Residents who remember what the Poppleton neighborhood in West Baltimore looked like before a stalled city-backed redevelopment project hollowed out the community went to court about their plight last year.

Today U.S. District Court Judge Adam B. Abelson dismissed their lawsuit, siding with the Scott administration and developer La Cité, who argued that the residents did not have legal standing to bring the sweeping civil rights and constitutional complaint.

Although properties were taken by eminent domain, homes were demolished and hundreds were displaced, the plaintiffs themselves, Edelson wrote, “have not had any property condemned by the government.”

“Beliefs about what might have happened to their property values or neighborhood amenities based on so-called ‘natural market forces’ are too speculative to establish standing,” he continued.

That conclusion baffled longtime resident Sonia Eaddy, one of the six plaintiff who brought the complaint.

“They’re trying to say that the people who remain here, it doesn’t affect us,” said Eaddy, who lives on Carrollton Avenue and serves as president of the Poppleton Now Community Association.

“How can they say that?” she asked. “We live with what they did to us every day.”

The community’s dilapidation was evident last week during a ceremony held to mark the re-opening of Poppleton’s recreation center.

While some nearby houses, like Eaddy’s, are well-kept, many square blocks surrounding the rec center are riddled with boarded-up buildings, trash, graffiti and weedy lots that once held houses.

• Poppleton’s recreation center has reopened. But can the city bring back people to use it? (6/16/25)

The nearby Poe Homes public housing complex, which alone housed 225 families, is also vacant and a dismal sight. Residents were moved out for a redevelopment project with little prospect of being built now under the Trump administration.

“We had a back-to-school night last year and there was very low attendance,” Eaddy said. “I had to explain it to our partners that all the kids are gone, all the young families are gone.”

“Eaddy asserts that the properties bordering her home include vacated and demolished homes, but does not plausibly allege that this ‘emptiness’ has interfered with her own use or enjoyment of her property”  – Judge Adam Abelson.

Eaddy said she was “really disappointed” by the judge’s ruling.

“We are in the process of reviewing the opinion and discussing potential next steps with our clients,” Thomas K. Prevas, one of the plaintiffs’ attorneys, told The Brew today.

“Emptiness” Has Not Interfered

Today’s ruling was the latest twist in a saga that stretches back across five mayoral administrations, starting with former Mayor Sheila Dixon, who is named in the lawsuit.

(Other defendants include Mayor Brandon Scott, Housing Commissioner Alice Kennedy, Housing Authority President Janet Abrahams, and La Cité and its president, Daniel Bythewood Jr.)

It was during the Dixon administration in 2006 that the city signed an agreement handing over 13 acres of land to the untested New York-based company.

As a result of that agreement, more than 500 homes in one of Baltimore’s oldest Black communities were targeted for acquisition by the housing department.

The project was supposed to bring 1,800 units of affordable and upscale housing to the neighborhood as well as a hotel, retail stores, a park and a charter school.

But despite HUD construction loans and city tax increment (TIF) subsidies, all that’s been built by La Cité is a 262-unit apartment complex that owes hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid water bills.

• Ground down and depopulated, Poppleton makes a last stand (7/8/21)

After years of wrangling with the city to get the neighborhood out from under the La Cité deal, Eaddy and her neighbors went to court last year arguing the agreement with Bythewood was unenforceable.

The agreement is an “unconstitutional transfer of wealth of a traditionally underprivileged and oppressed minority group (black individuals) to a politically-favored ally,” the complaint declared, alleging that the city’s use of eminent domain violates the U.S. Constitution.

Asking for a jury trial, the residents demanded that “the value seized” by the developer be returned to the community and “used to abate [the] ongoing nuisance” that the failed project caused.

Abelson’s ruling, though, suggests that his view of Poppleton, despite their 63-page complaint, was vastly different:

“Eaddy asserts that the properties bordering her home include vacated and demolished homes, but does not plausibly allege that this ‘emptiness’ has interfered with her own use or enjoyment of her property in any substantial way,” the judge concludes.