Continued...

Long-time Middle East residents did not have to be told that their neighborhood had desperately needed help for many years, the kind of help that could only come about through radical redevelopment. During the 1990s, a nonprofit effort in East Baltimore tried to buy up large blocks of vacant properties for rehabilitation. It ended in near-total failure. To their credit, the organizers of that community-development effort had understood the importance of renovating many properties simultaneously. Only an intensely coordinated investment could attract new residents to an area so thoroughly devastated by property abandonment and drug violence. They vastly underestimated, however, the challenge of acquiring the sites they needed from the seemingly limitless supply of vacant properties.

Difficulties in identifying and locating property owners and mortgage-holders made it difficult to begin land-purchase negotiations. The strategic bargaining by holdout owners and speculators who knew how badly the redevelopers wanted their vacant houses made it nearly impossible to close sales. To succeed, bold rehabilitation activity first would require the sort of strong acquisition efforts that involved the use of eminent domain. The question remained, however, as to whether or not an urban redevelopment process using eminent domain could be realized without repeating the callous displacement and community destruction that had characterized the urban renewal era.

Because the two largest entities behind EBDI, Johns Hopkins University and the City of Baltimore, were the same agencies that had presided over the community’s decades of decline, Middle East residents regarded their plans with a mixture of skepticism and hostility. To make their voices heard in the anticipated redevelopment process, residents formed the Save Middle East Action Committee (SMEAC) in 2001.

Rather than throw itself into a crusade to stop the redevelopment altogether, however, SMEAC worked to have residents included in every aspect of redevelopment planning and to guarantee that all residents be able to rejoin the revitalized community. Its volunteer members scoured the neighborhood, taking surveys door-to-door, to make sure every resident was afforded a chance to respond to the redevelopment proposals. It demanded regular meetings with, and accountability from, the leadership of EBDI. It organized protests of demolition activity that threatened the health and safety of those residents still waiting to be relocated. When the law afforded them protections, the resident members asserted those rights. When the law did not adequately protect them, they took their case to the court of public opinion through demonstrations, press releases, and even the production of a short documentary video.

Through its organized struggles, SMEAC has succeeded in making EBDI listen to the voices of the residents of Middle East as redevelopment and planning have moved forward. “Currently, our advocacy strategy takes us inside and outside EBDI,” says SMEAC executive director Nathan Sooy. “EBDI has created its own committees through which SMEAC responds to EBDI proposals and presents resident-generated ideas for change. But since these committees give residents no formal control over EBDI’s decisions, we have regularly been forced to take our grievances public through street protests and media coverage.”

SMEAC had also achieved its goal of giving displaced Middle East residents greater choice over where they wanted to live. “Back in 2003, SMEAC successfully pressed EBDI to remove its requirement that Middle East residents who accepted the nearly $70,000 in supplemented relocation assistance move into another struggling East Baltimore neighborhood,” says Sooy. Residents resented being told where they could live and feared that a subsequent redevelopment would force them to move yet again. Ironically, even with the supplemental relocation money increasing assistance to a level of up to $150,000, displaced Middle East homeowners faced having to take on additional mortgage debt if they wanted to buy one of the new homes being built in their old neighborhood. In order to allow residents the option of remaining in the newly redeveloped community on the same terms under which they had lived there before, SMEAC continued to press its “A House for a House” campaign in 2007. After two Baltimore Sun newspaper articles and many discussions, EBDI relented.