David Bramble, the man who would remake Harborplace — unless Baltimoreans vote down his plan on Election Day — has another big project already underway, one with huge potential for the west side of the city.
Three miles north of Harborplace, Reservoir Square is a $100 million redevelopment of a nine-acre site along North Avenue, between Bolton Hill and Reservoir Hill. It’s the biggest private investment in the area in decades.
The place used to be called Madison Park North, a complex of apartments, houses and a supermarket that became notorious for drug dealing and violent crime.
Bramble and partners at MCB Real Estate have been looking to redevelop the abandoned site for at least 10 years. The original buildings were demolished in 2016.
Open nine acres in one of the counties and a developer would have little trouble turning it into 150 market-rate townhomes, an apartment building with 200 units, a supermarket and other retail. But getting all that built in the city, Bramble says, was “several layers of hard.”
Wednesday morning, we stood at Park Avenue and Lennox Street, where workers painted walls and installed appliances in the first seven Reservoir Square homes. Four neighbors spotted Bramble and called to him. A native Baltimorean, he could have walked to our meeting place from his house in Madison Park.
“I’ll tell you why it’s hard,” he says of Reservoir Square. “In order to do something like this, you need all kinds of financing tools. This wouldn’t be possible without support from the state and from the city. The problem with this is, in a lot of these places, the market doesn’t really work. You can build affordable housing because those deals aren’t driven by the market, they are driven by subsidies. But if you just come to a neighborhood and you concentrate a whole bunch of poverty, it will look nice, you’ll do the ribbon cutting and everyone will cheer. And then you’ll come back and there still won’t be a grocery store, there still won’t be a coffee shop.”
That’s because such projects, with a concentration of low-income families, seldom attract other investment.
“We need to attract the middle class, that’s why we’re building these townhomes,” Bramble says, pointing to the first seven. “What we need to do is have conversations with people about how we raise income levels in neighborhoods while protecting people who [already] live there. And in Baltimore it’s more doable than any place else, primarily because we’ve got so much vacancy. So you can have strategies that are designed to attract middle-class people to underserved communities and a neighborhood like this.”
Reservoir Square, Bramble says, shows that a blighted neighborhood can be transformed on a large scale and that development partnerships are “willing to invest outside of just the cool stuff on the waterfront.”
He comes back to the need to attract middle class homeowners. That’s been a challenge for years, and the subject usually comes with a strong dose of pessimism. Bramble, on the other hand, is bullish on the idea.
“We need to give people a reason to have hope for economic prosperity in Baltimore,” he says. “We need to make investments in disinvested communities that signal our desire to attract middle class families into our neighborhoods and do it in a way that allows everyone to prosper in mixed income neighborhoods. Tax incentives are certainly a powerful tool, but they are not the whole story. Given how distressed some of these areas are, we need new financing tools. We need methods to help with the appraisal gap [of homes] until the market functions properly and we need specific strategies to make sure we protect legacy residents.
“If you can convince a middle-class family to move into a neighborhood like this, own a home or rent an apartment, join the PTA, before you know it, this is a thriving neighborhood paying taxes. The middle class is the missing piece, particularly the Black middle class.”
In Bramble’s vision, income integration is the formula that could transform Baltimore for decades to come.
“It’s the integration of [income levels] that we need in order to have a successful community,” he says. “I think people think you can live in a fancy enclave and just be safe. That’s crap. The truth is, if you’ve got blight all around you, it’s only a matter of time before it gobbles you up.”
Reservoir Square will benefit from the stability of both Reservoir Hill and Bolton Hill, neighborhoods with superb rowhouses, lots of homeownership and strong community spirit. Bramble has referred to Reservoir Square as the “gateway to West Baltimore,” a part of the city still facing dire challenges.
Meanwhile, his plan for Harborplace needs the approval of voters in November. It could face a second ballot challenge from a petition drive that seeks to have the public space at Pratt and Light streets declared off limits to private development.
As we spoke about this, Bramble uttered a message that seemed to be aimed at opponents of his Harborplace plan as well as others resistant to change: “I’m just gonna say this: Baltimore is on the rise. There are so many cool things happening, and the only people who can screw it up is us. We will screw it up by not taking risks, by not making investments, by fighting everything. …We can fix our neighborhoods and do it better than any other city has ever done it.”