Sixty years ago when Sharon Duncan was a girl, her mother rented their two-story rowhouse on Mura Street for $12 a week.

By the time Sharon was an adult and employed at a hospital, she moved a few doors away and paid a landlord $275 a month. Given the option of buying the house, she jumped in at $15,000.

She’s lived on Mura Street, in Johnston Square, for 40 years now – long after most of her neighbors left.

“Mine is the green one,” she says, pointing to the only house on the north side of the 700 block that looks inhabited.

The houses on the left and right are vacant and boarded up, as are 19 other rowhouses in the short block between Greenmount Avenue and Homewood Avenue. You can see sky through some of them, their roofs gone with the wind.

For years, a diminishing number of residents of the western end of Johnston Square watched as the homes around them were abandoned – “It got lonely,” Sharon says – and many of the homeowners who stayed could not afford major repairs to their aging houses.

But change has been coming to Johnston Square, and not in a small way.

247 Vacants Rehabbed

With its “community-driven, whole block, block-by-block” approach, ReBUILD Metro has started to counter six decades of disinvestment in some of East Baltimore’s most distressed neighborhoods – from Greenmount West to Broadway East and Oliver in between.

Johnston Square, and the slated redevelopment of homes in the 700 block of Mura Street, is just its latest project.

Since 2016, the nonprofit says, ReBUILD Metro has acquired and rehabbed 247 vacants and constructed another 30 single-family homes on open lots. All of that development, ReBUILD Metro says, has resulted in population growth of 370 residents in the Greenmount West area and 388 in the Oliver and Broadway East neighborhoods.

In addition, ReBUILD demolished 13 rowhouses and consolidated dozens of vacant lots to build two apartment buildings, the 60-unit Willows at Greenmount Avenue and Chase Street, and a second one, with 109 units, in the 1100 block of Greenmount, between East Biddle Street and East Chase Street. It is scheduled to open later this year.

There’s a new branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library coming, plus a large park with an athletic field.

Add it up and you start to see hope in places that seemed to be either crumbling or empty just a few years ago.

ReBUILD’s work in Johnston Square started in earnest in 2018. One of its eye-catching projects is Teachers Square, 15 rowhouses along East Biddle Street designed for “affordable, collaborative living for early-career teachers.” Those units opened last September and are full.

In February, ReBUILD finished rehabbing four more rowhouses in the 700 block of East Preston Street, part of a group of 28 Johnston Square vacants that contractors fixed up over the previous year. In all, ReBUILD reports having restored 45 vacants in the neighborhood; some were sold, some are rented.

Next up: Mura Street

The $5.5 million redevelopment of Sharon Duncan’s block will result in 16 vacant houses being transformed into eight double-wide homes. Two more rowhouses will be rebuilt. Three others will be torn down to provide parking for new and long-time residents.

When the project officially got underway last Wednesday, City Councilman Jermaine Jones noted that the plan calls for transforming the Mura Street rowhouses, not demolishing them.

“The work is being done in a way that is intentional, and it is preserving history,” he said. “These types of houses are often the first houses to get torn down, and their history gets eliminated. With this project, their history will instead be preserved.”

The plan calls for preserving history, not tearing it down.

State Senator Cory V. McCray (D, 45th) praised ReBUILD’s “whole block” approach to redevelopment.

As he spoke, two men in hardhats were at work in the empty house next to Sharon Duncan’s. She’ll soon be hearing a lot of construction noise, but she’s excited about the project. In fact, she says, she’s thinking of doing a deal to move from her rowhouse into one of the new double-wides.

“Ten years ago, ReBUILD made a commitment to Johnston Square residents that we would work with them to eliminate the vacancy plaguing their neighborhood,” says Sean Closkey, ReBUILD’s president and an expert in the kind of financial strategy necessary to pull off the redevelopment of neglected neighborhoods.

Financing ReBUILD’s work requires cobbling together funding from foundations and private donors as well as Maryland and Baltimore housing agencies.

“We still have lots of work to do to reach that goal, [but] our tremendous progress shows that it is well within reach,” Closkey says. “This change was only possible because we have worked hand-in-hand with the community every step of the way.”

Looking out for Longtimers

It was another veteran Johnston Square resident, Regina Hammond, who partnered with Closkey to get things moving. She’s executive director of the Rebuild Johnston Square Neighborhood Organization.

Hammond is particularly bullish on seeing that longtime residents are respected, and that they stay in Johnston Square as long as they want. In fact, 33 longtimers, including Sharon Duncan, have been able to get major home repairs and new appliances through a state program designed for “legacy homeowners.”

On Wednesday, Hammond stood at a podium in the middle of Mura Street, a few feet away from a community garden with a white wooden fence and a sign that said, “It’s a New Day in Johnston Square.”

A few years ago, the garden was a dumping ground. At one of the neighborhood organization’s monthly meetings, where ReBUILD’s plans were being discussed, a woman asked: “What about Mura Street?”

And that’s when things started to happen along that little block.

“We created some beauty over here”  – Regina Hammond.

“We ended up writing a few small grants, and we called on our partners at The 6th Branch,” Hammond says, referring to the veterans organization that has done so much good work, including trash removal, in Oliver and other neighborhoods.

“I said to six friends, ‘Put me a fence up here.’ I got a couple of bucks to buy the materials. So all of us came out one day. We swept this street. We created this garden,” she recalled. “We ended up getting some paint [for] all the boarded-up houses to make it look a little better because we knew some way, somehow, our prayer was going to get answered, and this neighborhood was going to be revitalized.

“So we created some beauty over here,” Hammond said, pointing to the garden.

“We have so many great projects going on,” she continued. “And it’s because of all the wonderful people and the partners that have listened to us, pulled together with us, prayed with us.

“Even though we didn’t know what was going to happen, we knew something had to happen, and that something, that blessing, is here today.”