When Dawn Lewis moved to Westport five years ago and Kendall L. King came early this year, they knew they were renting in one of Baltimore’s most distressed neighborhoods.

But everyone told them it was bound to improve.

Westport’s waterfront location beside the Patapsco’s Middle Branch would spawn high-end development that would, in turn, spur real estate recovery in the once-stable, blue-collar neighborhood, they were told.

Years of riverfront development schemes, though, failed to take off. And now about a third of Westport’s houses are vacant. As the number of boarded-up houses has surged, so has the number of people wandering the streets and alleys in search of a place to score drugs or sleep.

Lewis found herself battling rats thanks to the vacants on either side of her extremely tidy Sidney Avenue home. King, who lives on Maisel Street, pointed to the person asleep on the front porch of the vacant next door, used hypodermic needles nearby.

“I feel for these people, but I don’t want to live in an environment where there’s a collapsing house next to me that could become a fire hazard,” he said.

King then took a visitor to the top of his rental’s somewhat rickety rooftop deck and directed her gaze past the crumbling backsides of neighboring rowhouses and across the Light Rail tracks to where a fancy waterfront development is finally happening.

“I’m a stone’s throw – well, maybe three big heaves of a stone – from the water,” said King, pointing to where more than 200 Ryan Homes townhouses, part of the the One Westport project, are completed or are under construction and selling for $350,000 to $700,000 each.

Workers hammered away. The Middle Branch glittered. A rower on a single scull sliced through the water.

Last week the Department of Housing and Community Development (DHCD) was poised to take a big step toward bringing some of that redevelopment energy inland.

A $971,000 option to buy 29 unoccupied properties from HC-Baltimore LLC and its Virginia-based owner, David Baird, was on the agenda before Mayor Brandon Scott and the Board of Estimates.

If the sale didn’t go through, DHCD was prepared to condemn the properties. “This property will be redeveloped,” board documents asserted.

But on the morning of the meeting, the item was withdrawn by the housing department. There has been no subsequent explanation, despite multiple queries from The Brew.

“This matter is still evolving and remains under active consideration” was all agency spokeswoman Tammy Hawley said in an email.

And there was no response at all to emailed queries sent to Baird, whose HC-Baltimore LLC is the biggest single owner of vacant Westport properties.

“We need relief”

Westport leaders have long contended that Baird’s company mismanages its properties in a way that has worsened the community’s struggles with vacancy and accelerated its general decline.

In 2023, Mayor Brandon Scott announced “a $3 billion vision to fully eliminate the problem of vacant housing in Baltimore” and city officials report the number of city vacants has declined. But it’s hard to see any of that on the ground in Westport.

Lisa R. Hodges-Hiken, executive director of the Westport Community Economic Development Corporation, said her group has asked for a meeting with Housing Commissioner Timothy Keane “to provide answers on why the BOE item seeking approval for an option to buy HC-Baltimore LLC properties was pulled from the routine agenda”

“It is critical that the city moves forward with acquisition of a block of these properties as promised by the previous commissioner so that transformational development can take place,” she wrote to Keane. “The owner has proven they will not invest in the properties or sell them unless forced.”

Several of the 29 vacant properties targeted for city acquisition are on Maisel Street, where King lives. The majority of the addresses are on Sidney Avenue, where Lewis and her son live.

A 60-year-old former office and warehouse worker, Lewis says someone needs to pry Westport’s vacants out of the hands of harmful speculators.

“They’re sitting on those places, waiting for the city to buy them out,” Lewis observed. “I wish the city would finally do it and fix them up. We need relief!”

King, whose home abuts a dilapidated vacant rowhouse owned by HC-Baltimore LLC, was disgusted to learn that the plan to acquire many of the company’s properties has stalled.

“How is the city allowing these owners to sit there and let these houses go to crap and have people who have been living in them for decades suffer?” he said. “There’s so much negligence.”

“Sit-and-Hold” Strategy

Hodges-Hiken’s nonprofit has been working for years to reverse Westport’s decline, quietly pushing the city to clamp down on Baird and other property owners so that their array of moldering vacant properties can be renovated and inhabited.

HC-Baltimore “has by and large chosen to board most of them up, so that affects our ability to sell the homes that we renovate,” she explained.

She was “cautiously optimistic” upon hearing that the acquisition plan had appeared on the August 5 Board of Estimates agenda, calling it “just what we’ve been waiting for.”

“This has been a major impediment – not being able to get a significant number of properties ready to go at the same time, a critical mass,” she told The Brew before the board meeting. “This is such a game changer to be getting almost 30 properties.”

“There’s a culture where the city has adored slumlords and property speculators”  – Keisha Allen, president of the Westport Neighborhood Association.

Westport Neighborhood Association President Keisha Allen was also crowing about the plan ahead of the meeting.

“There’s a culture where the city has adored slumlords and property speculators. Now, in Westport at least, that sit-and-hold culture is over,” she stated.

Upon hearing that the item had been pulled from the agenda at the last minute, she said she had no idea why.

Defending HC-Baltimore

Brandon Hargreaves, whose company has been managing some of HC-Baltimore’s Westport properties for the last two months, told The Brew he knew nothing about the status of the city’s plans in Westport.

But he pushed back strenuously against the portrayal of the company as an irresponsible speculator worsening the condition of Westport’s housing stock.

“These places were in pretty bad shape when they got them,” he said, blaming the neighborhood’s problems on “the unhoused or the homeless or whatever we’re allowed to call them these days.”

“It makes it challenging to try to get these things occupied,” he said. “Literally, as soon as a tenant moves out, within 48 hours, someone’s broken into it.”

Who’s at fault? Not HC-Baltimore, he continued, going on to single out the police, the city and the residents themselves.

“Everyone points a finger at the the landowner when the neighborhood is not cleaning themselves up. What are they doing to help mitigate these problems?” he complained.

Asked what he would have residents do, he responded this way:

“What are they doing to get the police involved to actually move these people away from the property or remove them from the neighborhood?”

“The neighborhood is not cleaning themselves up. What are they doing to help mitigate these problems?”  – Brandon Hargreaves, manager of some HC-Baltimore properties.

His employees, he said, were working to address King’s complaints about the unsecured property next door. Told that a housing violation notice had recently been taped to its door, he did not seem concerned.

“Oh, there’s always violations on different properties. Someone dumps trash or something. Someone calls the city and then that’s a violation. So now we got to go and clean it up.”

The tacked-up violation notice was issued on November 2, 2016 – just a month after HC-Baltimore purchased the rowhouse for $5,000. It called the property “unfit for human habitation.”

The city’s online database indicates that HC-Baltimore was ordered to “rehabilitate or raze” the building by December 2, 2016. Neither happened, and it appears no fines have been imposed on the property owner for the decade that followed.

Informed of what the violation notice showed, Hodges-Hiken remarked: “This means the house has been continuously vacant for 10 years and the City has not held the owner to account.”

Little Transparency

It has been difficult to learn anything about the withdrawal of the Westport acquisition plan.

Background documents that usually accompany Board of Estimates items are “not currently available” because the item has been withdrawn, Comptroller Bill Henry’s office told The Brew.

But judging by the item’s description on the board’s agenda, the proposal was far along in DHCD’s decision-making process.

“This department has secured appraisals, negotiated with the owner and the Option has been signed by the owner,” the agenda description said.

“The Commissioner of Housing has made the required determination regarding this property,” it also said, a reference to Housing Commissioner Keane, who took charge of DHCD in March.

Keane recently went to Westport and personally saw the conditions there, according to Hodges-Heiken.

“We laid out to him that we really need this. He did a walking tour here early on, to his credit, in his tenure as commissioner.”

Last year, city leaders touted a grant made to the South Baltimore Gateway Partnership from the Baltimore Vacants Reinvestment Initiative to rehab two dozen Westport properties, along with houses in 14 other neighborhoods.

So far, Hodges-Hiken said, no grant funds have been deployed in Westport.

The Westport Community Economic Development Corporation has taken step to improve the visibility of the majority-Black community, including recording its history as a onetime stronghold of German immigrants altered sharply by white flight, the loss of manufacturing jobs and carve ups by highways and public housing projects.

“The way the city works, it’s easier to give a citation to an 80-year-old woman whose grass is nine inches tall than it is a man that owns a block of vacant homes”  – Keisha Allen.

The CEDC has taken special aim at speculators who sit on properties for years, letting them deteriorate and go vacant, thereby dooming efforts at redevelopment, while city government turns a blind eye.

“The way the city works, it’s sometimes easier for them to give a citation to an 80-year-old woman whose grass is nine inches tall than it is a man that owns a block of vacant homes,” Allen observed.

A Plague of Feces and Fires

With her office located on Sidney Avenue, Hodges-Hiken experiences the neighborhood’s challenges on a daily basis. A couple of years ago, she said, they sharply intensified.

Westport began to attract people from other parts of the city, other jurisdictions and even from other states to buy and use drugs. Increasingly, they hung out in the vacants or in the backyards of occupied homes, leaving behind a trail of used needles, feces and trash. At one point there was an encampment at the Light Rail station.

To put conditions in perspective, Hodges-Hiken pointed to an affluent part of Baltimore where a serial flasher recently garnered breathless media attention.

“You know when the guy was naked in Canton? Wow, that’s like a random Tuesday in Westport,” she exclaimed. “Why should somebody who’s paying rent, mortgage and taxes have to deal with that all the time?”

In October 2024, an HC-Baltimore-owned and squatter-occupied property on Cedley Street caught fire, and the fire spread to at least three occupied homes.

Hodges-Hiken complained directly to Baird, copying city officials. “Your attorney continues to make excuses at receivership court about your company, not having enough resources to fix up the properties in your current portfolio,” she wrote. “However your continued acquisition of properties contradicts this representation.”

She said Baird never responded to her request that he temporarily house the displaced families.

In a more recent case, tenants in a rental property her nonprofit operates were confronted with squatters in the next-door vacant.

“I had to get a $3,000 privacy fence to make sure the woman and her little granddaughter wouldn’t have to witness all kinds of shenanigans,” Hodges-Hiken recalled.

Those Left Behind

Despite the condition of the houses, the humanity of their residents should not be forgotten, said Allen, who moved to Westport in 2008.

“These homes hold great stories, even if they look unsightly to you,” she remarked. “People raised families, put kids through college here and they deserve to remain.”

Mary Randall, who has lived in her Wesport home since 1975, said the community’s decline makes her sad.

“We had two banks. A post office. We had everything on Annapolis Road but a grocery store. It was so beautiful,” she recalled, blaming the current situation on slumlords operating unchecked.

“The people that own those properties should board ’em up, if they can’t rent ’em out,” she said. “And if they don’t, the city should get on them. It’s that simple.”

Hazy Future

Last Saturday morning, two Baltimore Police vehicles were parked near the Light Rail station, where a half dozen people were sitting on benches and in wheelchairs, some of them nodding off.

The neighborhood was quiet, except for the booming music from a black SUV that periodically circled a nearby block.

Lewis said she stays inside and keeps to herself, focusing on making improvements to her pink-flamingo-themed kitchen, caring for her cat Snowy and shih tzus, Raven and Ayaan, and tending the four rodent trap boxes she has positioned in the tall grass on either side of her home.

King, who bikes to his weekday job repairing laptops and computers, showed a reporter the tomato and pepper plants growing in his tiny front yard.

Looking at the houses on his shady, sycamore-lined street – a patchwork of occupied homes with blooming flowers and boarded-up structures with “No trespassing signs” – he was upbeat.

“This is like the gem of Baltimore,” he said, enumerating Westport’s advantages beyond waterfront proximity and affordability. “You got one stop and you’re at Ravens Stadium, two stops you’re at Orioles Stadium. And the other way takes you to BWI. ”

Days later, he told The Brew there was some progress to report with the neighboring vacant, which now had a “Notice to Vacate” and other warnings posted by DHCD. Plywood had been nailed over the opening in the basement.

There was no one sleeping on the porch in the photo he texted, just the sad sight of a Berger cookies package and some spent needles.

“But the good news,” he offered, “is that as I meet more neighbors, they are all interested in organizing against these negligent property owners.”