Residents rebuke EBDI developer

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Saying they were excluded from the process, angry residents of Middle East shut down a presentation Thursday by the developer of the 88-acre redevelopment as he attempted to detail a series of recommendations for the future of the stalled $1.8 billion project.

Scott Levitan, senior vice president of the Forest City-New East Baltimore Development Partnership, was forced to halt the meeting after nearly an hour of protest over issues such as the renaming of the community and the process that Levitan employed to map the latest shift in the overall development.

“You got to let us be heard,” said Kia-Michelle Massey, a resident of Middle East, who told Levitan there was little trust between the residents and East Baltimore Development Inc., the redevelopment nonprofit formed in 2001 which has since partnered with Forest City, Johns Hopkins University and the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

“We don’t feel like at this point you have an interest in what we have to say.”

The new mission of EBDI includes adding retail and office space, a hotel, a new public school and upscale housing to the site originally intended to hold a world-class biotech park linked to the Johns Hopkins Hospital. After more than 1,300 households were relocated and about 600 demolished, the project stalled.

Thursday evening, some of the remaining Middle East residents complained that they were not included in the latest planning effort.

Vocal residents also took issue with the prospect of being priced out of any new housing market that may be built at the EBDI site and a plan to rename the Middle East community “Beacon Park.”

The Beacon Park name was listed on the slide presentation Levitan attempted to unveil.

“We want to market and identify and brand that development,” Levitan said.

Reginald Fitzgerald, a Middle East resident, protested renaming the community by saying, “That name change is full of crap. We are the low guy on the totem pole — we gonna get what they give us.”

Another added: “You are taking a colonialist attitude to fix what’s not broken.”

Seeking the survey

Levitan called the meeting to unveil a list of recommendations made after a survey and study of the project by Carton Donofrio Partners, a Baltimore-based marketing firm.

He refused to make a copy of the recommendations available to The Daily Record and did not distribute any copies of the survey or the findings to the nearly 75 residents who attended Thursday night’s meeting at EBDI’s offices in the 1700 block of East Chase Street.

“We are tired of being talked to,” said Phyllis A. Hubbard, one of the residents. “We need to be listened to.”

Levitan agreed to suspend the meeting until Aug. 11 — and agreed to make copies of the survey and the recommendations public before that date.

He told the group: “This is a summary; there is a lot more content here. I am sorry people don’t want to engage in conversation” tonight.

Lawrence Brown, a post-doctoral fellow at Morgan State University studying health disparities, pushed Levitan to release the documents.

“Are you saying the residents are not capable of reading the recommendations?” Brown asked. “There’s disappointment in this room. Hopkins and EBDI have focused from the top down. I think we need to re-engage the residents.”

Last year, EBDI and Forest City said the study was commissioned to create a plan to market Middle East to middle-class families and commercial developers, using “psychographics and additional market research” to transform an urban neighborhood pockmarked by blight and crime into an upscale area.

The project, the nation’s largest urban renewal project, is located just north of Johns Hopkins Hospital. A five-month investigation by The Daily Record this year found the project has cost $564 million so far — $212.6 million in public funds.

Now a decade old, plans to develop the site into a world-class biotech research park and add up to 900 new housing units have stalled, even as more than 1,300 households have been relocated from the community and 31 acres containing rowhouses, churches and businesses have been razed.

Another 57 acres of vacant and blighted rowhouses await demolition.

Safety, cost concerns

As The Daily Record has reported, the survey was sent by email in February to Hopkins employees by Andrew B. Frank, special assistant to Hopkins President Ronald J. Daniels on economic development initiatives.

On Thursday, Levitan said most of the participants were sought from the Hopkins medical campus and “other areas in Baltimore.”

Their major concern over living in Middle East, Levitan said before the meeting was halted, was personal safety.

“Perception of safety is the No. 1 barrier,” the presentation said, adding that 69 percent of respondents surveyed “rejected the location, listing “risk/safety” as the reason.”

Plans to build upscale housing costing more than $190,000 per unit also drew ire Thursday night.

“The question is, ‘Can you afford it?’” Fitzgerald, a self-employed hauler and contractor, asked the room.

“Can you afford to shop in the stores that they want to build here? The new houses that brings in folks that make at least $60,000 per year. It’s going to hurt you. This is what we need to be thinking of. You been here all your life. This is your neighborhood. They getting rich off of you.”

Levitan tried to soothe the fears and protests by pledging to work with the residents. He said Daniels, Hopkins’ president, was committed to working with the remaining residents.

“Johns Hopkins can help this community achieve what it wants,” Levitan said. “Or we can fight [Daniels] for the next 10 years that he’s president of Hopkins and I swear we’ll all be sitting in this same room 10 years from now.”