Blighted Johnston Square row houses rehabbed

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A once-blighted block in Johnston Square has come alive this spring with the sound of drills, hammers and saws as construction workers continue a mission to upgrade 30 vacant houses in the East Baltimore neighborhood.

The activity in the 700 block of East Preston Street is an extension of last year’s renovations in the 800 block, where the first 12 row houses were gutted, rehabbed and listed for sale as part of a public-private partnership with Mi Casa Inc., a Washington-based developer. So far, six of those houses have sold.

“It’s a huge project,” said City Councilman Carl Stokes, whose 12th District includes Johnston Square, of the community’s conversion.

The changes are part of an overall redevelopment of several communities on the city’s struggling East Side, including new housing starts in Barclay, Goucher and Oliver, also through public-private partnerships.

The Johnston Square upgrades were sparked by the 2011 opening of the City Arts Apartment building at 440 E. Oliver St., where local artists now live and work in spacious lofts near the historic Greenmount Cemetery.

Also, the public Baltimore Design School is under construction about two miles away in a former industrial building that was long vacant.

“Prior to that, [Johnston Square] was a very desolate wasteland,” said William Moore, a vice president at Southway Builders, the contractor who is working in the area. “Today … it is quite vibrant.”

Southway workers this week also were putting the finishing touches on the $15 million, 74-unit Lillian Jones Apartments near the City Arts building. The new development, a modern mid-rise, rose over the past six months after a block of vacant row houses at Greenmount Avenue and Preston Street were razed last year. Financed partly with low-income tax credits, the development features apartments averaging 750 square feet and rents beginning at $550 a month. The official opening is expected in June.

Back on the 700 block of E. Preston St., the city’s Department of Housing and Community Development is paying Mi Casa about $4 million from federal neighborhood stabilization grant funds and other federal grants to gut and renovate 18 row houses, Moore said.

Elin Zurbrigg, deputy director of Mi Casa, said in an email that the funds are part of a larger, multiphase plan for the area.

“The restoration of this major corridor that runs through the heart of the Johnston Square community, as well as the Lillian Jones development behind E. Preston Street and scattered site [Housing Authority of Baltimore City] rehabs, combined represents the biggest residential reinvestment effort in Johnston Square in decades,” Zurbrigg wrote.