Since 2016, you’ve been leading the Baltimore Pumphouse project, which will transform a blighted brownfield site in Broadway East into a center for commercial and community activity by 2021. How will this project help to elevate the neighborhood?
What often happens when low-income black and brown neighborhoods are redeveloped is that the affordable housing and services get front-loaded, and millions of dollars are spent before a single business or retail establishment enters the neighborhood. At the end of the day, the programs and services on their own are not enough to provide the neighborhood with long-term economic viability. Without consumer spending, we end up with a neighborhood that’s fossilized in its poverty. So, we realized that in order to change the game, it can’t be about the project, it has to be about changing the market. By establishing a group of viable businesses here, we’re creating new value in the neighborhood without displacing any residents.

What are some of the challenges that your team has faced thus far?
This is not for the faint of heart; it’s a really hard project. When working in low-income black and brown communities, the total cost of development far outstrips the as-appraised value of the property. Meaning that I need so much more money to get the work done than anyone will say the property is worth. It requires a ton of grant funding and subsidies to solve that gap before anything can move forward, and traditional lending opportunities are not really an option.

Neighborhood residents are co-equal planners in the Baltimore Pumphouse. How does this approach differ from other neighborhood development projects?
The residents are truly our bosses. They are co-equal partners at the planning table, and they provide the push, pull, and voice that the project needs to get done and take off. The idea is not to ask residents for feedback on an idea, but to actually work together to create every idea. Sometimes developers will bake their ideas and then get feedback from the residents after its able to move forward. That’s not our philosophy, we see that as a much more paternalistic way to engage communities, and we value neighborhood agency above everything.

How do you hope this project acts as a model for future neighborhood development plans?
Here, we have traditional business and retail establishments coming back for the first time in 50 years, and we haven’t cleared a single community. In order for low-income communities to be successful, the business and retail establishments have to come in at a much earlier stage with the legacy families still in place. That’s what we’re trying to prove. So I hope developers continue to use the concept of solving the market challenges as opposed to just the project. There’s a different level of collaboration, creativity, and boldness that can be achieved when we’re think- ing about solving those larger market challenges instead of individual projects.

What has kept you motivated throughout this multi-year project?
When I bring my daughter to the site, where there are still vacant houses around, she is aghast. She looks out of the car window and goes, “Mama, that building is broken!” I don’t ever want her level of urgency to beat mine. I don’t ever want to get comfortable with any vacant house or building. We’re going to make it so that no three-year-old has to walk or drive past any vacant building, period.

The cluster of dilapidated masonry buildings that sits swallowed in untamed vines on the corner of East Oliver and North Wolfe Streets will soon become a destination for economic opportunity in East Baltimore.

Though it’s been nearly five years since plans were announced to transform the old Eastern Pumping Station site into Baltimore Food Hub, a ground-breaking ceremony held earlier today officially kick started the $23.5 million redevelopment. The project will eventually yield a 3.5-acre campus with job-training facilities, communal incubator space, and an excess of land to be dedicated to urban farming.

Members of American Communities Trust (ACT)—the national development partner overseeing the redesign alongside local workforce nonprofit Humanim—were joined by upwards of 75 local community leaders and Broadway East residents to celebrate the milestone, as trains whizzed by on the adjacent Amtrak line overhead.

Among those in attendance were City Council President Bernard C. Young, U.S. Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Economic Development Jay Williams, ACT board president Bill Struever, Maryland State Delegate Maggie McIntosh, and Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, who has made food justice a top priority throughout her administration.

“The food hub is a perfect example of what happens when purpose meets planning,” Rawlings-Blake said. “This site has been considered the front door to Baltimore that you see when you’re travelling by Amtrak. This is a critical component to making that entryway vibrant and vital, and it’s a true reflection of the future of our city.”

The socially conscious campus, which is expected to debut its first phase as early as summer 2017, will provide space for budding food businesses to thrive with amenities like a licensed commercial kitchen, tools for production and distribution, flexible office space for food companies and nonprofits, headquarters for food trucks, and its own teaching garden to be used to educate youth about urban agriculture—a model based off of chef Alice Water’s acclaimed Edible Schoolyard project.

As a part of the larger effort to eliminate the city’s food deserts, the hub will also be equipped with its own all-season food stand and garden center, which will be easily accessible to the public.

“This is a project that will empower the individuals within this community without displacing them,” Williams said. “It will make sure that the young men and women and senior citizens that inhabit this neighborhood don’t have to travel miles on the bus line or try to find a ride to get healthy, accessible food.”

The 15,000-square-foot kitchen incubator on site has been fully leased by City Seeds, Humanim’s culinary arm that specializes in job training for small food startups. Humanim itself will operate Baltimore Food Hub’s signature teaching kitchen, which will offer a number of community education and workforce development programs for city residents.

The groundbreaking comes at a significant period of regrowth for East Baltimore, which has recently introduced other socially minded projects including communal incubator space Open Works and the redevelopment of the historic Hoen & Co. Lithograph building in Collington Square.

“It’s not an accident, they’re all connected,” McIntosh said. “We need to continue the process of redeveloping these blighted areas to really grow the new economy.”

Also in attendance at the press conference was Reverend Donté L. Hickman Sr., who is certainly familiar with the concept of revitalization after his church-sponsored senior center, which has since been rebuilt, was burned down during the Baltimore Uprising.

“In the early 2000s, there was an article written that said that this was a neighborhood ‘dubbed without hope,’” Hickman said. “I always took issue with that particular article, because so many people who lived, and still live, here never lost their hope that this community could experience revitalization. I always considered it to be a neighborhood without help.”