Residents of Poppleton in West Baltimore are challenging the city’s taking of their homes through eminent domain in a civil rights lawsuit filed Tuesday.
The city’s 2006 agreement for New York-based La Cité to redevelop nearly 14 acres of the neighborhood was unconstitutional and unlawful and resulted in the government seizing more than 500 homes with no public benefit, says the lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Baltimore.
The Poppleton Now Community Association and six residents filed the civil rights case, alleging the city’s contract with the developer violates both federal and state law and should be voided. It names as defendants La Cité and its president, Dan Bythewood, Baltimore’s mayor and City Council, former Mayor Sheila Dixon and other officials.
“They took private property and handed it to a private developer without delivering a public use,” Thomas K. Prevas, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said in an interview. “Poppleton was targeted because it was a minority neighborhood, near amenities like the University of Maryland Medical Center.”
Baltimore officials had not yet been served with the complaint, said Tammy D. Hawley, a spokeswoman for the city’s Department of Housing and Community Development. A representative of La Cité did not immediately respond to requests for comment Tuesday.
City housing officials had announced in June that they were trying to cut ties with La Cité, which officials said defaulted on its land disposition agreement after failing to prove it had financing in place for a senior apartment building long planned for the site. Over 18 years, the developer completed just one apartment complex out of an array of proposed mixed-use buildings across nearly 33 acres.
La Cite responded with a statement that argues it’s Baltimore, not the developer, that’s in breach of the agreement.
The Poppleton residents allege in the lawsuit that the city’s original agreement with La Cité violated their rights because it “takes land from private people by eminent domain but doesn’t even know what the public use is yet and decides they’re going to figure it out later,” Prevas said.
Many of those homes in the historic Black neighborhood were owner-occupied, the lawsuit said.
One plaintiff, Yvonne Gunn, lives in a house on West Fayette Street that her grandparents moved into in 1918, a home affected by condemnation but not itself condemned, the lawsuit said. She and her husband bought the home from an uncle in 1985.
“Over the past decade the long-stalled development project created a sense of fear as the Gunns lost their neighbors, endured tall grass and weeds, and became embarrassed when family would come visit,” the lawsuit says.
She watched as some 70 to 80 neighboring three-story rowhouses similar to hers “were wiped off the face of the earth,” Gunn, a past president of the community association, said in the complaint. “If my house was in Federal Hill or Canton it would have always been worth a half-million dollars.”
But despite her family’s years of care and renovations and after displacement, demolition and disinvestment in Poppleton, her home was assessed at just $50,000, the lawsuit says.
The idea to redevelop Poppleton came about because of the thinking in the early 2000s that revitalization required “heavy-handed government intervention” that could “repair blight caused by segregation, white flight and the end of industry by forced land acquisition and redevelopment,” the lawsuit says.
The plaintiffs also questioned Bythewood’s qualifications.
“The City gave-away more than 500 people’s homes to this Developer because of his campaign of influence over elected leaders, which he used to overcome its deep lack of qualification or capacity,” the lawsuit says.
The plaintiffs are asking the court to find the land agreement void and order the developer to pay back any improper payments it made to the city, with proceeds used to invest in Poppleton. It seeks to force the city to restore to Poppleton at least the value taken from the neighborhood through eminent domain. Prevas estimates that value at least $15 million.
The lawsuit also aims to have the city abolish “illegal land use practices that abuse civil rights and impose disparate treatment
of minorities,” such as urban renewal plans and land banking, the practice of acquiring land for potential future community development use.
