When Regina Hammond moved into a new Johnston Square townhome in 1984, she paid little attention to the increasing number of vacant homes in her neighborhood.
“My children were young, and I was working a full-time job. So, I really didn’t have time to focus on what was going on,” she said. “But around 2013 or so, I had more time. My children were older, I didn’t have to run them back and forth to practices, so I had time to really focus on things that I saw that weren’t good.”
Since 2013, Hammond has become a leader in community development in Johnston Square, a neighborhood historically plagued by racist lending practices and disinvestment for generations. She established the Rebuild Johnston Square Neighborhood Organization (RJSNO) and started listening to the needs of her neighbors.
After conducting a survey, RJSNO made plans that would eventually become part of the Johnston Square 2020 Vision Plan. The plans were made alongside nonprofit ReBUILD Metro and Baltimore’s Department of Housing and Community Development.
Hammond and RJSNO’s plans for Johnston Square involve both refurbishing homes and creating a holistic and health environment that benefits the community. RJSNO has planted gardens and trees in Johnston Square, and their collaborators at ReBUILD Metro are currently spearheading the construction of Greenmount Park for the local schools, Saint Frances Academy and Johnston Square Elementary.
Hammond hopes the half-acre park will become the heart of the new Johnston Square she has been working toward for the past decade.
The organization also proudly embraced the bee as its symbol, starting with a mural on the corner of Wilcox and Biddle streets. Hammond says the bee represents the organization’s grit and stands as a unifying sign for the neighborhood’s identity.
“If you think about the meaning of bees and what they do, it’s like community and people working together,” she said. “And that really describes who we are as a community. We’re on our hands and knees planting flowers. We’re out there cleaning the neighborhood for weeks at a time, and we’ve done that for the past 11 years to keep the neighborhood looking clean and safe and pretty.”
Having no prior experience in community organization, she learned a lot from the the city housing department and ReBUILD Metro. The city agency gains ownership of vacant houses to be refurbished and approvtheirs community projects. Hammond also described ReBUILD Metro’s founding president Sean Closkey as a mentor.
“I was just a resident of Johnston Square who saw what I shouldn’t be seeing. And that was nothing but disinvestment in one neighborhood, when I knew for a fact in Baltimore, you had some neighborhoods that got quite a bit of investing.” Hammond said “To me that was not fair. I wanted to figure out how to level that playing field, and [ReBUILD Metro] helped us level that playing field.”
At RJSNO’s first meeting, residents wanted to create more greenery and recreational spaces for their children.
“When I moved in, my children were young and there was no recreation in this area. So, the children were quite destructive because they had nothing else to entertain them. Their idea of a good time was banging on your door and running or playing football in the street and hitting your cars and setting off an alarm,” Hammond said.
Hammond also prioritizes accessible education. Next to Greenmount Park, ReBUILD Metro and RJSNO have also begun building a new Enoch Pratt Free Library branch. The library will provide a productive space for learning and socializing.
Preventing displacement of current residents is a top concern for RJSNO and ReBUILD Metro as revitalization proceeds. A 2019 study conducted by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC) determined that Baltimore experienced the fifth-highest rate of gentrification from 2000 to 2013, with five neighborhoods displacing an average of 673 Black residents.
“The biggest way in which [displacement] happens is largely through property taxes,” said Andrew Samuel, an economics professor at Loyola University Maryland “And when the properties get reappraised at a higher value, even if the property tax rate doesn’t change, the liability that people are expected to bear now goes up. And that’s usually the most frequent way in which people find that they are unable to continue to afford to live in the neighborhood.”
Hammond and Closkey believe the path to revitalization without gentrification starts with community involvement.
“I believe that the best way to do community development work is to literally start in relationship with people,” said Closkey. “And it is within the context of relationships that you can really have a much more honest and a much more effective conversation about what needs to happen.”
Closkey also shares Hammond’s sentiment that lowering Johnston Square’s vacancy rates requires more than home repair. Examining how houses end up vacant and preventing future vacancies is just as important. For example, the city housing department collaborates with companies like LifeBridge Health and Meals on Wheels to help with the health of underserved senior citizens.
“All of those components and helping our older adults age in place actually are preventing vacant properties,” said Alice Kennedy, commissioner of the Department of Housing and Community Development “We can’t demolish our way out of this, and we also have a focus on preventing the vacants as well.”
Healing from decades of disinvestment also involves building generational wealth through homeownership. ReBUILD Metro established a free program called Path to Own to help renters in Johnston Square take the necessary steps to buy a home, so residents can benefit from predictable mortgage payments and rising equity.
Additionally, Hammond frequently encourages residents to apply for the Maryland Homestead Tax Credit, a program designed to limit tax increases. The credit assists homeowners experiencing large jumps in property tax that are all too common for developing neighborhoods.
ReBUILD Metro also refurbishes Johnston Square residents’ homes under their Legacy Homeowner Repair program. These renovations serve to improve the living conditions of the residents and assist in building equity in their homes, which in turn keeps the houses occupied and the families content. Closkey explained how their programs all serve to cure the root cause of vacant housing, rather than simply eliminate the symptoms.
“Most times, people are simply defining what the symptom is and assuming that if we remove the symptom, we get the cure. It’d be sort of like if either of the two of us had a terribly high fever and our solution was just to dunk the other one in an ice bath,” Closkey said. “Well, yeah, you’d probably bring the fever down, but you actually didn’t do a damn thing.”
RJSNO’s Johnston Square 2020 Vision Plan also details their goals to maintain mixed-income housing within the neighborhood. A mixed-income model can prevent displacement.
“I think a solution for them is to ensure that there’s always some mixed-income housing options available for people who want to continue to live there,” said Samuel, the Loyola professor. “So, as new developments go in, there is some continued subsidized or lower income housing that meets the needs of the people who currently live there.”
Looking to the future, Greenmount Park and the Enoch Pratt Free Library are slated to open in August 2025. And by 2032, ReBUILD Metro hopes that people will be able to walk from Johns Hopkins Hospital to Penn Station without a vacant home in sight.
‘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.
