Was it really all just about “slum clearing?”

The murky finances and unmet goals of the Johns Hopkins biopark are detailed today in the first installment of an investigative series in the Maryland Daily Record that was five months in the making: “A Dream Derailed.”

The $1.8 billion project has fallen so far short of what Hopkins, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Baltimore city officials and other principals promised ten years ago when it began – biotech companies filling five buildings and hiring thousands of people from the community – that the development is being renamed and re-branded, authors Melody Simmons and Joan Jacobson report.

The 88-acre project – which leveled huge swaths of row homes and relocated their primarily low-income African-American occupants — is now being reshaped as a combination of middle-class homes and commercial development that will include a hotel, grocery store and restaurants.

(A consultant is being paid to rename the community, which has referred to itself since the 70s as “Middle East,” according to a sidebar story on angry reaction to the idea.)

“It’s not going to be a biotech park,” said Shale D. Stiller, a Baltimore lawyer and civic leader who is a member of several boards deeply invested in the project and who was quoted in the Record story.

Why didn’t more biotech companies come?

“It was because of our inability to attract it. I don’t know why it didn’t happen. The University of Maryland did a very good job across town,” Stiller told the record. (He served on the board of East Baltimore Development Inc. (EBDI) and is a trustee emeritus of the boards of Johns Hopkins Medicine, Johns Hopkins Health Systems and Johns Hopkins Hospital.)

The authors also examined the way financing for the project was described in its early years and found, after reviewing financial records, that more taxpayer dollars, and fewer private ones, were actually spent.

EBDI’s CEO, Christopher Shea, noted in the story that housing for Hopkins graduate students is moving forward, as are plans to put a state  laboratory for the state Department of Health and Mental Hygiene in the development.

Part of the effort may be “way behind in some line in the sand [drawn] in 2002, but not behind now in my priorities to successfully resettle the community,” Shea told The Record.