The Mondawmin neighborhood in West Baltimore offers plenty of culture and community — a zoo, a subway stop, a mall and deep history. Yet it’s been hard to convince young people to move to a place known as the epicenter of the 2015 uprising following the death of Freddie Gray, who died from injuries suffered in police custody.
People are hesitant to make a home when the house next door is boarded up. It is hard to compare that with the flower pots, sharp brick buildings and shady trees in Bolton Hill, just a short walk away.
“Younger people who have options don’t want to move into a community with a lot of vacancy,” said Dan Ellis, executive director of the Neighborhood Housing Services of Baltimore.
Mondawmin, about 3 miles northwest of the Camden Yards baseball stadium, had a vacancy rate of about 14% in 2020, well above the citywide rate of nearly 8%, according to the Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance (BNIA).
Walk two miles east and you enter Bolton Hill, another world. The vacancy rate is about 1% and the income is about double that of Mondawmin. The average Bolton Hill resident had a per-capita income of $45,263 in 2020 versus $24,625 in Mondawmin.
Among the reasons for the disparity are the history of segregation and lack of investment in Mondawmin and other mostly Black neighborhoods, said Bill Hamilton, secretary of the Bolton Hill Community Association and editor of the Bolton Hill Bulletin. One example of that history was a 1979 survey that showed the 13 biggest lenders in Baltimore provided only 1.6% of their mortgage loans to majority Black census tracts, author Antero Pietila wrote in the book, “Not in My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City.”
Andrea Limauro, a former Baltimore City Department of Planning official, said the racial discrimination feeds into wealth inequality, an issue that cities like Baltimore cannot solve on their own. “I think it’s a national and federal issue that should really be tackled by national policies,” Limauro said.
The community faced additional challenges after the violent protests and property damage following the death of Gray, the 25-year-old Black man who died from injuries suffered in police custody. Many Baltimore residents, especially in Mondawmin, lost confidence in the police after Gray’s death, Hamilton said. Homicides and shootings remain high citywide since Gray’s death.
Even though the city’s population is falling, Baltimore in 2021 saw more than 300 homicides for the seventh straight year, The Baltimore Sun reported.
Developments are being made in the city and in terms of how police deal with violence, but progress is slow, said Hamilton. This means most of the crime rates in Mondawmin and the rest of the city have stayed the same.
The Mondawmin community faces major changes as many of the neighborhood’s elderly residents leave or pass away. “There’s a generation of people aging out of the community,” said Mario Chang, 45, president of the Korean Business Association. “There’s a lot of transitioning happening in the area.”
About 19% of Mondawmin residents are age 65 and older, above the citywide rate of 14%, according to BNIA. Ellis, of Neighborhood Housing Services, agreed aging out is a major problem. An aging community with vacancies does not encourage new residents. Ellis said Neighborhood Housing Services wants to eliminate vacancies in Greater Mondawmin, now at 14%, by the end of the decade. “That’s pretty ambitious,” he said.
Sometimes when an elderly person leaves their home, their family takes over the house and moves into the neighborhood, providing a boost to the community, said Jacqueline Caldwell, a community advocate in the Greater Mondawmin area. This new blood could explain why one census tract saw income per capita increase by almost $10,000 between 2010 and 2020.
Several people interviewed said growth is likely to continue because Mondawmin is one of the only areas citywide that has many attractions — a mall, a busy subway station, a college, schools and big homes — all in one place. “It has the ability to be an archetype of what urban renewal and revival can be,” said Franklin Lance, senior pastor of Mount Lebanon Baptist Church and president and CEO of the Parks & People Foundation.
Lance sees the age of Mondawmin residents as an asset, one that makes the neighborhood stable and less transient. “It has more homeowners, people tend to pass down their properties through generations, they’re less likely to move,” he said. “So, it is a more stable community than some others.”
To work toward bettering Mondawmin, Lance said the community needs an influx of capital, which can be accomplished by implementing tax increment financing, known as TIFs, which allow local governments to invest in public infrastructure developments and pay for them later.
Despite some of the issues in Mondawmin, Caldwell said there are bright spots that are often hidden because the community suffers from “media genocide. Nobody knows about all the good things that are happening,” she said.
Caldwell said many partners come and develop in Mondawmin because they see assets in what she calls “one of the greatest communities in Baltimore.”
“I don’t call my neighbors ‘residents.’ You know, we call each other family here,” Caldwell said. “It’s a very tight-knit community with a lot of assets.”
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