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Flip the Script on the Waterfront

There’s a lot going on in Cherry Hill and the adjoining community of Westport, which hug the Middle Branch of the Patapsco River. The relocated Maritime Industries High School opened this fall, and Cherry Hill Middle/Elementary is scheduled to be rebuilt by 2018. The National Aquarium’s fence around a long-stalled waterfront park came down. And Under Armour CEO Kevin Plank’s Sagamore Development has unveiled plans for a major redevelopment, including neighborhoods, parks, hotels, marinas, and a new global headquarters for Under Armour.

Michael Middleton, who grew up in Cherry Hill and is now head of the Cherry Hill Development Corporation, is hopeful that this activity will breathe life into his neighborhood. But he also wants to make sure that the current residents will be a part of it. “We need to flip the script,” he says. “We need to make sure that anyone who wants to stay in Cherry Hill can stay in Cherry Hill.”

Displacement is not an idle fear. One of the city’s youngest communities, Cherry Hill was chosen to house war workers in 1943 as the site of what was then (and is still) the largest planned suburban black community in the country. The Afro-American newspaper called the industrial waterfront site a “damnable selection”; for city leaders, it had one advantage: Its isolation meant that there were few neighbors to complain.

A decade later, low-income housing came to Cherry Hill for much the same reason; today, it is home to the largest concentration of public housing east of Chicago, contributing to what Middleton says is a sense of transience that has kept the neighborhood from coalescing. “Cherry Hill has had a bad rap,” adds Ray Winbush, the director of the Institute for Urban Research at Morgan State University, which just completed a study on the Middle Branch area. “I’ve rarely seen an area so maligned, in terms of stereotypes. I think the people who are developing Middle Branch, they want to say, ‘We’re going to save the community from itself.’ And in every case that involves displacement of African-Americans.”

Winbush may be pessimistic about the future, but he does hold out some hope that this time could be different. “People are now talking about these things in light of the uprising that occurred in April,” he says. “I think there’s a willingness to say, ‘How do we shape black neighborhoods, and how do we stop this intrusion that has occurred in our historic communities?’”

Both Winbush and Middleton insist that a key part of any future vision of the area should involve mixed-income housing. Winbush cites Chicago’s Hyde Park as a template: This waterfront neighborhood on the city’s South Side, home to the University of Chicago, maintains a balance of subsidized and market-rate housing and is one of its most integrated parts of a heavily segregated city.

Middleton isn't naïve to the challenges of redevelopment without displacement, but he thinks residents can overcome them. “Cherry Hill wants to plan its own destiny. If the nature of this community continues, it will be a community that is compassionate, because all of us have been in that position of being poor, and understand that all of us must help one another. We're aware of gentrification. We're aware of people losing their homes. It is up to us to use whatever resources we have available to stop it.”