By 2014, the CDC was organizing informal community events focused on the redevelopment of West Baltimore’s historic commercial corridors — the corridors now at the center of the 1,300 Acres plan. It was a chance, May says, to “get ahead of the real estate development curve and help shape that curve.” In 2015, MRCDC began shopping the idea of an innovation district to the nearby universities and whoever would take their calls at City Hall. The project has gained momentum quickly. Coppin State and MICA have taken the district branding and run with it, partnering with May’s group on startup competitions and pledging future support. The city, too, is on board and has contributed some money: $100,000 for the district itself, and another $100,000 to help the Conscious Venture Lab, a Howard County startup accelerator that is moving to 1,300 Acres. In December, Baltimore Mayor Catherine E. Pugh and Maryland Governor Larry Hogan stood at the site of the MCB Real Estate development and announced $2 million in state funding for the site’s redevelopment.

“This city-state partnership will bring much-needed investment, services, housing and jobs to Baltimore,” said Hogan. “By working with local community organizations, as well as the private sector, transformative projects like this will help ensure that Baltimore’s future is better and brighter than its present or its past.”

But the hard part is just beginning. May knows that there is no guarantee that new development will benefit longtime residents, many of whom are not eager for the higher rents and cultural shifts that it will bring. But he says he will do everything in his power to make sure 1,300 Acres benefits all segments of the community.

“I’m always inherently skeptical, especially being black,” says May. “But what we believe is that every person has talent, every person matters, and that everybody deserves access to economic prosperity. Innovation is one of the ways that can happen, by making sure people have spaces and places where their creativity can come into the marketplace.”

Vacant buildings sit in the Reservoir Hill neighborhood in West Baltimore.

Channeling Opportunity

On that windy afternoon in February, May took me on an afternoon driving tour. We met at Reservoir Hill’s Dovecote Cafe, which opened in 2016 and is run by three transplants from Oakland, California, who now live just down the street. Aisha Pew, one of the co-managers, described the new cafe as a “community and central hub.”

Reservoir Hill was a natural spot to begin our tour. It is May’s own neighborhood; he settled there with his family in 2010 and to some observers, it is the heart of the district, and the home of a number of its strongest advocates.

Bounded by Druid Hill Park to the north, Penn North to the west, and the Jones Falls Expressway to the east, Reservoir Hill was once the northernmost part of Mount Royal, a section of the city that was quite rural up until the mid-1800s. Even before 1900 the area was becoming more urban, but much of the change in the area above North Avenue — what is today Reservoir Hill — took place over the last century. Large townhouses were subdivided into apartment units, without adequate rehabilitation, to accommodate a swelling population. Over time, redlining practices, prevalent in West Baltimore, altered the demographic makeup of Reservoir Hill, one neighborhood among many that once formed a thriving Old West Baltimore. After the 1968 riots, middle- and working-class black families joined the flight of white families out of the city. Beginning in the 1970s, housing in Reservoir Hill deteriorated, the famed commercial strip along Whitelock Street died out, and more large homes were subdivided into apartment units.

Since 2000, however, a mini-renaissance has taken place. Census figures show that more than 340 new residents have moved in, and the average home price has risen from about $101,000 in 2010 to roughly $178,500 in 2016, according to Live Baltimore data. Governing magazine classified it as a neighborhood in the middle of gentrification, a force May and his Reservoir Hill friends believe can be used to improve city blocks without radically changing neighborhood demographics.

In addition to MCB Real estate’s project, other development partnerships are in the works, May says.

“For us, that’s what this is really all about: making sure residents have access to real economic opportunities,” says May.

The question is how. Innovation districts can be powerful generators of wealth for cities, says Jennifer Vey, a fellow and co-director of the Bass Initiative on Innovation and Placemaking at Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C., think tank that has done research on the rise of innovation districts and how to assess their impact.

In particular, they can be great opportunities for economic development in low-income neighborhoods, mainly because they tend to get established in commercial areas that border these neighborhoods, which means high-growth jobs in technology are right next door.

“However, whether or not they create broad opportunity for city residents is contingent upon the stakeholders in the area getting very aggressive about very intentionally connecting people to these jobs,” Vey says. “How do you grow in ways that make people feel connected to these places, where people don’t feel like this is not a place they can relate to, even though they live only three blocks away?”

The innovation district was officially announced in 2016 on a cold January Monday, when a host of city officials and community leaders gathered in the Penn North neighborhood at the corner of North and Pennsylvania avenues, the exact center of the nascent district. Even those not from Baltimore would recognize the setting. Behind a makeshift stage was the same CVS that had been burned and looted in April 2015, and has since been rebuilt and reopened.

While then-Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and other guest speakers championed the effort that winter day, local residents looked on in confusion. For many, this was the first time they heard the neighborhoods where they live and work were to become part of a new development district. The announcement and what it portended seemed ominous. In a neighborhood like Sandtown-Winchester, where the median income is $19,000 and the unemployment rate is 21 percent, residents did not immediately see how they would fit into a project that seemed designed for white-collar tech workers. They still don’t see.

“We are definitely in support of opportunity and job creation in our community. But what we see is attempted gentrification,” says Ray Kelly. Kelly is an organizer with the No Boundaries Coalition, which has been working since 2008 to create safer streets in many of the neighborhoods that would be part of the innovation district.

Baltimore's Penn North neighborhood made national headlines when unrest broke out following the death of Freddie Gray.

Tiffany Welch is the president of the Matthew Henson Neighborhood Association, a community group that represents neighborhoods to the west of Penn North. She is waiting for more information before making a judgment, but her eyebrows are raised.

“It’s not exactly clear what the timeline is, what the aesthetic will look like, or how the communities will look like in it. Until we know those answers, everyone is really skeptical,” Welch says.

May says outreach to various communities has been happening and will continue. He points to events, like last year’s Startup Soiree networking event on Pennsylvania Avenue, last September’s social change hackathon at Coppin State University, and this summer’s innovation camp, currently being organized, as ways that 1,300 Acres is trying to connect local residents, and especially younger residents in elementary school and high school, to new events, people and opportunities.

“Any time you have 50 years of really zero investment at scale in an entire side of the city, there’s a lot of distrust on the ground,” May says. “But when you look at an entire side of a city that doesn’t have access to growth aspects of the economy, we can’t win as a city until we provide opportunities for everyone.”

Local residents agree that jobs and economic opportunities are needed, but community leaders remain fearful of displacement. Who will be forced to leave, either because they can’t find a job or they can’t afford their home anymore? Who will miss out on the new opportunities created by this innovation district?

“Of course gentrification is going to be my biggest concern. It is real. It is happening,” says Ericka Alston-Buck, founder of the Kids Safe Zone and Family Support Center.

Founded by Alston-Buck just one month after the April 2015 riots, the Kids Safe Zone is now an 8,000-square-foot after-school center that sees hundreds of kids ages 5 to 17 walk through its doors to do things like play Xbox games, read books and get homework help throughout the week. It’s just blocks from where the initial announcement about the innovation district took place. After a rocky start — Alston-Buck says she, like Kelly, had no idea why the mayor and other officials had gathered one year ago in Penn North — she plans to participate in the summer innovation camp that 1,300 Acres is sponsoring. Activities in science and technology will take place at multiple sites, with the Kids Safe Zone being one of the stops. Alston-Buck says she met with May shortly after demolition began at what will be Madison Park North last December, and that he was open and willing to work with neighborhood groups.

Ericka Alston-Buck of the Kids Safe Zone visits with her husband and son in her office.

“He told me, ‘There was no way I was going to come to Sandtown and say, hey we’re Innovation Village, and we’re going to do this, that, and the other.’ So that gave me a buy-in with Innovation Village,” says Alston-Buck, who’s also independently raising funds to build a makerspace in Sandtown that would include a technology lab, entrepreneurship center, recording studio and coffee shop.

Back in February, during our driving tour of the district, May made sure to steer down Eutaw Place, a street that knifes through two neighborhoods that seem worlds apart.

To the east is Bolton Hill, where the median home value is $360,000. On the other side is Madison Park, where the median household income is less than $20,000. As we drove, May spotted a young boy with a backpack walking in front of Pedestal Gardens, a federally subsidized housing complex. Across the street he pointed out a building, a 28,000-square-foot vacant structure that could, eventually, be redeveloped as part of 1,300 Acres — maybe as a job training center, maybe as a startup incubator. Whatever it might be, May references the boy with the backpack, and says his litmus test is the same.

“If you’re black or brown in this city, and you feel like you can look at a building from the outside and say, ‘That’s for us too,’ that’s half the battle,” he says. “We really believe that people in West Baltimore deserve those same opportunities that we’re seeing in other parts of the city.”