BALTIMORE -- The residents of Westport were complaining: poor garbage collection, pothole-riddled streets, a pungent gas-like smell from a building under construction.
Presiding over this meeting of the Westport Neighborhood Association was Keisha Allen, who is used to hearing the residents’ grievances.
There’s much to complain about in Westport. The neighborhood is marked by boarded-up houses, vacant lots and trash-filled gutters. Residents are wary of leaving their houses after dark. Its unemployment rate is higher than the rest of the city’s, and so is its rate of shootings and homicides.
But Allen, the Westport Neighborhood Association president, sees potential here.
“Westport is this hidden jewel,” she said, “like a diamond in a rough.”
Westport, she noted, is close to Interstate 95 and the Baltimore-Washington Parkway and, with some help, it could be a healthy, growing neighborhood.
“People automatically think this is like ‘The Wire,’ ” she said, referring to the HBO series that told some tough stories about Baltimore life. “Not even on a bad day are we like ‘The Wire.’ ”
She is carrying that message into her newest volunteer role, as a member of the Baltimore Casino Local Development Council. The panel, named by Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, is in charge of recommending how to spend the millions of dollars generated by Baltimore’s new casino for neighborhoods. By state law, 5.5 percent of the state’s casino revenues will be returned to areas surrounding casinos to compensate for the traffic, trash and other problems the gambling centers generate.
“We sit and wait and wait”
Her fellow council members include representatives of wealthier communities, like Federal Hill, that are also near the casino.
Allen’s biggest aim is simply getting her neighborhood noticed. “We get tired of watching other neighborhoods get [resources],” she said.
“We sit and wait and wait. It’s making the city understand that we are ready.”
Allen, 38, who works at the Anne Arundel Medical Center, said she had no intention of even joining the neighborhood association when she moved to the community seven years ago. Raised in Anne Arundel County, the daughter of a bus driver and a beautician, Allen had been looking for a house she could afford to buy and found one in Westport.
She attended a few community association meeting, and then went to the annual block party, an all-day festival. Allen said she connected with her neighbors and started going to meetings regularly, then was asked to join the board and run for president.
She recalls thinking, “Sure, I’ll take over. This looks easy.
“Wrong. It’s nothing but not easy.”
Zane Kolnik, a Westport resident who attends the association meetings, said Allen is “definitely effective, passionate, and as a local homeowner values the properties.”
Deborah Guest, a neighborhood association board member at-large, called Allen “a go-getter, that’s for sure.”
Guest is impressed by Allen’s love for her community and the care she takes to keep in close touch with residents even as she serves on citywide committees, such as the Baltimore Police Department’s civilian review board.
Allen said her proudest achievement during her time with the neighborhood association was partnering with Rebuilding Together Baltimore to fix about 20 homes.
Allen contacted the organization, identified homes in the neighborhood that were in dire need of help, and worked with Rebuilding Together to fix the homes free of cost.
The project was simply about “making someone’s life a little better and just making the neighborhood more functional,” Allen said.
She also is determined to improve education. She worked with the Boys and Girls Club and Westport Academy to add educational programs, such as an algebra club.
She wants to start more programs aimed at improving children’s lives, and she said she knows where they can be based: in a new community center set to open by year’s end.
