“Will I be able to afford to live here in 10 years?” a resident asks at the start of Erich Lange’s urban planning capstone project on Penn North, the long-neglected, low-income neighborhood just two-and-a-half miles north of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor.
Not long ago, that question might have seemed absurd. Penn North’s population is only 1,500, but it has about 400 vacant properties. Years of disinvestment and neglect have taken their toll, and the crime rate has historically been high.
And yet, the community’s quality of life has recently been improving. Safety is better, thanks to a city program called Safe Streets. Planners are focusing on the area’s amenities, including a stop along Baltimore’s only metro line and the expansive Druid Hill Park, which borders the neighborhood to the north.
Lange, who wrote his Capstone in fulfillment of the Master’s in Urban & Regional Planning program at Georgetown University, is the transportation development officer for the West North Avenue Development Authority, “so my job is to kind of lead the charge, organize transportation improvements in the corridor,” he says. “So, anything from sidewalks and pedestrian improvements to larger-scale, more robust things.”
All of which, if successful, could become a kind of virtuous circle. More people move in. Investment in homes and businesses increases. Quality of life improves.
This idea of spurring development around transit stations is called Transit-Oriented Development (TOD), which Lange says “is experiencing a resurgence in the United States due to its prospect of environmentally friendly lifestyles and preference by younger and older demographics alike.”
The downside is that all of these improvements may increase property values, which, although a plus in some respects, tend to drive up rents and force out many of the same residents these programs were designed to help. In Penn North, that includes 40 to 60 percent of residents who report living below the poverty level and 31 percent of renting households that spend more than 30 percent of their monthly income on rent. All told, Lange says nearly 45 percent of renting households are vulnerable to displacement.
Improving—and Preserving—a Neighborhood
To address the threat of displacement, Lange recommends pairing transit-oriented development with the creation of Community Land Trusts (CLTs). “While not often existing in tandem with TOD,” Lange writes, “Community Land Trusts are a potential anti-displacement mechanism that are increasingly prominent in contemporary urban planning practice.”
“Typically, the most successful CLT models are non-profits that acquire property and move the land into a trust,” Lange says. “This allows them to reduce homeownership costs as homeowners only buy the real property and lease the land. This mitigates land value appreciation, which is a key driver of gentrification and displacement.”
Finding the money to buy the land is an ongoing problem. But Lange says that with vision, planning, and political will, this too could be surmounted. He suggests using affordable housing trust funds combined with new avenues of funding.
Penn North and many other low-income communities share a troubled legacy of urban renewal, depopulation, and years of disinvestment. But society is in a different place now, Lange says. There is a growing commitment to the health and vitality of all communities, and now is the time to act.
“I like to believe that the social and political environment has shifted,” he says, “and that we, as a country, are beginning to right the wrongs of the past."
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