BALTIMORE — Angela Banks remembers it was a brief phone call. Her landlord told her she needed to leave as soon as possible. He was selling the three-story rowhome in the Poppleton neighborhood — her home for decades — to the city of Baltimore to make way for a new development.
It was wintertime in 2018. Banks and her five children moved into her green Ford Explorer. At night, they rolled up the windows, put on two pairs of pants and piled clothes on themselves to keep warm. During the day she begged for gas money.
“I lost everything. Everything I worked hard for and everything that I had, I lost,” Banks said. “Didn’t take nothing except trash bags and clothes.”
On Monday, Banks, along with the nonprofit advocacy group Economic Action Maryland, filed a complaint with the federal government to investigate the displacement of Black residents from Poppleton under the Fair Housing Act. They held a news conference on the steps of Allen A.M.E. Church, a block south of Banks’s old home, with current and former residents to announce the complaint against the city.
The complaint was filed with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and it alleges that when the city of Baltimore targeted Poppleton for redevelopment, it disproportionately displaced Black residents from their homes and perpetuated the city’s segregation.
“Baltimore has long been a tale of two cities. One a wealthy, predominantly white city with charming homes, tree-lined streets, and all kinds of amenities,” said Marceline White, executive director of Economic Action Maryland. “While the other predominantly lower income, majority Black neighborhoods have seen little investment or improvement in their communities for decades.”
City leaders slated Poppleton, a predominantly Black neighborhood, for redevelopment as early as 1975, according to the complaint. Almost 20 years ago, the city promised to raze about 500 homes there to clear space for a massive complex of apartments and other buildings to be developed by La Cite, a New York-based firm. In 2015, the city approved up to $58 million in public financing for the project.
Neither the city nor La Cite responded Monday to requests for comment. As part of their deal, the city acquired rowhomes, paying homeowners to leave and knocking down entire blocks.
But the massive redevelopment plans limped along through the Great Recession, then the pandemic, and the project known as Centre\West is just now entering its second phase, an $80 million senior housing apartment building with 176 units located at the corner of Schroeder and Saratoga streets, the Baltimore Business Journal reported last week.
The complaint says that even if the redevelopment project had finished in 2015 as originally planned, most of Poppleton’s original residents wouldn’t have been able to afford the rent of the newly constructed apartments.
The complaint also lists a set of demands, including:
—Compensation for former Poppleton residents as well as a right of return for any new housing;
—Significantly curbing the city’s ability to use eminent domain and creating a community oversight board to oversee any future use of eminent domain;
—A community land trust for the Poppleton neighborhood.
A former homeowner and neighbor of Banks, Parcha McFadden, spoke at Monday’s news conference, as well as Sonia Eaddy, who successfully saved her historic rowhome from demolition after a fight stretching back nearly 20 years. Eaddy said eminent domain and the threat of seizing properties have destroyed her neighborhood.
“I would like to ask the city, ‘Where is our just compensation?’” Eaddy said. “It is a permanent erasure of a people of color, our history, our culture, our characteristics, our identity. There is nothing to show we ever existed … Black neighborhoods matter.”
As for Banks, she said she spent about six months living in her car before finding a home in Morrell Park in Southwest Baltimore, though her rent is significantly higher. The home on the 1100 block of West Saratoga Street where she lived for decades is still standing. The city owns the property. It has sat vacant since her family was forced to leave in 2018.
Last year, Baltimore paid about $50,000 to compensate Banks for her family’s displacement, she said, but much of the money went toward paying back debts accrued when she was living in her car and later struggling to find stability.
“The city, they broke me,” Banks said. “They broke me to the point where I tried to commit suicide … I guess God had a different plan for me.”
Banks said the stories told Monday morning were just a few snapshots of hundreds of families who once called Poppleton home.
“The struggle was real,” Banks said. “Just imagine how many other people that this happened to that never got to tell their story.”
