Nneka N’Namdi wants Baltimore to see the bigger picture.

By Grace Hebron

Photography by Schaun Champion

Five years ago, Nneka N’Namdi watched as children rode their bikes along a demolition site. As they crossed Fremont Avenue to Lafayette Street, where four large brownstones were being razed, the bikers rode past hazardous debris and gaping, six-foot holes in the ground.

The urban decay she witnessed that day—it happened to be Mother’s Day weekend—inspired N’namdi to launch Fight Blight Bmore (FBB), an advocacy group aimed at eradicating blight by creating safer spaces for Baltimore residents. More recently, these efforts have included a push for more equitable housing practices, with focuses on community development, estate planning advocacy, and dismantling the city’s ties to systemic racism.

“Being a port city where you have all the different geographical types—except for frozen tundra—Baltimore could really live up to its natural promise,” says N’namdi, who lives in old West Baltimore, one of Baltimore City’s most run-down areas. “But it will never be what it could be, due to the displacement and the genocide of indigenous Americans, and the enslavement and oppression of Africa-descended people. Until those things are dealt with, we can forget it.”

Her first goal on this quest was just wrapping her head around the scope of the problem. And her track record in multiple fields helped: She’s COO of systems engineering firm N’namdi Consulting, an entrepreneur with more than 15 years of experience in community arts and wellness program development, and also a licensed real estate agent.

“In 2019, I estimated that Baltimore City had three times the reported number of blighted properties,” she says. “Things are much the same today as they were two years ago. I think the most significant change has been the ramping up of the governor’s program, Project CORE, which really seeks to use demolition as a primary strategy for remediation. Unfortunately, this doesn’t really fix the problem. It just creates a new version of it. What needs to change is that there has to be a more holistic focus on community development, which effectively means investing in people and community in ways that will enable them to create the community that they want.”

The pandemic certainly didn’t help, either, upending the priorities and finances of the city. But N’Namdi has a few strategies in mind.

“Being a port city where you have all the different geographical types—except for frozen tundra—Baltimore could really live up to its natural promise.

“But it will never be what it could be, due to the displacement and the genocide of indigenous Americans, and the enslavement and oppression of Africa-descended people. Until those things are dealt with, we can forget it.”

“One of the things that we’re really focused on is continuing the call to the mayor and local elected officials, as well as state elected officials, to do away with the tax sale [the forced sale of property for unpaid taxes], and to create a more equitable collection system for property taxes,” she says. “This will help to stabilize the community, stabilize families, and make people less housing-insecure.”

Equitable appraisals would help, too, she says.

“We’ve seen the devaluing of property, which makes people housing insecure.” Low appraisals also make it hard for developers to borrow rehab money against the value of a property, she says.

But she’s seeing some progress, especially when it comes to public awareness of the long-term negative consequences of urban decay and neglect.

“People are really starting to make the connection between what a neighborhood looks like, and public policy priorities,” she says. “More people are reaching out to us. And some of the language that we are hearing folks use really focuses on blight in the same realm as other social determinants of health.”

The radical inequalities between neighborhoods also affects things like life expectancy: In neighborhoods like Sandtown-Winchester, it’s 10-20 years less than in some of the city’s stable neighborhoods, according to FBB.

“Let’s start with water,” she says. “Because Baltimore is under consent decree with the EPA, the cost of water is high,” she says. “That’s limiting folks’ access to this resource that we all need to live. But if you look at Sandtown-Winchester, people live under food apartheid, meaning that there’s no accessible grocery store within a quarter mile of that neighborhood.

Your water costs are high. Your access to nutritious food is low. And then, because of poor transportation infrastructure, you have to travel farther for school. If you can’t bathe or drink water, if you can’t eat nutritious food, if you have challenges getting to school and work, what quality of life are you going to have?”

And the list goes on: “Many of these blighted neighborhoods are also heat islands,” N’Namdi says, “which means because there’s a lack of tree canopy, and because we have tar roofs, these neighborhoods have temperatures that are six degrees higher. So when you compare Sandtown-Winchester to Roland Park, you see starkly different physical conditions. The outcome is lower life expectancies.”

All of those obstacles can also contribute to mental-health problems, she says.

“Your community is a reflection, oftentimes, of how you see yourself. By allowing these communities to look this way, we’re teaching people that there’s something wrong with them, and that is not correct. There’s some- thing wrong instead with the conditions in which people find themselves living. And it is extremely traumatic to have to navigate these spaces, to walk past buildings that look like they might fall down if the wind blows too hard. Or to walk past grass that’s taller than you in a city where we have three times the national average of childhood asthma. That makes navigating the school, navigating home, and going outside traumatic. It damages people’s ability to feel and to think, and therefore, to have a good, healthy and whole life.”

Despite all the challenges, N’Namdi has remained remarkably hopeful there will be progress.

“My hope is that Baltimore takes a good, hard look. This is an opportunity for Baltimore, to be one of the first major American cities to come out of that process with some reparative policy so that we don’t continue taking these complex and compound traumas forward. I do hope that we begin to see this come to fruition in the next several years. It can be done.”

There are approximately 16,692 vacant properties in Baltimore City as of December 31, 2018, according to data culled from the Housing Authority. But 2018 Warnock Foundation Innovation Fellow Nneka N’Namdi says that’s just scratching the surface.

In order to more accurately report information and, ultimately, find solutions to combat blight, the Upton resident developed an initiative called Fight Blight Bmore, which endeavors to reduce blight and increase home equity for Baltimore residents.

“How can we support community-oriented solutions to eliminate blight?” N’Namdi asks. Decades of systemic disinvestment in working poor communities in Baltimore City have resulted in what she considers to be “community-based trauma resulting in long-term stress from fear of unsafe property implosion, toxic exposure, and crime.”

FBB hopes to combat these issues and others related to the racial, economic, and environmental disparities that impede home ownership. We spoke with N’Namdi to learn more about her initiative’s strategy to end blight in Baltimore City and beyond.

What prompted you to create Fight Blight Bmore?
Back around Mother’s Day 2016, I witnessed young people being inadvertently endangered by a demolition site, a four large brownstones on Fremont Avenue and Lafayette Street, that didn’t have a sign. Watching the children walk and ride down the street without the benefit of a barrier gave me pause. I started investigating why there wasn’t a gate between the walkway and the site, why we had the vacant properties, and what was the city’s plan.

And what information did, or didn’t you find?
I found a need to have a ready tool to report unsafe building structures to the city. There was a lack of community developed solutions to remediate blight that wouldn’t result in significant displacement of communities. Community development in Baltimore and many other old industrial cities—Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis—results in total gentrification of neighborhoods, which is traumatic.

A lot has to do with communities having access to data about blight to create solutions that will be most impactful, sustainable, and least damaging to the people. It isn’t just that the buildings look bad; it makes you sick, exposes you to crime, raises rent. If you think of it as it just looks bad, you can’t think of the root cause of the issues.

How are you defining blight?
The definition we use is the presence [or] concentration of vacant, abandoned, dilapidated, underutilized or mis-utilized buildings, spaces or lots, non-jurisdiction specific. Baltimore City has a definition, but their definition is convoluted and doesn’t take into account anything other than vacancies. It doesn’t count underutilized or misused spaces like recreation centers, schools, churches, or retail storefronts. Because of that, the city’s actual number of blighted properties is possibly three-times the reported number.

Removing blight in Baltimore City is a huge endeavor. Will you collaborate with other initiatives?

Yes, many people are doing related work. [Blight] impacts public health, public safety, and the economy. Sandtown South, No Boundaries Coalition, Conscious Development Roundtable, Black Church Food Security Network, Black Yield Institute, City Weeds, Juan Nance with Healthy People Juice, and Baltimore Housing Roundtable. It’s a lot of crossover efforts.

What impact do you hope FBB will have against blight the city?

The city is aware that there is a problem, but the way they calculate the problem minimizes the seriousness. Like most municipalities, they attempt to use the same tools that created the problem to solve the problem. To adequately address blight, you have to address the core cause of blight, which is racism.

You hear people talk about it, but it isn’t critical mass enough to confront that history in Baltimore as it applies to property management across race and class. The city has a number of efforts, like Vacants to Values and Live Baltimore, but none of those things address the core problem. Things like TIFs, Community Development Block Grants, and Opportunity Zones, they are not beneficial to communities.

So what are you hoping to do differently?

My hope is that we create a model that people in the community can use for themselves. A lot of times people in communities, specifically black people because of the legacy of inequity in land ownership, don’t feel comfortable buying property and redeveloping without seeing someone else as a model do it in their communities. So that’s what I did.

Every step of my process I share with other people so that they can see that anyone can do this, if you have a willingness. We can pull together resources to do this work to create inner-community systems. Every portion of my process involved paying black- and women-owned businesses—from the appraiser to muralist. That creates vibrancy. My ultimate outcomes are that we do not see displacement in our communities and that people who have lived in these communities for the last 50 years get to feel healthy and safe.