Displacement is not Development

Baltimore, in the late 1960s and through the 1980s brought waves of change. From the 1968 uprising, to the highway that separated hundreds of Baltimore families, consistent divestment from Black neighborhoods and the  deindustrialization that shuttered the factories that had anchored generations, like Dr. Kevin Daniels (professor at Morgan State University) and Baltimore Brothers VP Bilal Rahman’s fathers, both proud Bethlehem Steel workers. The closing of plants like Bethlehem Steel and General Motors didn’t just end jobs; it dismantled social ecosystems. Drugs flooded in, families fractured, and entire neighborhoods hollowed out. “  A lot of people didn’t make it,” Rahman remembers. “The breadwinners went to prison, the children went into foster care, and whole families were devastated.”

As Andrew Muhammad, whose uncle also worked at Bethlehem Steel,  and others note, the cityscape itself became a visual record of that loss: abandoned homes, empty lots, the physical remains of disinvestment. Once-thriving blocks became ghostly reminders of what had been taken. Baltimore’s spirit endured but it was forced to do so amid ruin that was never accidental.

Systemic racism, segregation, redlining, and long-term disinvestment intentionally weakened many of these communities. While Baltimore has never been “one city,” unequal treatment of neighborhoods has led to lasting social, economic, and emotional harm.

Against this backdrop, Baltimore is ripe for gentrification. Using U.S. census figures and economic data, senior research analyst Bruce C Mitchell determined that 171 of Baltimore’s 679 census tracts were eligible for gentrification, defined as having values in the bottom 40% of the city in 2000. Of those 38 tracts, or 22% experienced gentrification, which researchers defined as areas that rank in the 60th percentile of increases in median home value in the number of residents with college degrees.

A 2019 study by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition found that from 2000 to 2013, Baltimore experienced the fifth highest rate of gentrification in the United States, ranking behind bustling cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia.

Gentrification is seen by some as the only viable solution toward improvement without understanding the  quiet violence of gentrification. 

The rebuilding of two alley streets after the Civil War might be considered the first attempt at gentrification in Fells Point. The leveling of two Majority-black Ali Streets, sections of Dallas and Spring; part of the slum clearance efforts on the edge of Upper Fells in the late 1930s, might be the second. They were demolished to make room for white immigrant families in what became the Perkins Homes housing project. But displacement under the guise of development continues to take place with the City claiming property from residence through eminent domain, displacing dozens of residents and selling portions of Baltimore neighborhoods to developers from New York and Los Angeles. A good contemporary example of this would be Poppleton, where some of the families displaced had been living there for over three decades. 

If disinvestment broke Baltimore’s backbone, gentrification  became its next wound; masked as progress, but rooted in displacement. Residents, organizers, and policy advocates, reveal  how systemic neglect and speculative redevelopment work hand-in-hand.

Danise Jones-Dorsey, a community land trust organizer, explains that the negative portrayals of Baltimore are not accidental. “It is in the interest of people who want to buy low and sell high to continue the message that Baltimore City is a despicable place to live.”

Community leaders connect this pattern to a larger agenda. “It’s convenient,” says Adam Jackson (Healthy Neighborhoods), “because if you paint Black people as inherently pathological, then you justify removing them.” Even national networks are complicit in amplifying fear, sustaining a view of Black Baltimore as broken, dangerous, and deficient.

Nick Mosby unpacks how so-called “affordable housing” programs and nonprofit developers often stabilize neighborhoods just long enough to raise property values, pushing out the very residents who brought stability. “As they stabilize those blocks… the speculators wake up,” he says. “And then guess who’s left out? The renter who helped rebuild the community.”

From post-industrial flight to 21st-century redevelopment, “Charm City”, a name coined in 1975 to rebrand Baltimore, was always as much about controlling perception as improving reality. Scholars and residents alike describe gentrification as structural violence: a calculated cycle of divestment, devaluation, and displacement that has repeatedly targeted Black neighborhoods under the guise of renewal.