Donald Gresham is willing to vacate his home of 20 years, but he will never leave East Baltimore, his lifelong neighborhood.
"It's where I grew up, where I was educated, where my history is and where I am staying," Gresham told a crowd of nearly 100 gathered yesterday for a housing conference at the East Baltimore Community Resource Center. "I don't plan to go anywhere."
But, like many in the crowd, Gresham will have to go somewhere. His two-bedroom rowhouse on Chester Street is slated for demolition.
Much of the area that extends east from Greenmount Avenue to Edison Highway is undergoing sweeping changes to make way for an $800 million biotechnology park on 88 acres adjacent to Johns Hopkins Hospital, a project that is well under way.
Although Gresham's home will be razed, other houses in the neighborhood will be preserved and renovated. He wants one of those restored houses in a simple transfer of property with no increased debt - a house for his house.
"They can just [relocate] me right into another house right here in East Baltimore," he said. "We have the gold mine. They have to fix this for us."
"A House for a House" has become the rallying cry for the Save Middle East Action Committee, an advocacy group for displaced homeowners, which Gresham chairs.
The conference gave residents a chance to voice their complaints to East Baltimore Development Inc., the nonprofit organization created by the city to manage the project. The corporation is negotiating the property settlements, overseeing the renovations and assisting residents with relocations.
"We are planning a strong, mixed-income community with plenty of options," said John T. "Jack" Shannon Jr., president of EBDI.
The company helped relocate nearly 400 homeowners in the first phase of the project.
Shannon said a survey his group commissioned revealed that eight out of 10 of those relocated were satisfied with the process.
Shrene Burnett left the neighborhood in the initial phase for a home in Hamilton that more than tripled her mortgage.
"We were the guinea pigs and there were a lot of bumps," she said. "But we stood our ground."
She still serves as the action committee secretary and on the EBDI board of directors. She said she might eventually move back to East Baltimore. She would have many housing choices, Shannon said.
