On October 7, ReBUILD Metro celebrated 20 Years of building stronger communities with 150 of our neighbors, partners, friends, and community. A birthday belongs to an individual, but an anniversary celebrates something we build together, and this anniversary was to celebrate all of us and how we have been rebuilding Baltimore’s neighborhoods together; how we have changed Baltimore’s story together; how we are proving that transformational community-driven redevelopment is possible together. In celebrating this milestone with so many of our friends and colleagues, we were celebrating everyone who has made our work possible for the last two decades–and everyone who continues to believe in a brighter future for Baltimore.
Here is ReBUILD Metro President Sean Closkey’s reflection on 20 years:
“In 2004, I rode the train from Philadelphia to Baltimore for my first meeting with a group of BUILD pastors in the Oliver neighborhood. The conditions I encountered in Oliver were not unique to Baltimore or Urban America, but that was no consolation to the families living there. It was brutally unsafe and desperate, and it was easy to understand why there was so little hope for a better future. But Pastor Calvin Keene, Bishop Douglas Miles, and a few others were holding onto hope nonetheless, and before long, my colleagues at the Reinvestment Fund and I shared it with them. In time, I was introduced to Tony Deering, and we gained another vital partner, who would ultimately become our first investor—empowering us to convert hope into action.
In April of 2006, we held our first board meeting as a partnership between BUILD and the Reinvestment Fund, and TRF Development Partners—now ReBUILD Metro—formally became a development partner to the Oliver community.
20 years and 600 homes later, Oliver and the surrounding areas of East Baltimore we’ve touched still face many challenges, but their residents are no longer living in fear, and their neighborhoods are no longer crumbling. Raising a family along East Preston Street or East Biddle Street is no longer traumatic. And as wealth and opportunity begin to return, the benefits are washing over the entire community, from new homebuyers to residents who have lived here for decades.
Our community leaders, investors, partners, and team committed to transforming these neighborhoods—through the novel concept of community-driven redevelopment without displacement—and we have realized this goal to a degree many people thought was implausible.
When I take visitors around East Baltimore, I often wonder if it seems like this transformation was simply a matter of developing a 20-year vision and seeing it through, day after day and year after year. I wish it had been that straightforward. Truth be told, ReBUILD’s journey had no shortage of wayward steps, mistaken assumptions, and strokes of good and bad fortune. To survive was a matter of showing up every day, believing our cause was worth holding onto.
But that part was actually the easier one. The course corrections were the greater feats. To tell both an investor and a community member that our redevelopment was going to take years longer than we first thought, or that we needed to rent dozens of properties we had planned to sell, or that we needed support not just to build new homes but to create new parks—that all required a tremendous amount of trust and faith in our work that extended far beyond our walls.
If I’ve learned anything over the last 20 years, it is that trust and faith take even longer to build than houses and blocks, but they carry you even further.
It is an amazing time in ReBUILD’s history: not only because we are so close to fully eliminating abandonment and restoring all of the communities between Penn Station and Johns Hopkins Hospital, but because the web of strong and trustful relationships we have built across our city has now become so well-fortified by our shared experience and success. We are too familiar with challenges and transitions to believe that there won’t be more of them ahead, but we are also more prepared than ever to navigate them, thanks to how many people have now come together and committed to ensuring that our exceptional progress over the last 20 years continues.
There’s real magic in that shared journey, and we are so grateful to everyone who is and has been a part of it. As we celebrate 20 years of building stronger communities, we hope you will stay with us for the next chapter of our story. There is so much more to do, and so much more to come.“
