Market-rate housing plans for a portion of the 88-acre East Baltimore Development Inc. project were unveiled Thursday before a city design panel.

The three-story, red brick and wood paneled houses are expected to be listed in the $200,000 range, said Dennis Miller, a former EBDI executive who is now a vice president for Ryland Homes, developer of the houses.

The 45 proposed town homes – to be built along East Eager Street between Washington and Chester Streets – will replace vacant, blighted houses cleared as part of the massive EBDI project north and northeast of the Johns Hopkins medical complex that has been riddled in controversy over the last 12 years.

Activists and community members recently staged a rally two blocks from the proposed town houses, at St. Wenceslaus Hall, lamenting the lack of “affordable” housing in the predominately black and poor neighborhood.

Gated Community

Each house will have between two and four bedrooms, a garage attached to the ground floor off of the back alley, a rear deck on an upper floor and bay windows, Ryland architect Steven M. Harden told the city’s Urban Design and Architecture Review Panel.

A portion of Castle Street that runs in the middle of the small cluster of proposed homes will be gated and closed off. A small park with four trees and three park benches will be constructed there for the residents, Harden said.

The UDARP panel voted to approve the schematic designs for the town homes, but further consideration of additional design work is expected to be presented to the group in the near future.

The design shows four groups of boxy three-level town homes, one on each quadrant near the 2000 block of E. Eager St. The block was recently razed of its vacant, blighted houses to make way for new housing at EBDI with funds from a national mortgage settlement obtained through a massive lawsuit by a group of U.S. attorneys general.

One UDARP member, Diane Jones Allen, called the design “modern with a Baltimore flavor.”

Scott Levitan, senior vice president for Forest City-New East Baltimore Partnership, the master developer of the EBDI project, told the UDARP panel that a grocer had expressed interest in building a 40,000-square foot store nearby on property once cleared for a private biotech research building at Washington and Ashland Avenues.

Levitan declined to disclose details about the potential grocery store.