Abandoned furniture and a fire-damaged car fill the vacant lots on Tivoly, Fenwick, and Hugo avenues in Baltimore’s Coldstream-Homestead-Montebello neighborhood. An eighteen-wheeler has been left abandoned on the 2700 block of Fenwick Avenue for months.
This is meant to be the site of a new Tivoly Eco-Village redevelopment project, providing dozens of new net-zero carbon emissions homes.
However, little progress has been made since vacant homes were torn down beginning in 2008 and development plans were announced years later. Baltimore’s Housing Commissioner Alice Kennedy, who was appointed in 2020, acknowledges that the community has waited far too long for progress. She insisted it has become a priority for the city.
“Part of it has been promises that have been made by other administrations or implied promises without having some of the funding in place and so forth,” Kennedy said. “So, Mayor Scott has made this a priority to ensure that the funding is there, to get the project off the ground, and to close those gaps.”
The process of acquiring and demolishing properties is complex, time-consuming, and expensive, Kennedy said, and was the focus from 2008 to 2019. Many families had to relocate.
Baltimore City Councilwoman Odette Ramos, who represents the area, said the city long lacked funding to rebuild the infrastructure necessary before a developer could start building.
“If you’re knocking down 150 properties and you’re only putting up 100 maybe, you have to change all the watering, change all the gas, you have to change all the sanitary [sewers],” Ramos said. “You have to change all of everything.”
A boost came from $10 million from the pandemic-era American Rescue Plan Act, an economic stimulus package. After infrastructure was completed, leftover funds would then be directed toward the first phase of construction.
Ramos generally advocates restoring vacant homes rather than demolishing and rebuilding entire blocks. However, in this case, she acknowledged that it was the community surrounding the project that pushed for complete demolition and reconstruction.
Mark Washington, executive director of the Coldstream Homestead Montebello Community Corporation, said that the community preferred rapid demolition because of a large amount of crime in the area.
“For as challenged as the community was, and still is, there was this one particular area that faced even greater challenges and presented greater demands, and that was that Tivoly, Fenwick, Hugo area,” Washington said. “It was an area notorious for illegal drug activity, of violence, and a horrific fire happened there.”
Washington said there were nearly no homeowners in the area, especially compared to the rest of the neighborhood. He said that almost all properties were either vacant or occupied by renters, many of whom would move after only one or two years. In his view, a lack of homeowners caused the blocks to lack stability that would have been needed to fix the area’s problems.
Washington also said that he viewed the city’s systematic divestment from the area in the 1950s and onward as intentional and that the long redevelopment process highlights that his neighborhood has not been a priority for Baltimore in the past. His attitude toward the project is changing, however, and he feels that the ARPA funding will lead to the results his community has waited so long for.
“Keep in mind that this project has been going on for almost 20 years trying to get this done, and it’s that multi-decade process that speaks volumes about the city’s… unwillingness or inability to move a less-than-favorite project along in a community with tremendous needs and tremendous challenges,” Washington said.
He noted that Mayor Brandon Scott being has been involved since the project’s earliest days, when he was a staffer for then-City City Council President Stephanie Rawlings-Blake. And even though Scott never represented the community, he never disengaged from the project.
The son of one resident has more complex feelings about the project. Therman Cook’s mother has lived in the area since 1970. Cook says that the city has not been clear with them as to whether an expanded scope of the project which now seeks to tear down even more homes on the designated blocks includes the home of his mother.
“We put a new roof on the house, we put a new kitchen in the house. When we redid the kitchen, we paid about $20,000 for that. We’re looking at redoing the bathroom but if they’re going to tear the house down, we don’t want to redo the bathroom,” Cook said. “I don’t know for sure what they’re going to do if this block is considered part of the project. Whether or not it’s considered part of the project, I haven’t got a clear answer.”
Despite potential challenges, Cook still supports the project and thinks it could revitalize the community, but he isn’t entirely confident it will bear results.
“I think it’s good,” he said. “It’s been a long time….”
As the Tivoly project advances, Kennedy said that the city has learned not to overpromise to residents about redevelopment, but to be realistic and honest.”
With construction now scheduled to begin in the fall, Kennedy said that the Tivoly Eco-Village would be well worth the wait for the residents in the area. “It’s taken a little while to get off the ground for sure,” she said. “But, it really is going to bring some amazing properties to Baltimore and our first full net-zero project.”
‘Vacants in Baltimore’ is a series produced as a senior capstone project by the Loyola University Maryland Department of Communications and Media, under the supervision of April Newton
