencies.

Motor House. A gentrified version of Load of Fun Studios.

The Rotunda Hampden, 379 apartments, 130,000 ft retail, 140,000 ft office, 1100 space parking.

613 Portland Street Apartments marketed to UM students.

Cardinal Gibbons 80 Affordable Apartments.

RECENTLY COMPLETED PROJECTS (Before March 2015)

We’re not going to provide links for these but you can easily Search them because they already exist:

Highland town Middle School (aka 101 Ellwood)*
Union Mills
1100 Wicomico St
520 Park Ave.
The Lenore
101 Wells Street
2 E. Wells Street.*
Pabst Castle
1111 Light St.
City Arts Building
That other building between Lafayette and Lanvale
Baltimore Design School
Land Bank Apartments
The Fitzgerald
Public Comfort Station, Fell’s Point
521 St paul St.
The Zenith
McHenry Row
Canton Crossing
301 N Charles St.
The Fred Lazarus Building
Union Wharf
King Cork and Seal* (Baltimore and Haven Streets)
Riverside Wharf*

Photos From Small Foods 2015

Posted on March 16, 2015 by The Chop

Did you know that Baltimore’s annual Small Foods festival and cooking competition took place on the third floor of the H&H building this weekend? Did you know that by annual, we mean tenth anniversary edition? You didn’t? Yeah, well we didn’t know about it either until about an hour before it started. But as it happened we were sitting on the couch thinking about dinner plans at that very moment, and rather than put our names in for a two hour wait at the latest must-try Hampden flavortorium (which one is it this week?) we grabbed a box of wine and made for Whole Gallery where we were treated to a meal fit for a (Lilliputian) king.

We arrived to find almost 200 Bohemian types of various stripes who for the most part seemed as surprised by the event as we were, as we chatted with several first-time attendees most of whom hadn’t heard of the event in previous years or who came in on a whim.

The basic idea is that it’s an open-invite potluck in which everyone brings a miniscule version of their favorite foods to share. There were miniature corndogs an inch long and little grilled cheese sandwiches the size of a crouton. Tiny pancakes and biscuits and gravy, pizza, Mexican… you name it it was there in its tiny version.

As with any Through-the-Looking-Glass type event, everyone won and all must have prizes. Awards were given out for smallest food, most delicious, and most surprising among others. And of course there’s a grand prize winner, who receives a trophy fashioned from a giant can of mini corn. All in all it was a very fun night and we’d definitely go back next year. We might even show off what ‘little’ culinary skill we have with some tiny bowls of soup or miniaturized quiches.