Commissioner Alice Kennedy hoped to sell the community on the idea that developers and the residents can work in concert. 

“I was talking with some people over the weekend and we cannot go back and we cannot change the past,” Kennedy said. “But we can only look to the future.”   

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Kennedy’s sentiment is comforting, but the land deal that allowed Bythewood to cash in on property he never built nor owned for hundreds of thousands of dollars illustrates the relationship the city has with many developers who come to Baltimore. 

“Baltimore is desperately seeking a savior,” Carol Ott, Tenant Advocacy director at Fair Housing Action Center of Maryland, told me. “That can come in the form of one person, one company, or multiple companies. But the idea is the city doesn’t have the resources or the capital or the people to make it happen, so the city goes outside to find this magic bullet.”

Bythewood promised big, and the city fell for it. Not once, not twice, but three times. 

Way back in 2004, Dan Bythewood first laid eyes on a parcel of land just west of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and south of Baltimore’s infamous “Highway To Nowhere.” Poppleton had long suffered from disinvestment and population loss. The neighborhood, on the edge of West Baltimore, didn’t receive the investment aimed at downtown’s waterfront communities that have long been the focus of Baltimore’s attempts to attract business and new residents. MLK Boulevard seemed like an informal barrier between Poppleton and downtown, between investment and neglect. Bythewood had an idea of what he could do to change that, and, like so many out-of-towners, it was prestige TV that informed his ideas of the city.