A long-neglected neighborhood is about to get a billion-dollar makeover. But what will the Westport of the future owe to the Westport of the past??

Sitting on her tiny front porch, as she does most days when the weather is nice, Deborah Guest sees a neighborhood boy she knows.

“How ya doin’?” she calls out. “Keep up the good work!”

Guest turns and explains: “One of my Sunday school babies. He was caught smoking weed. I said, ‘Have you lost your mind?’ Where does this come from?”

Guest has owned her small brick rowhouse on Maisel Street since 1984. But she has lived here in Westport since 1958, where, four years after Brown v. Board of Education, she was enrolled as one of only a handful of African American children at Westport Academy, the elementary school across the street from her current home.

In those days, she could walk over to Annapolis Road to have a soda at the pharmacy or mail a letter at the post office. On Saturdays, farmers from the county would set up vegetable stalls on the dirt road, now an exit ramp off Interstate 295. Guest’s father had a job at Boston Metals in nearby Brooklyn; other neighborhood parents worked for one of the two glass factories in the area, at the Baltimore Gas & Electric plant, or at the GM factory at Sparrows Point. “Back then we had enough, so we didn’t know we were poor,” she says.

Westport, a working-class neighborhood tucked into the industrial zone south of the city along the Middle Branch of the Patapsco River, has changed. Manufacturing jobs have disappeared, along with many of the people who held them. More than 20 percent of the 900 or so housing units in Westport are vacant, and only a quarter of the households are owner-occupied. A Department of Planning report in 2000 listed the neighborhood median income at $16,250 a year, with one-third of households earning less than $10,000.

Guest says that she sees a lot of young people hanging out in the streets these days: “They get up in the morning, and their day consists of going out to the corner and waiting for something to happen.”

When things do happen, they usually aren’t good. In September, one of her four children, 29-year-old Kareem, was shot and killed in an incident Guest describes as misplaced retaliation. The loss of her son served as yet another sign of how bad things have gotten. “How dare they come into this community and kill someone who’s lived here their whole life?” she says.

But something else is happening in Westport. Something that might change not only the long-neglected neighborhood, but the city itself: The developer Patrick Turner, who has had his eye on Westport for nearly a decade, is poised to transform Guest’s neighborhood by building a $1.4-billion, 4.8-million-square-foot development called Westport Waterfront. The plan calls for two thousand townhouses, apartments, and condominiums; a high-rise hotel; a smattering of exclusive retail shops; and enough open space and eco-friendly features to quicken the pulse of local environmental groups. Buildings will boast green roofs, the shoreline will be buffered by wetlands for migrating birds, and the streets will be constructed with gravel filtration to minimize river-polluting runoff. Turner says he’ll seek Platinum designation under the LEED for Neighborhood Development program, the U.S. Green Building Council’s rating system for neighborhood design.

With a light rail station already in place, the development would be a model of smart growth, the anti-sprawl approach to urban planning that calls for transit- and pedestrian-oriented communities. The site sits in a Maryland Enterprise Zone, so tax credits are available for companies that provide new jobs, and its proximity to I-95 means it was also awarded BRAC (Base Realignment and Closure) Zone status, which comes with infrastructure improvement dollars. With the nearby Middle Branch Park and the Gwynns Falls Trail, the development would be a key element in city’s Middle Branch Master Plan, the planning department’s ambitious 2007 blueprint to transform the entire Middle Branch region from isolated post-industrial backwater to the city’s southern “green gateway.”

In short, the rise of Westport Waterfront would transform the area, tripling the housing stock and dramatically shifting its income and racial mix. For Deborah Guest, at least, that is a change that can’t come soon enough.

For a time in the 19th century, the sandy shores of the Middle Branch, easily reached by rail, were a popular destination for Baltimoreans who would come for boating and swimming by day, drinking and dancing by night. But in 1889, the Carr & Lowrey Glass Works factory opened, bringing industry to the area once again. In the early 1900s, Consolidated Gas, Electric Light & Power—BGE’s predecessor—built a coal-fired power station nearby. By 1923, the entire area was zoned for industrial use.

Those who lived in Westport’s residential neighborhood were typically white and working-class—people who were employed in nearby industries. Housing was built in the 1940s for the influx of war-related factory workers. Westport Homes was designated for whites only, while war housing in nearby Cherry Hill was built for black workers.

Beginning in the 1950s, highways went up, splitting the neighborhood in half and furthering its isolation from the rest of the city. Demographics started to shift. White residents fled en masse in the 1960s; today, about 90 percent of Westport’s population is African American. John Unglesbee, who grew up in Westport, worked for

Carr & Lowrey until it shut down in 2003. Like many white residents, he moved out of the neighborhood years before—he now lives in Lansdowne. But he still comes to the old neighborhood to sit at K’s Korner, a bar in the basement of a rowhouse on the corner of Sidney Avenue and Kent Street. The neighborhood has gone downhill, he says. “You used to have a bank, a movie theater, a shoe store, a barbershop. Now you just see a lot of boarded-up houses.”

You also see a huge stretch of undeveloped waterfront, an asset that has proven highly desirable to Baltimore builders. The neighborhood fronts a body of water five times the size of the Inner Harbor.

In late 2004, Turner invited Haskins to tour Westport. “The glass company was an abandoned facility. There was rubbish everywhere,” the banker recalls. But the two climbed to the top of the factory, where, fortified by the vista of water and the Hanover Street bridge, Turner sketched his ideas for transforming the area into a live-work-play complex to rival the Inner Harbor.

His vision appealed to Haskins, who founded Harbor Bank in 1982 with the mission of providing loans to small and minority-owned businesses that didn’t have ready access to traditional financial markets. “When you talk about the last thirty years in Westport, what people conjure is a community on the periphery, with all the negatives: low income, drugs, and crime,” Haskins says. “Here you’ve got a project that has the potential of bringing a new dimension to that part of the city. You have an opportunity to change lifestyles and lives.”

Turner Development Group paid about $14 million for the glass factory, the BGE facility, and adjacent properties—a total of about 42 acres, much of it heavily contaminated from industrial use. The Carlyle Group, a private equity firm, got involved in 2007; as of the end of 2009, Turner says, property, demolition, environmental remediation, and design costs had reached $50 million—although nothing has been built.

City Hall has been more than eager to help Turner’s cause. Last January, the city approved a bond issue of $160 million in Tax Increment Financing (TIF) to pay for infrastructure improvements. The TIF—the largest in the city’s history—is an influx of capital that will be paid back by future property taxes: Turner predicts that the site, which currently brings about $95,000 a year to the city, will generate $45 million a year in property and hotel taxes once the development is built. He also anticipates that more than 15,000 jobs will be created. “We’re taking something that’s paying nothing and turning it into something that will pay a lot,” he says.

The shaky state of the bond market meant a delay in the issue of the first set of TIF bonds, currently scheduled to go to market this March. In November, Turner received another major boost: The city directed more than $21 million in federal stimulus funds to enhance the bonds and help make them more salable.

The timing of Turner’s negotiations worked in his favor: In 2008, the city passed the Inclusive Housing Law, calling for developers who receive substantial subsidies or benefit from major zoning changes on the part of the city to designate 20 percent of housing units affordable. But because the legislation came after Turner had begun negotiating with the city, Westport Waterfront doesn’t have to comply. Turner nevertheless agreed to ensure that 200 units—10 percent of the total—will be available for low-income residents. According to Andy Frank, deputy mayor for neighborhood and economic development, 130 apartments in the waterfront development would be affordable rental units and $6.35 million of the TIF money would go toward the city’s purchase and renovation of seventy or more houses to be sold within the existing neighborhood. The value of affordable housing on the site, Frank says, is an estimated $21 million.

Some residents and affordable housing advocates don’t think that’s enough. Josh Civin is vice president of the Citizens Planning and Housing Association, which strongly supported the housing ordinance. He believes that Turner’s project should honor the spirit of the law that he narrowly escaped. “The city’s position is that they’d been in discussions with Turner before the law took effect, so he’s not required to comply. But we argued for the full 20 percent.”

ACLU of Maryland attorney Barbara Samuels, the head of the group’s Fair Housing Project, agrees that the Turner Development Group’s concession isn’t enough. A sustainable city, she points out, “isn’t just about a green roof. Sustainability is about whether people from all walks of life can afford to live there and do business.”

In 2007, the city spent about $1.5 million to tear down the derelict Westport Homes Extension, a complex of 232 units on the west side of I-295. The demolition was part of a $59 million fund to develop low-income housing. Samuels finds the timing less than fortuitous. “It’s ironic that the city is putting $160 million into TIF funding without fighting for more affordable housing to be put into the project or built elsewhere, and in the meantime it’s tearing down public housing and claiming there’s no money to replace it,” she says.

Haskins has a different point of view. Westport, he says, “has enough poor people already.” As chairman of the board of East Baltimore Development Inc. (EBDI), Haskins says he learned some valuable lessons. A project like Westport is better done “from the top down.”

The EBDI project, on 88 acres to the north of Johns Hopkins Hospital, involves the creation of a $1.8-billion planned community that includes a biotech park and other amenities. The project so far has involved acquiring 1,600 parcels of land and using eminent domain to relocate hundreds of families, a tactic that has caused considerable community backlash. The new housing is planned for three income brackets: market rate, workforce, and affordable. Getting the optimum balance is very delicate, Haskins observes. “If you lead with the market rate [housing], you get tagged as gentrifiers. But if there’s too much low-end, you can’t change the neighborhood dynamic. You have to lead with a stronger mix to offset what’s already there. You’ve got to disproportionately weight it to market rate.”

Westport, with its “long history of not being desirable, needs to become an inspirational place to live,” he says. “The rest will fall into place.”

Turner insists that Westport Waterfront will be a project with income levels that are “across the board,” even in the waterfront housing: “Every building will have some affordable housing in it. Nobody’s gonna know what the guy next door makes.”

If that does indeed happen, CPHA’s Civin notes, it would be a first for Baltimore. “Walk around the harbor,” he says. “It’s hard to think of a recent prime waterfront development that has any affordable housing.”

Selling the neighborhood of Westport on its own reinvention has so far proved to be an easier task than EBDI’s overseers have faced in East Baltimore. Turner first met with Westport residents in 2004, soon after he acquired the first property in his master plan. “We told people to stay in their homes,” he says. At the time, houses were selling for $8,000 to $12,000. “We said, ‘You’ve put up with this shitty neighborhood for most of your life, and speculators are going to come in and offer what seems like a huge amount for your home. Don’t sell.’”

Before she met Turner, Deborah Guest had heard the buzz in the neighborhood. “People were saying this big developer was coming around and he was gonna take your house away,” she recalls. “But I didn’t see that. Nobody’s had their house taken away.”

Linda Towe, who doesn’t live in Westport but volunteers for a community organization called Project T.O.O.U.R. (Teaching Our Own Understanding and Responsibility), has had more difficult relationships with the Turner camp. She complains that community demands for a traffic study haven’t been met and recalls fears that Turner planned to acquire homes along Wenburn Street, a major entry point to the waterfront site, by eminent domain. Losing their homes, she says, remains an “underlying concern” of many residents.

Beth Strommen, currently the director of the city’s Office of Sustainability, was southern district community planner for the city planning commission at the time. One early planning option, she says, was to widen the residential Wenburn Street into a boulevard. After word got out, flyers were posted in the neighborhood warning of Turner’s alleged predation. The real fear, says Strommen, was of change. “People were wondering, ‘What’s going to happen to me when all this change occurs?’”

As EBDI chair, Joe Haskins learned a few things about how a big development project can invite a ferocious backlash from existing residents. “Many low income communities see ‘urban renewal’ as ‘urban removal.’ You have to work quickly to debunk that.” Toward that end, Turner hired a full-time community liaison, Bonnie Crockett, a former banking attorney who had worked as executive director of the Federal Hill Main Street program. Crockett, now director of Westport Community Partnerships, has helped Turner disburse more than $250,000 to the neighborhood so far, funding football uniforms and tree plantings (in partnership with the Parks & People Foundation) and a high school scholarship program. He established a $50,000 fund to match homeowners’ façade improvements, up to $2,000 per property. So far, twenty residents have signed up.

Turner’s involvement with Westport’s residents was key to selling the project to its first partner, Landex Corp., which recently signed a contract to build two hundred apartments—most luxury, with thirty low-income rentals—on about an acre, says Catherine Fennell, whose real estate consulting firm, Heatherbrook Development, is working with Landex. “Usually people wait until they have all their approvals before they start working with the community,” says Fennell, who was development director for the city’s Department of Housing and Community Development from 1994 until 2000. Turner started early. As a result, “the project will go more smoothly than it would if he’d come in and tried to ram it down their throats.”

Fennell describes Turner as a “holistic developer”; Bonnie Crockett says he follows a sort of Hippocratic oath: “Do no harm.” Garth Rockcastle, dean of the University of Maryland School of Architecture, thinks that Turner’s concerns for the existing residents are authentic reflections of his own hardcrabble beginnings. “He identifies with his constituencies,” says Rockcastle, who has informally consulted with Turner on design elements. “He’s a self-made person and recognizes the potential in others.” Most developers, he adds, “would only do what they need to do, to get what they want.”

In Westport, it’s an approach that has paid off. “There’s no opposition,” Turner says. It’s an exaggeration, but not by much. “Even someone renovating a rowhouse has opposition. Everybody loves us. All the environmental groups. The city. The state. The neighborhood. We’re lifting them up.”

Like Pat Turner, Deborah Guest has her own vision of a neighborhood transformed. It’s more modest than the fanciful second skyline of towers in Turner’s digital renderings. There will be jobs, and her three surviving kids might consider moving back to the neighborhood. The streets of Westport will be safer, so she won’t have to worry about her grandchildren. “I see families coming back together and the open air drug market leaving,” she says.

She tells a story about the last time a big developer swept into her life. Back in 1984, she went to housing court because her landlord had refused to fix the furnace, the toilet, or the locks on the doors. One day she got a phone call from a housing advocate who told her that a man named Jim Rouse had set up a program to help people like Guest buy their own homes. “We were both crying,” Guest recalls.

Rouse, the celebrated real estate titan who developed Harborplace and founded the planned community of Columbia, established the nonprofit Enterprise Foundation (now Enterprise Community Partners) in 1982 to encourage affordable housing. The foundation handed Guest a $16,000 loan, enough for her to buy the house on Maisel Street—the house she still owns, the house she plans to keep.

“People see Pat Turner and think he’s gonna take and take and take,” Guest says. “But when I look at Pat Turner’s face, I see Mr. Jimmy.”