A few weeks ago I was in Philadelphia for my niece’s birthday party, and as we happened to be downtown, and as I happen to be a bit of a building nerd, I walked with my cousin over to see the brand new, 975-foot-tall Comcast Center, which when it opened in June became the tallest building in Pennsylvania (and about 400 feet taller than anything we’ve got here in Baltimore).

It was a cool building, designed by the superstar architect Robert A.M. Stern (he’s supposedly the designer for 10 Inner Harbor, ArcWheeler’s non-starter of an office tower, supposedly to be built on the site of an old McCormick factory downtown) although critics say it looks like the world’s biggest USB flash drive.

I was struck, however, by the sight of the Arch Street Presbyterian Church’s rectory, which is attached to the skyscraper’s lobby on the North side of the building. As you can see from the photo, it blends in reasonably well — I love it when I see examples of new, highly modern architecture integrated with old, beautiful structures.

It reminded me immediately of Darlene Dixon’s West Baltimore row house, which she refused to move out of in order to accommodate the construction of the UMB Biopark on Martin Luther King Boulevard. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a really funny sight, and worth the trip to take a look.

Can anyone think of any other examples of this — big institutional or commercial buildings that have tiny houses or other residential properties as neighbors, coexisting peacefully in the urban environment?

ROBBIE WHELAN, Business Writer

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This week, at an event related to the release of the Johns Hopkins Carey School of Business’s annual “Trend Watch” report, attorney Ray Truitt of Ballad Spahr Andrews & Ingersoll made some interesting remarks about development, public housing and the relevance of the upcoming presidential election.

If a Democrat is elected president come November, he said, it is likely that HOPE-VI, the public housing improvement program spearheaded by Sen. Mikulski in 1993, will be resuscitated, “and that may be critical for the development of low-income and affordable housing.”

HOPE-VI is a program meant to help convert “severely distressed” public housing into more livable space. Since George W. Bush became president, however, the federal government has been cutting funding for the program every year.

To some, HOPE-VI is an invaluable lifeline of public money to improve public housing stock. To others, it is a way of tearing down poor people’s homes in order to replace them with mixed-income developments that are privately-owned, and generally more profitable for developers. The most recent issue of The Economist has an interesting article about the possible renewal of HOPE-VI in the next few months or years.

So what’s biotech got to do with it?

For one, the success of the new University of Maryland BioPark on Baltimore’s west side is inextricably tied to a corresponding neighborhood redevelopment effort in the surrounding communities, and it probably would not have moved forward if the city hadn’t cleaned up the public Read the rest of this entry »

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