State Center’s office buildings would be demolished and replaced with a mixed-use community containing up to 1,600 residences; a grocery store; offices, retail space and a hotel, under a revised “vision plan” unveiled by state and city officials on Tuesday.
The only building not targeted for demolition within the 28-acre state-owned parcel is the Fifth Regiment Armory Baltimore at 219 W. Division St. The fortress-like landmark was completed in 1903, hosted the 1912 Democratic National Convention, and now serves as a training facility and headquarters for the Maryland National Guard, which is expected to remain. It also houses the Maryland Museum of Military History and is one of the largest National Guard armories in the country.
The State Center site is bounded roughly by Howard Street on the east; Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard on the south; Madison Street on the west; and Dolphin Street on the north. It’s one of two areas in Baltimore City that’s served by both a light rail station and a Metro Subway station. The oldest buildings are 60 years old and in need extensive repairs and upgrades.
The latest plan calls for the four large office buildings within State Center’s boundaries to be torn down and replaced by a predominantly residential neighborhood, as opposed to an office park or shopping center. This new neighborhood would include:
- Housing: A “Base Scenario” calls for 1,350 rental units and 64 for-sale units. The maximum building height would be 77 feet or about seven stories. A “Max Market Alternate Scenario” calls for 1,600 rental units and 112 for-sale units. The maximum building height would be 163 feet, or about 16 stories.
- Office space: 99,000 gross square feet. “Office space is really challenging right now,” said architect and urban planner Amber Wendland, a consultant to the public officials working on the project. “We are thinking in the long term for the site, so we did include a number for that, but it is very much dependent on having interest, having a tenant, having someone wanting to have office space” at State Center.
- Retail space: 80,000 square feet of space, including a 30,000-square-foot grocery store. A previous plan called for the Fifth Regiment Armory to be recycled to contain a grocery store. The latest plan calls for the grocery store to be in a new structure elsewhere on the site, not in the armory.
- Hotel: A hotel with 140 keys.
- Parking: A “Base Scenario” calls for 1,650 spaces, to meet a projected demand for 840 to 1,800 spaces. A “Max Market Alternate Scenario” calls for 2,000 spaces, to meet a projected demand for 1,000 to 2,000 spaces. Most of the parking would be underground, as part of an effort to keep the streetscape more pedestrian-friendly.
- Revamped streets and public spaces: Streets would be designed to help knit the new community to the surrounding street grid. The main east-west corridor would be Preston Street and the main north-south corridor would be Eutaw Street.
Additional considerations:
- The Fifth Regiment Armory: The armory is not targeted for change under the new plan. It is owned by the state and would not be offered for development.
- Transitions in building configurations: The lowest buildings would be on the west side of the site, next to the McCulloh Homes public housing community. Buildings would step up in height closer to Howard Street. The office space and hotel would be on the eastern side of the parcel, near Howard Street, the Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall and the Mount Vernon historic district.
- McCulloh Homes: An earlier plan considered making McCulloh Homes, which is owned by the Housing Authority of Baltimore City (HABC), part of the State Center redevelopment. The latest plan does not include McCulloh Homes as part of its scope but reflects the thinking that McCulloh Homes likely wlll be redeveloped and that any changes there should be coordinated with the changes on the State Center property.
“HABC has a long term goal of redeveloping McCulloh Homes into a mixed-use neighborhood, but no firm plans or timeline,” said one image in the presentation. “However, there remain opportunities for mutual benefit between the two projects.”
Although McCulloh Homes is not a substantive part of the vision plan unveiled on Tuesday, “the partnership with McCulloh Homes is really critical,” Wendland told the audience. “We both have similar missions of providing mixed income communities…We see lots of great shared opportunities…We’re not totally there yet but I want to assure you all there are lots of active conversations around this.”
- Advisory council: As of Oct. 1, a group called the State Center Community Advisory Council has been formed to provide input on the planning phase of the project. Consisting of representatives from approximately 20 community organizations, it replaces another group called the State Center Neighborhood Alliance.
- Time frame: There is no set time frame for construction to start or be completed. A project timeline presented on Tuesday indicated that the period for the state’s “Developer Solicitation Transaction” would start in November of 2026 and be complete by December of 2027, but officials said that may be subject to change. Before developers are solicited, they said, planners will have two more community meetings.
- Market forecast: The number of residences in the vision plan is based on a 2026 market forecast that projects a long-term demand for approximately 1,600 rental units and 350 for-sale units, supported by 85,000 square feet of retail space, a 125-key hotel and 165,000 square feet of office space. Parking is based on market demand.
The “Base Scenario” for housing assumes “5 over 2 construction (five levels of wood frame construction above two levels of concrete podium for multi-family mixed use” buildings. The “Max Market Alternate Scenario” assumes “three wood frame over concrete podium and three concrete/steel frame buildings for multi-family mixed use to test the feasibility of more expensive construction types and higher density.”
Clean slate
A plan to redevelop the State Center property was originally approved in 2009 under former Gov. Martin O’Malley and has gone through several iterations since then. Several years ago, state officials allocated funds to start moving 3,000 state employees out of the aging state office buildings to locations in downtown Baltimore, a process that is still underway.
The office buildings targeted for demolition under the latest plan include buildings at 1100 N. Eutaw St.; 300 W. Preston St.; 301 W. Preston St.; and 201 W. Preston St.
The planning effort is led by Maryland’s Department of General Services, the Maryland Economic Development Corporation and the Maryland Department of Transportation, working with Baltimore’s Department of Planning and others.
Speakers on Tuesday did not provide an estimate for how much the entire redevelopment would cost. A previous plan was estimated to cost $1.5 billion.
State Sen. Antonio Hayes said the redevelopment of State Center is a major project for Baltimore. “This is probably one of the most significant developments outside of Harborplace,” he told the audience.
Planning framework
The latest plan was unveiled during a community meeting at the Kappa Alpha Psi Youth and Community Center on Eutaw Place, just outside the State Center boundaries. The presentation was part of a series of community meetings led by the public agencies working on the redevelopment plan. About 50 people attended.
Speakers told the audience that what they were presenting was not the final plan for the area. They called it a planning framework. One slide was labeled the “State Center Vision Plan Refinement.”
The speakers said the planning framework was one step that will lead to final plan that public officials can use to seek proposals from private groups interested in developing the land once it is cleared. They said what they were presenting was built on previous plans for the area, updated to reflect current and projected conditions in the real estate market.
Previous plans for the area had included the possibility of recycling some of the office buildings for new uses such as housing. The state at one point planned to convey the buildings to the City of Baltimore, with the idea that city officials would lead the effort to identify private developers.
Under the latest plan, none of the office buildings will be saved and recycled. Wendland told the audience that recycling the buildings turned out to be too costly and that clearing the land and essentially starting with a blank slate would provide more options for creating a community that met current market needs.
Wendland said design team members went through all of the office buildings and concluded they would be prohibitively costly to retrofit.
“We went inside every single building,” she said. “We evaluated all of the structural systems…We looked at the mechanical systems. We looked at the windows…We looked at the cost to remediate or retrofit the buildings and what we did is we took that cost and then we looked at what the market can support right now and found that it’s too expensive to renovate the buildings…It’s not economically viable in the current market, and so what we’re proposing is these buildings get demolished and we build new.”
‘Well-positioned site’
Wendland said the team believes the property’s location will make it attractive to prospective developers.
“This is an incredibly well-positioned site in terms of transit,” she said. “I truly cannot think of another site in the city that has such great access to the Metro, to the light rail and also Penn Station. It’s really an incredible opportunity.”
The location is also attractive, she said, because it’s close to numerous key cultural and institutional anchors, including the symphony hall, the University of Maryland Medical Center’s Midtown Campus, the Maryland Institute College of Art and the University of Baltimore.
The 60-year-old campus “occupies some of Baltimore’s most well-situated land, just steps from trains, buses and thousands of residents,” states a flyer distributed at the meeting.
According to DGS Secretary Atif Chaudhry, instead of transferring the buildings to the city, the state will lead the effort to identify a developer or developers for the property. By eliminating the transfer to the city yet working closely with the city, Chaudhry said, the state will be able to save time but will be able to attain the same objectives.
Chaudhry said the state has not determined whether it will seek one developer for all 28 acres or subdivide the land and seek proposals separately for multiple parcels. He also said there is no firm time frame for demolition to begin.
Tarek Bolden, a Baltimore City planner working on the project, said one of the city’s priorities is to limit amount of time the cleared land sits vacant.
What about affordable housing?
At the meeting, Baltimore resident Deborah Morris asked about plans for affordable housing for “poor folks who have incomes under $40,000.” She noted that long-time residents were displaced in the 1960s to make way for State Center.
“What type of affordable housing are you going to provide?” she asked from the audience. “Not million-dollar housing. Not $500,000 housing.”
Hayes said one role of the community advisory council will be to help public officials decide how affordable housing fits into the mix. He said there is still time for that discussion because the plan is “very conceptual.”
Morris said after the meeting that other developers have gotten around requirements to build a percentage of affordable housing as part of their developments and she doesn’t want to see that happen on the State Center property.
City Council member Zac Blanchard suggested that the reimagined State Center might be a good location to build a new home for the Waxter Center, the senior center on
Cathedral Street that was forced to close temporarily this year due to mechanical problems.
Baltimore City Comptroller Bill Henry said he’d like to see the final plan include affordable housing that’s for sale, not just for rent.
“We clearly don’t have the right attitude somewhere about affordable housing being condos,” Henry said. “I don’t know why we don’t have more affordable [for sale] housing being built…If there are things that are holding us back from that, then we should be looking at how can we institutionally or perhaps [through] regulation address why it’s so hard to do affordable rent-to-own or affordable for-sale housing.”
‘Gathering input early’
Henry praised the presenters for coming to community members while the plan is still taking shape, not after it’s fully developed.
“The thing that I really appreciate about this meeting is that it is happening,” he said. “I appreciate the fact that this is development that is bringing the community in early and gathering input early, to have the opportunity to take into account what the people who actually live in nearby neighborhoods want and need and make sure that’s a factor as government goes out and tries to find a developer,” he said.
“It is so important to do it in that order because we have on occasion found ourselves in situations where developers have the vision and then come in and they try to impose it on the people,” Henry said. “Sometimes that works. Sometimes it doesn’t. But what really works very reliably is when the community is involved from the beginning.”
More information about the State Center plan is available at www.baltimorestatecenter.com.
