The Disappearing Rowhouse Neighborhoods of Baltimore and ...

The Disappearing Rowhouse 

Neighborhoods of Baltimore 

and Philadelphia: 

What’s an Urbanist to Do 

By Philip Langdon | 2001 Knight Program Fellow 

Knight Program in Community Building at University of Miami School of Architecture

1 

Contents 

2 

Abstract 

3 

Full Report 

27 

Plans 

Cover 

A partial block of abandoned rowhouses off Cecil B. Moore Avenue in North Philadelphia.

2 

The Disappearing Rowhouse Neighborhoods of 

Baltimore and Philadelphia: What’s an Urbanist to Do 


Bio 

Philip Langdon is a widely 

published freelance journalist 

and author of books including 

A Better Place to Live: 

Reshaping the American 

Suburb (University of 

Massachusetts Press, 1994) 

and Urban Excellence (Van 

Nostrand Reinhold, 1990). 

He is also senior editor of the 

national design and planning 

newsletter New Urban News. 

Abstract 

This paper examines the responses of Baltimore and Philadelphia to the 

deterioration or abandonment of low-income rowhouse neighborhoods. Strategies 

and tactics that are discussed include: renovating rundown rowhouses with 

public subsidies; combining narrow rowhouses to make wider, more marketable 

homes; demolishing individual rowhouses; transferring cleared lots to adjacent 

homeowners; demolishing entire blocks of unmarketable small rowhouses along 

alleys; creating neighborhood parks where alley houses stood; converting vacant 

land into community gardens; building new rowhouses with modern amenities; 

and “de-densifying” the city by constructing detached or semi-detached houses. 

This paper examines why many of these approaches have frequently failed. 

Among the points made: 1) Spot rehab has often been ineffective because as 

some houses were improved, others fell into abandonment, leaving the neighborhoods 

just as deteriorated as they had been at the start. 2) New parks in 

former alley areas received little natural surveillance, and tended to become 

neglected and vulnerable to crime. 3) New rowhouses with parking in front 

sacrifice the traditional semi-enclosed feeling of the streets. 4) Semi-detached 

houses (known in Philadelphia as “twins”) rob the streets of definition if they 

are not properly sited. 5) Combining side-by-side units can save blocks of rowhouses, 

but the cost is too high to do this extensively. 

Some of the more successful approaches have been: 1) Transfer of abandoned 

lots to next-door neighbors. 2) Community gardens on vacant land. Gardens 

and maintenance of vacant land have created a more orderly, hopeful atmosphere 

and brought out neighborhood volunteers. 3) Establishment of small parks 

surrounded by the fronts of houses, or private outdoor spaces closely supervised 

from the backs of houses, has created valuable urban amenities in some neighborhoods. 

4) An architectural competition in Philadelphia that produced interesting 

ideas for shallow rowhouses wrapping around secluded interior landscapes. 

These rowhouses would reduce neighborhood density, yet define the streets. 

The author argues that cities should be more strategic about demolition, 

should have different policies for neighborhoods with varying conditions, should 

focus on bolstering transitional neighborhoods, and should try to revitalize the 

city as a whole by attracting middle- to upper-income residents. Middle-income 

people can be attracted to areas with good prospects for revival, such as those 

near downtowns, employment centers, universities, hospitals, and amenities. 

Administrative approaches such as a clearinghouse for information about vacant 

properties may reduce the volume of derelict land and buildings.

3 

The Disappearing Rowhouse Neighborhoods of 

Baltimore and Philadelphia: What’s an Urbanist to Do 


Photo 

A partial block of abandoned 

rowhouses off Cecil B. Moore 

Avenue in North Philadelphia. 

In few urban areas of the United States is neighborhood abandonment now 

more acute than in the rowhouse sections of Philadelphia and Baltimore. In Baltimore, 

a city famous for block after block of rowhouses with white marble steps, abandonment 

has run rampant. More than 13,000 of Baltimore’s residential structures sit abandoned, 

95 percent of them rowhouses. 1 In Philadelphia nearly 25,000 rowhouses are vacant 

and unlikely to be reoccupied. Sixty percent have been empty for more than a decade. 

How did this problem develop What remedies have been tried How have those 

efforts fared What approaches now seem in order This paper 

attempts to answer those questions and to point toward strategies 

that can help cities address the problem of neighborhood 

abandonment. Research for this report included visits, under 

the auspices of the Knight Program in Community Building at 

the University of Miami School of Architecture, to many 

Baltimore and Philadelphia neighborhoods and interviews in 

those two cities with a variety of people, ranging from architects 

to city planners to leaders of neighborhood community development 

corporations. 

Origins of Rowhouse Neighborhoods 

In Maryland, southern Pennsylvania, and other sections of the Eastern seaboard, 

the rowhouse has a long history. In both the “greene country towne” that William 

Penn laid out along the Delaware River in 1682 and in Baltimore, founded on 

Chesapeake Bay in 1729, rows of buildings sharing sidewalls with their neighbors 

were the main form of urban housing in the 1800s. Tight-knit development, with 

buildings standing shoulder to shoulder, remained the dominant pattern in those 

two cities into the 20th century. 

The rowhouse form was compact enough form a conveniently walkable community 

and variable enough to accommodate a broad spectrum of economic classes. In the 

19th century, prosperous people tended to live in high-ceilinged, three-story rowhouses, 

which were often built along main streets or looking onto parks such as 

Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square and Baltimore’s Union Square. People with little 

money inhabited tiny rowhouses – shallow, lower-ceilinged, two-story dwellings, the 

1 As of August 2001, there were 13,410 abandoned (technically, long-term vacant) houses in Baltimore, according to the Baltimore City 

Housing and Community Development office. The City was demolishing about 10 properties a week. In addition to abandoned houses, 

Baltimore had about 24,000 houses that were classified as vacant and presumably ready for occupancy — thus not abandoned, at 

least not yet.

Langdon/Disappearing Rowhouse 4 

humblest of which were built along alleys behind the larger houses. As Mary Ellen 

Hayward and Charles Belfoure report in their authoritative book, The Baltimore 

Rowhouse, some 19th-century dwellings, particularly on the alleys, were just 10 1 ⁄ 2 

to 12 feet wide. 2 

Because of rapid industrialization, both Baltimore and Philadelphia grew frenetically 

between the Civil War and World War I. Thousands upon thousands of jobs 

emerged in the factories, ports, ship yards, and rail systems. Speculatively built 

rowhouses provided most of the housing that modestly paid workers could afford. 

Although streetcar lines made it possible by the late 19th century for middle-income 

families to live in more spread-out surroundings miles from their workplaces, many 

blue-collar workers couldn’t afford twice-a-day trolley fare. They didn’t have to; 

urban neighborhoods contained factories and mills right next to houses or within a 

few blocks of them. Employees walked to work, walked to taverns, walked to neighborhood 

stores. 

As decades passed, the forms and styles of rowhouses evolved. Some were built 

with undulating façades or with bay windows that punctuated the street and brought 

extra light into the second floor. Whereas old rowhouses had their doors and windows 

up against the sidewalk, some of the newer homes featured front porches. By the 

early 20th century, rowhouses for middle-class homebuyers in newly developing 

areas like Charles Village, three miles north of downtown Baltimore, had not only 

porches but also front yards, further shielding the homes’ interiors from the public 

sidewalks. Rowhouses remained a common form of development until after World 

War II, when detached houses and automobile-reliant suburbanization became the 

new norm. 

Sadly for the cities, the intimate mixing of workplaces and housing broke down 

almost entirely in the last half-century. Much of the economy – even clean businesses 

seemingly compatible with residential neighborhoods – stopped locating within 

walking distance of where people lived. Instead they gravitated to vehicle-oriented 

development away from central cities. Urban manufacturing suffered a huge decline, 

a calamity from which cities such as Philadelphia and Baltimore have not yet recovered. 

American Street in North Philadelphia, a broad thoroughfare with steel rails down 

its center for freight trains, was in its heyday a huge source of employment, with 

one company after another along its length. Now it is an industrial wasteland. 

The tracks remain, but the boxcars, the businesses, and most of the buildings are 

gone. The disappearance of industrial jobs has aggravated the deterioration of the 

2 This paper incorporates historical information from Hayward and Belfoure’s The Baltimore Rowhouse 

(New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999).


Photo 

A partly vacant block of alley 

houses in the Boyd-Booth neighborhood 

in Baltimore. Lack of 

outdoor space and lack of parking 

are two of a number of factors 

that have resulted in widespread 

abandonment of alley houses. 

residential areas nearby. Baltimore has experienced an industrial exodus and neighborhood 

decline similar to Philadelphia’s. In the past dozen years, thousands of jobs 

at plants like the Procter & Gamble complex overlooking the Baltimore waterfront 

have vanished. 

Abandoning the Neighborhoods 

As neighborhoods have become poorer, crime-ridden, and bereft of legitimate 

jobs, many houses have been sold to absentee landlords or have deteriorated after 

their elderly owners died. Landlords have milked their properties and abandoned 

them when they turned unprofitable. Unoccupied houses have been stripped or used 

for drug hangouts and other illegal activities. With their doors and windows covered 

by plywood, chipboard, or sheet metal or left open to the elements, derelict houses 

have given their neighborhoods a shabby appearance, exacerbating the demoralization. 

Many of the most decayed houses have been razed, but spot demolition has 

fallen far short of solving the neighborhoods’ problems. In Philadelphia, when one 

unit in a rowhouse block is demolished, the newly exposed walls of the neighboring 

units may get a coating of stucco. More substantial fix-ups are rare. “As some of the 

units are taken down, the rows are destabilized,” says Rose Gray, director of housing 

development for Asociación De Puertorriqueños En Marcha (APM, or Puerto Ricans 

on the March), one of Philadelphia’s most active community development corporations. 

In the units left standing, walls bulge, floors slope, and leaks develop. With weedy, 

trash-strewn lots to complete the effect, it’s hardly surprising that blight 

continues to spread. 

Baltimore, like Philadelphia, contains many vacant rowhouses that are vulnerable 

to the weather and to intruders. In some instances, abandoned 

units in Baltimore have had their window and door openings 

filled in with cinderblock masonry to deter further problems. 

Where demolition has created gaps in the rows of houses, the 

city has sometimes built new cinderblock sidewalls to stabilize the 

adjacent houses. The cost of the sidewalls, however, is substantial 

– about $10,000 per wall, according to Patrick McMahon of 

Baltimore’s Neighborhood Design Center. 3 

3 The cinderblock walls in Baltimore look neater and more regular than the rough stucco walls in Philadelphia. McMahon notes, however, that 

the money devoted to building cinderblock walls is not always well spent. In some instances, a house that has been stabilized ends up being 

abandoned a short time later. Consequently, McMahon says, it would sometimes be wiser to do more demolition at the outset and not try to 

preserve houses whose remaining life appears brief.


The Exorbitant Cost of Citywide Rehabilitation 

Some demolition is unavoidable. Philadelphia officials estimated in August 2000 

that approximately 3,100 of that city’s vacant residential buildings were in danger of 

collapse. Only a small proportion can be rehabilitated, because the cost greatly outruns 

what people are willing to pay for renovated units. Public funds, drawn mainly 

from federal Community Development Block Grants (CDBG), can support housing 

rehabilitation, but the sums are minuscule compared to the need. In 1996, when the 

number of vacant rowhouses in Philadelphia was estimated at 27,000, John Kromer, 

director of the City’s Office of Housing and Community Development, made the 

following calculations: 

• Nineteen thousand of the unoccupied rowhouses were “long-term vacant” – so 

neglected that they would cost an average of $110,000 each to rehabilitate. 

Rehabbing all 19,000 would cost $2.09 billion – 69 times the size of the housing 

production portion of Philadelphia’s CDBG budget. 

• Six thousand were “short-term vacant units” (structurally sound and unoccupied 

for less than three years), costing an average of $45,000 each to fix up. 

Rehabbing those would cost $270 million – nine times the City’s housing 

production budget. 

• Two thousand were “move-ins” – vacant dwellings ready for occupancy and not 

in need of repair. 

• Ten thousand currently occupied rowhouses were deemed likely to go vacant in 

the future because they were over a century old, needed more than $35,000 in 

structural or systems work, were occupied by lower-income residents unable to 

afford financing, or were located on blocks suffering significant vacancy problems. 

Those would cost another $350 million to return to good condition. 

The bill added up to an astronomical sum: $2.7 billion. If the costs of rehabilitation 

were calculated for Baltimore, the results there would also be enormous. It is 

folly, then, to think that enough money will become available to eliminate the problem 

of abandoned housing. Philadelphia’s population has plummeted from a peak of 

2,072,000 in 1950 to 1,517,000 in 2000, and Baltimore’s has fallen from a 1950 

peak of 950,000 to 617,000. In neither city do officials foresee a reversal of the 

downward trend. Consequently, they have concluded that it’s foolish to insist on 

retaining all the housing from a vanished industrial era.


Photo 

Sears Street in the Grays Ferry 

neighborhood in South 

Philadelphia, where pairs of small 

rowhouses built in the 1890s 

were combined to make houses 

twice as large. All of the original 

doorways were retained, though 

some are no longer used. 

What to Do with Tiny Houses 

Many rowhouses in Baltimore and Philadelphia were built just 12 or 14 feet 

wide, putting them at a disadvantage in today’s real estate market, where houses are 

generally less cramped. There are ways to bring these houses up to today’s standards 

if funds are available for major renovation. 

In the Sandtown-Winchester area of Baltimore and in the Grays Ferry neighborhood 

in Philadelphia, pairs of adjacent units have been combined to form 

dwellings twice as large. In Grays Ferry, a section of South 

Philadelphia near the Schuylkill River, the rowhouses in the 2700 

block of Sears Street were constructed 14 feet wide, 30 feet 

deep, and two stories high in the 1890s. When new, they stood 

within walking distance of a multitude of employers – brickyards, 

lumber yards, coal yards, foundries, chemical and ammonia 

works, riverside docks, a boiler company, a stone crusher, a 

cooperage, and the Electric Car Company of America, which 

manufactured streetcars. By 1998, nearly all the employment 

was gone. Sears Street had become blighted with abandoned 

houses and crack dens. 

The Philadelphia Housing Development Corporation then stepped in. Using 

$1.9 million from the U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development, in 

1998 and 1999 the Housing Development Corporation converted 36 vacant cityowned 

rowhouses into 21 renovated units with new roof joists, new drywall, and 

new electrical, plumbing, and heating systems. In most cases, two units became one. 

Party walls were breached in two locations on each floor to produce three-bedroom, 

1 1 ⁄ 2-bath dwellings. To preserve the block’s architectural integrity, all the front 

doorways were preserved even when only one doorway per combined residence was 

kept in service. The project saved homes exhibiting many pleasing touches: marble 

bases, marble steps and sills, segmental-arch windows, marble voussoirs (wedgeshaped 

stones in an arch), and pressed metal cornices. The cost of making a spacious 

new unit from two narrow, dilapidated rowhouses was roughly $105,000. They sold 

for only $32,000 – less than a third of what the government invested in them – but 

they managed to preserve a block that would almost certainly have fallen into ruin.


Photo 

Rowhouses on Elfreth Alley in 

the historic Old City section of 

Philadelphia are in high demand 

despite their extreme narrowness 

and their location on a lane wide 

enough for just one vehicle. 

Not all houses 12 feet wide are obsolete. In 

resurgent Baltimore neighborhoods like Federal 

Hill, Otterbein, Fells Point, and Canton and in 

Philadelphia neighborhoods like Society Hill and 

Old City, people will eagerly live in narrow little 

houses on passages barely wide enough for one vehicle. 

No building type is obsolete if it’s in the right place. 

Usually that means a location that has a nearby 

employment center, a waterfront, an animated 

cultural life, or other powerful amenities. 

In rough sections of North Philadelphia, some 

narrow streets lined with thin two-story rowhouses 

remain substantially intact even while nearby blocks 

have crumbled. Why Partly because small, two-story 

rowhouses are comparatively inexpensive to keep up. “In regular [i.e., modestincome] 

neighborhoods, the smaller the houses, the better they’re taken care of,” 

says Belfoure, the Baltimore rowhouse historian. The intimate scale of the blocks 

with small rowhouses – where the streets are narrow and neighbors get to know one 

another – may generate solidarity among the residents. 

On the other hand, if some residents make noise or create other disturbances in 

such tightly built surroundings, the effect on the neighbors is magnified, and some 

of them react by moving out, says Ed Rutkowski, executive director of the Patterson 

Park Community Development Corp. in Baltimore. In neighborhoods besieged by 

poverty, crime, drugs, and bad schools, long-term demand for tiny rowhouses is 

not encouraging. Even in North Philadelphia blocks that have remained intact, it’s 

common for one or more dwellings to be empty, presaging more abandonment in 

the years ahead. 

These houses have dim prospects primarily because they’re located in neighborhoods 

that people with choices don’t want to live in – neighborhoods short on jobs, 

stores, restaurants, parks, money, and variety. Such neighborhoods are monocultures 

– block after block of working-class homes, without the diversity of uses and the 

range of house sizes and types that have sparked the revival of better-situated neighborhoods, 

like those in Philadelphia’s prospering Center City.


The Failure of Rehabilitation 

For a long while, the hope persisted that if enough rundown rowhouses were 

fixed up, they would attract occupants, and the neighborhoods would spring back to 

life. “Generally, there was a level of optimism that if we kept rehabbing houses, we 

would eventually turn the tide, and people would move back into the city,” says 

Michael Seipp, former executive director of the Historic East Baltimore Community 

Action Coalition. Those hopes proved realistic in Center City Philadelphia and in 

Baltimore neighborhoods like Otterbein, where houses were offered to “urban 

homesteaders” for a dollar. But poor, crime-ridden neighborhoods lacking proximity 

to downtown have been hard to reclaim, at least with the strategies that the cities 

have tried. 

The scant results have caused many observers to call for a more tough-minded 

policy on public investment. “For years, governments have directed the most 

resources to the areas that are the hardest to revive,” says Ed Rutkowski, whose 

Patterson Park Community Development Corporation serves Patterson Park, a 

transitional neighborhood in southeast Baltimore. The city and developer-philanthropist 

James Rouse’s Enterprise Foundation have spent large sums since the 1980s 

to rehabilitate the Sandtown-Winchester section of West Baltimore. “The notion 

was that if you dump enough money in, you can change [a place like Sandtown- 

Winchester],” says Marcus Pollock, a board member of the Patterson Park CDC. 

Despite the substantial aid, including grants and low-interest loans, “at the end of 

the day, you end up with the same intransigent problems,” Pollock says. The 

problems have proven intractable in Sandtown-Winchester and in much of an area 

called “Historic East Baltimore,” just north of Patterson Park. After former Mayor 

Kurt Schmoke had directed millions of dollars to the most rundown areas, the 

current mayor, Martin O’Malley, concluded that this produced too little lasting 

result per dollar spent. 

A similar conclusion has been reached by many in Philadelphia. John Carpenter, 

former executive director of the New Kensington Community Development Corporation 

in eastern North Philadelphia, says, “So much of Philadelphia’s community 

development money in the last generation has been spent in the most deteriorated 

neighborhoods. A half-billion dollars has been spent in North Philadelphia in the 

last 10 years. Can you tell”


Photo 

Rear of a block of rowhouses in 

West Baltimore, where alley 

houses have been demolished. 

It is often difficult to make 

effective use of the land where 

alley houses stood. 

John Kromer, who headed the Office of Housing and Community Development 

throughout Ed Rendell’s eight years as mayor and who is now at the Fels Center 

of Government at the University of Pennsylvania, points out that when cities use 

subsidies to renovate old houses or construct new ones, people often move into the 

new or rehabbed housing from older, less habitable houses. The old housing then 

slips into abandonment. Good new housing benefits the families that occupy it, but 

the city as a whole may not be better off. That fact was long ignored by elected 

officials and neighborhood groups. Today many observers are coming to recognize 

that cities have to avoid spending limited funds in ways that mainly shift abandonment 

from one site to another. 

Consequently, many rowhouses will come down – if not soon, then over a 

period of years. Fourteen thousand decrepit houses in Philadelphia are expected to 

be razed as part of the $295 million Neighborhood Transformation Initiative bond 

issue proposed by Mayor John F. Street. In Baltimore, Michael Seipp, who now 

heads the rental housing division of the Baltimore developer Struever Brothers, 

Eccles & Rouse, forecasts that his city’s troubled neighborhoods will “continue to 

lose another 800 to 1,000 houses a year.” 

In decayed neighborhoods, houses on narrow alleys are particularly expendable. 

Alley houses were often cheaply built, on crawl spaces. Often offering only 800 to 

900 square feet, two bedrooms and one bathroom and no outdoor space, they were 

low on amenities to begin with. Their streets are too narrow to accommodate on-street 

parking or even to allow vehicles to turn onto an off-street parking area. In many 

areas, they have been left to deteriorate 

and are logical candidates for demolition. 

Nonetheless, the situation must 

be examined neighborhood by neighborhood 

and block by block. No one 

approach will suit every location.


Below Left 

A garden on the site of 

razed rowhouses in a West 

Baltimore neighborhood. 

Below Right 

Sites of two razed rowhouses 

have become a neighbor’s 

sideyard on West Lexington 

Street in Baltimore. 

What to Do with Empty Land 

Until the seriously deteriorated neighborhoods are reclaimed, there will be 

gaps in the urban fabric — gaps that become eyesores. To address the problem of 

unkempt, unsupervised vacant lots, the City of Philadelphia has transferred some of 

the lots to adjacent homeowners who want to acquire them. The City of Baltimore 

is considering doing the same. Possible uses could include off-street parking, gardens, 

or side yards. In Baltimore the Neighborhood Design Center is exploring the 

introduction of a bracing system for rowhouse sidewalls made vulnerable by demolition 

of adjoining dwellings. The bracing would stabilize the walls and eliminate the 

need for costly new sidewalls of cinder block. The bracing system also would make it 

easier to insert window or door openings into a newly exposed sidewall, thus giving 

the residents direct access to, and surveillance of, the side lot. Mark Cameron, executive 

director of the Neighborhood Design Center, says that when Baltimore begins 

transferring cleared lots to next-door neighbors, some method of inserting windows 

and doors into the sidewalls will be essential, whether it involves a bracing system or 

the placement of windows and doors in cinder-block walls. Twenty-six years ago the 

Pennsylvania Horticultural Society launched a program called Philadelphia Green, to 

work with community groups to green up that city in a variety of ways, including 

making vacant land more presentable. One of the groups involved in Philadelphia 

Green is the New Kensington Community Development Corporation, serving the 

Kensington, Fishtown, and Port Richmond neighborhoods in eastern North 

Philadelphia. Founded in 1985, the New Kensington CDC focused for its first several 

years on rehabilitating or constructing housing. But the improvements the CDC 

made to the housing stock failed to stem the decline in population. By the


mid-1990s, it was obvious that a different strategy was needed. The CDC shifted 

from fixing up housing to doing something about the area’s 1,100 vacant lots. 

Residents said the condition of the vacant land was a key influence on people’s 

attitudes toward the neighborhood. 

The CDC has helped neighbors to acquire 165 cleared vacant lots. “In the beginning, 

people were not so interested” in acquiring an empty lot next door to their 

house, says Sandy Salzman, the organization’s executive director, “but now we frequently 

have to cut the lot in half because residents on both sides want a side yard.” 

The New Kensington organization has also organized nearly 20 community 

gardens that people in its neighborhoods maintain. “Social connections were lacking,” 

says former executive director John Carpenter. “We needed to rebuild neighborhood 

trust.” Gardeners, it became clear, are people who exert a positive influence 

on a neighborhood. Whereas individuals who volunteer to participate in crime 

patrols tend to be “against something” – negative in their outlook – gardeners, 

according to Carpenter, “are a different kind of people. They’re for something. 

They tend to be more hopeful, with more energy.” Anti-crime volunteers frequently 

lose interest once the robberies and burglaries subside. Gardeners, by contrast, stick 

with a project. Thus the CDC’s efforts to reclaim neglected land helped to foster a 

much-needed sense of cooperation. 

Although the community gardens generally do not have sitting areas, “because 

neighbors have not wanted to encourage people hanging around, they are beautiful 

clean and green spaces,” says Salzman. In addition, the CDC has succeeded in 

having community groups maintain two parks – expanses that are larger than 

community gardens. Palmer Park, owned by the City’s Fairmount Park, has been 

adopted by the Friends of Fishtown. Konrad Square, owned by the City’s 

Department of Recreation, is cared for by the Friends of Konrad Square. 

Heavy equipment speeds some of the projects toward completion and serves as 

a motivational tool. Some men eagerly volunteer when they’re given an opportunity 

to operate heavy machinery. “In NKCDC,” Salzman points out, “we actually own a 

tractor, bobcat, dump truck, and pickup truck to do the work that is needed.” 

In Philadelphia, if a tract of land is uncared for, a rogue dump truck may arrive 

in the middle of the night and unload trash on it. Through trial and error, the New 

Kensington organization has learned which techniques for protecting the vacant 

parcels work best. Shielding vacant land with Jersey barriers has been found to be a


Photo 

New Kensington Garden Center 

in eastern North Philadelphia. 

bad idea; the concrete barriers attract graffiti, and litter accumulates at their base. 

Installing chain-link fencing around a vacant site, with a locked gate, is also not a 

good idea. “It’s divisive,” Carpenter says. “There are those who have keys to the 

padlock versus those that don’t. It’s hard to get access to the site. And it looks ugly.” 

The New Kensington organization pioneered the planting of trees at eight- to 

ten-foot intervals along the perimeter of large vacant parcels. When trees are planted 

and the grass is regularly mowed, dumpers are usually deterred. The contrast between 

the clean lots and trashy ones has spurred more people to volunteer to care for 

neglected lots. As Carpenter puts it, these techniques “create social pressure for a 

higher standard.” 

The New Kensington CDC operates a garden center as well. 

On another expanse of vacant North Philadelphia land, an organization 

called Greensgrow runs a hydroponic farm, raising plants that 

it sells. Greensgrow produces nine kinds of lettuce, plus herbs, 

tomatoes, potatoes, and flowers, supplying restaurants downtown. 

In all, the New Kensington CDC has stabilized more than 600 lots 

by cleaning them, planting trees, turning them into community 

gardens, or conveying them to adjacent owners. 

Community gardens should be established only if residents 

indicate they are willing to devote time to gardening, says Rob 

Inerfeld, executive director of an Arlington, Virginia-based program called Community 

Greens: Shared Parks in Urban Blocks: “They need some champions, people 

who are going to stand out and promote them.” Adds Patrice Carroll of the U.S. 

Department of Agriculture’s Philadelphia office: “Community gardens are successful 

because they have very clear boundaries of responsibility. Individuals commit to tend 

their plot and derive a very clear benefit from their labor: food or flowers or both.” 

Though labor-intensive, community gardens succeed because their maintenance is 

subdivided into manageable bits – individual plots.


Volunteer efforts are useful for cleaning and maintaining scattered vacant lots, 

but when hundreds of lots are being managed or when the vacant land is in severely 

rundown neighborhoods, it’s necessary to hire workers to deal with the problem. 

A team that’s paid to manage empty land can do wonders for a neighborhood’s 

appearance. In Baltimore, the city is investing in a pilot “clean and green” program 

on some blocks that have been more than 60 percent abandoned. However it’s 

accomplished, the tidying up of empty sites can help restore confidence in the 

neighborhood. 

Fostering Development in Rundown Neighborhoods 

Philadelphia’s neighborhood strategy will probably involve spending a considerable 

sum of public money in “tippy” neighborhoods – those that have some signs 

of blight but that appear to be salvageable with a modest to moderate-sized public 

investment. Baltimoreans Rutkowski and Pollock, in The Urban Transition Zone: 

A Place Worth a Fight, 4 argue that public funds for revitalization achieve more if 

they are invested primarily in “transitional” neighborhoods that stand a good chance 

of being stabilized. Stephen Kazanjian, until recently the executive director of the 

Greater Germantown Housing Development Corp. in northwest Philadelphia, takes 

that argument a step further, saying cities must “build on their strengths.” 5 Given 

the limited public funds, it doesn’t make sense to spend heavily on neighborhood 

renewal in places that are far gone and that have little to rally around. Money for 

social services must be directed to individuals who need help, but large volumes 

of public funds shouldn’t be spent to save neighborhoods that have little chance 

of recovery. There isn’t enough money to focus on all the neighborhoods, says 

Kazanjian. “I wish there were, but there isn’t.” 

Kazanjian says Philadelphia inadvertently hampers neighborhood improvement 

by favoring housing development for people with modest incomes. “In Philadelphia, 

by City Council mandate, we do not allow CDBG funding to go to developments 

for households above 80 percent of median household income,” he says. That policy 

must be rethought if Philadelphia wants to revive its neighborhoods. 

Under Mayor O’Malley, Baltimore has shifted toward the idea of building on 

strength. “We’re focusing on the strongest blocks, on keeping them strong,” 

says Zach Holl, a community planner with Baltimore’s Department of Planning. 

4 See Marcus Pollock and Ed Rutkowski, The Urban Transition Zone: A Place Worth a Fight, published in 1998 by the Patterson Park 

Community Development Corp., 2900 East Baltimore St., Baltimore, MD 21224. 

5 Kazanjian is now with Real Estate Strategies, a real estate consulting firm in Philadelphia.


“Clearly, this administration is going to do a market-driven approach. We’re not 

going to invest money where the block is 70 percent vacant. We’re not going to 

spend on infrastructure in an area that’s to be demolished.” 

In Philadelphia Kazanjian argues that the best strategy would be one aimed not 

at providing housing – the usual focus of neighborhood and community development 

groups – but at revitalizing the city. That strategy would, he says, “look at 

where you can have success stories, where is the population moving. Direct them 

into a place, retain them in the city.” People and resources could be directed toward 

the section of South Philadelphia just south of Center City. That area, beyond South 

Street, the traditional dividing line between Center City and South Philadelphia, is 

within reach of the jobs, culture, restaurants, and other amenities of Center City. It 

could attract people who would like to live downtown but who can’t afford Center 

City housing prices. Such an influx would improve South Philadelphia. Marginal 

rowhouse blocks could evolve into desirable neighborhoods. The number of 

middle-class people living in the city would grow. Other parts of Philadelphia that 

meet Kazanjian’s criteria are those close to Temple University and the University 

of Pennsylvania – places where there’s a magnet that attracts people and generates 

economic vitality. 

Cities greatly need an expansion of their middle class. Educated middle-income 

residents are a chief spur to efficient government, effective schools, and a dynamic 

economy. Robert D. Lupton, president of FCS Urban Ministries, a Christian 

community development organization that has worked at revitalizing the Summerhill, 

East Lake, and Grant Park neighborhoods in Atlanta, writes in his book Return 

Flight, “The people who remain in Summerhill need once again to have educated 

neighbors to raise the standards of their schools. They need politically active 

neighbors who will help to organize against crime and drugs on their streets and 

playgrounds. They need spiritual neighbors to reopen the churches and businessminded 

neighbors to stimulate legitimate enterprise.” 6 

Some of those new middle-class neighbors could be people who grew up in the 

neighborhood, left and built successful careers, and now are interested in returning 

to their roots. This applies particularly to retirees, some of whom move back to their 

childhood neighborhoods after spending most of their adult lives elsewhere. 

Successful natives who return can be especially helpful because they aren’t seen as 

invaders, the way strangers in a downtrodden urban neighborhood sometimes are. 

6 Robert D. Lupton, Return Flight: Community Development Through Reneighboring Our Cities (Atlanta: FCS Urban Ministries, 1997), p. 15.


If the middle class lives in the city – especially if it lives in mixed-income neighborhoods 

with gathering places, public streets, and other hallmarks of traditional urbanism – 

the city will benefit. Rents in desirable areas will no doubt rise as a result of this 

process (which its critics have saddled with the loaded term “gentrification” – as if the 

people involved were a pampered leisure class that passes its time at fox hunts and 

society balls). But the city’s economic base will be strengthened and the quality of 

public services will improve. The results, on balance, will be more good than bad for 

transitional neighborhoods, for lower-income people, and for the city as a whole. 

As Lupton observes, “The resources of the ‘gentry’ are badly needed in urban 

communities.” 7 Ideally, what should be sought is the development of neighbor-leaders 

and a sensitivity toward the needs of the poor – a combination Lupton calls “gentrification 

with justice.” 8 

A Clearinghouse for Vacant Properties 

Mayor O’Malley’s “Project 5000” in Baltimore calls for the city to acquire 

5,000 vacant buildings or empty lots. Those properties could then be transferred to 

new owners — mostly private owners. The goal is to see that the properties are put 

in good condition, which would mean rehabilitation in some instances, razing in 

others, and a variety of development possibilities. 

One reason why blight has persisted in some locations is that the owners of 

derelict buildings can be difficult to track down. Some owners are out of state. 

Some have died, leaving the properties tied up in estates or in the hands of relatives 

who ignore the nearly worthless buildings. 

Those who have studied the problem say there’s a need for systems that identify 

the owners, gather information on properties, and make those properties available 

to buyers and developers without undue complication. Working with community 

groups, the City of Baltimore hopes to speed the process of acquisition and transfer 

of derelict properties. Project 5000 calls for the city to acquire neglected properties 

through tax sale foreclosures, code enforcement negotiations, or eminent domain. 

Of these methods, eminent domain is generally the least favorite choice, since it 

costs several times as much as the other methods. 

7 Lupton, p. 38. 

8 Lupton, p. 50.


Photo 

New “twins” under construction 

in the Cecil B. Moore neighborhood 

in North Philadelphia. These 

have basement garages facing 

the street, providing secure 

parking but detracting from the 

streetscape. 

The Neighborhood Design Center has suggested establishing a clearinghouse 

with an interactive web site. This would make it easy for developers, neighbors, and 

others to find information about properties’ costs and ownership, the status of specific 

buildings, market conditions, demographics, tax sales, incentives, and financing. 

Philadelphia’s anti-blight program entails improvements in city government 

procedures. Aggressive code compliance, better efforts at mothballing vacant buildings 

worth saving, and efforts to remarket vacant properties quickly are part of the 

city’s effort. In the long run, those activities, which have the virtue of being not 

especially costly, may be important tools for helping distressed areas rebound. 

Carpenter, the former New Kensington CDC director, says it would also be 

helpful for the city to undertake more assembling of vacant land and creation of 

nodes of development. He sees some reason for hope. Philadelphia, according to 

Carpenter, is changing “from being very deal-oriented to being very systems-oriented.” 

It needs to keep going in that direction. Rather than concentrating government 

efforts on individual deals, such as helping a developer convert a school into a housing 

complex, the city should have systems that make it easy for developers to find out 

what properties are available, examine them, and get the necessary approvals. 

The Importance of Design 

Planning should strengthen the patterns that give city life its appeal, not turn 

cities into second-rate imitations of the suburbs. Philadelphia has made a dubious 

choice in promoting “de-densification” of much of the city. 

In North Philadelphia, where the population has declined and the real estate 

market has been weak, the City has pushed community development corporations to 

spread housing across more land, often by constructing 

“twins” – side-by-side duplexes with front yards, side yards, 

and back yards. An argument can be made that twins are 

beneficial because they diversify a housing stock currently 

weighted too heavily toward row housing. But low-density 

development such as twins should be carefully scrutinized. 

The subsidies required for development of twins in North 

Philadelphia are higher than the subsidies required for rowhouse 

development, according to Rose Gray, at Puerto Ricans 

on the March. To be able to sell a twin unit for $55,000 in 

eastern North Philadelphia, Gray says, the City may ante up a 

subsidy of $100,000. Twins do not seem to have attracted


many of the middle-income people that the city needs in order to achieve a workable 

balance of income groups. If the people buying the twins lack the wherewithal 

to keep up with the costs of a dwelling that’s more expensive to maintain than a 

rowhouse, there will be trouble once the newness wears off. Development of this 

kind should be done where the market encourages it, not everywhere. 

Care must also be taken in fitting twins into the urban network of streets and 

public spaces. Some of the twins that have been built in Philadelphia are anti-urban. 

They stand so far back from the sidewalk that they fail to define the street. Whereas 

a block of traditional rowhouses creates a consistent wall, making the street space 

feel like an “outdoor room,” some twins are more irregular in form. The space 

between the houses is often wider than the houses themselves; there is more void 

than solid. Some twins have built basement garages on the front, giving pedestrians 

an unappealing view of pavement as they pass by. As a result, the twins sometimes 

squander the opportunity to shape the outdoor space into a strong, cohesive pattern. 

In addition, some are clad in fake clapboard siding of vinyl or aluminum, which 

looks cheap compared to the brick walls of the rowhouse. Gray points out that rowhouses, 

with less exterior surface per unit, can afford brick on at least the front walls. 

(Ideally they would have brick all the way around.) 

“There are myths that people carry around with them,” says David Dixon, who 

directs urban planning for Goody, Clancy & Associates in Boston. “One is that 

density is automatically wrong. The starting assumption for most rezoning and most 

planning initiatives is that de-densifying is a positive idea.” Although there is no 

need to rebuild Philadelphia at the density it had in 1950, it seems foolish to 

deliberately consume urban land through low-density development. It would be 

better to set excess land aside for future use – to land-bank it. Years from now, there 

may be good uses for land that nobody currently needs. The aversion to density 

usually indicates short-term thinking and a failure to recognize city strengths. 

Dixon argues that de-densification is usually wrong, especially when carried 

out in a way that robs public spaces of definition. City-dwellers can satisfy their 

social and economic needs better in an environment that has consistent street walls 

and that’s dense with people, stores, restaurants, and other attractions. When a 

large number of people live near one another (assuming that they behave in a civil 

manner), the resulting liveliness makes the area appealing. Density is often key to 

whether a development will be successful. Says Dixon: “Creating a strong critical 

mass is often critical to creating a market.” Conversely, spreading development out 

may make a place dull, discouraging potential residents.


Photo 

Spicer’s Run, a new Baltimore 

rowhouse development that 

positions an attractive face to 

the street and accommodates 

cars on the interior of the block. 

It would make sense to increase density in certain locations – close to employment 

concentrations, transit hubs, or major centers of activities or amenities. One 

idea that has worked in various cities is construction of four- to six-story buildings 

with retail on the ground floor and rental apartments or condominium units above. 

That mixture provides conveniences absent from strictly residential or strictly commercial 

developments. 

Many of the neighborhoods now in trouble were built to a nearly uniform density. 

This is one of the reasons why some of them now seem so tedious. Variations in 

the density might perk them up. Even if the overall density of a city decreases, there 

are some locations where an upping of the density would work to the good of the 

city and the neighborhood. 

Sometimes a sizable development – if it has qualities 

that rise above the norm – can create a market where none 

existed. Quality of design can give a development an edge. 

Better architecture, materials, and open spaces can give a 

well-conceived urban neighborhood an advantage over a 

mundane suburban area. 

When rowhouses are built, they should help to define 

the street. Philadelphia has done a poor job of this in recent 

decades. New rowhouses have often been outfitted with 

parking pads or garages on the front, detracting from the 

street. Baltimore has done somewhat better. Recent residential 

developments in Baltimore tend to feature all-brick rows paralleling the streets, 

giving the setting a degree of coherence. The new rowhouses in Baltimore may have 

garages on their ground floor, but if so, the garages are often positioned at the rear 

so that they do not deaden the street façade. This is important because pedestrians 

prefer streets lined by building fronts presenting a succession of windows, steps, 

porches, front yards – not garage doors. 

Baltimore and Philadelphia do not need to build rowhouses exactly as they were 

built a century ago. Marketable new rowhouses today are usually wider than those 

from a century ago. They also offer more light and more storage space than their 

historic predecessor. They may offer off-street parking. The new version of the 

rowhouse ought to be designed, however, in a manner that upholds traditional 

urban virtues: a pedestrian-friendly atmosphere and strongly defined public spaces.


Bottom Left 

Designs by Cassway-Albert Ltd. 

for a 1998 competition on how 

to create affordable housing and 

rebuild the Francisville section of 

North Philadelphia. The proposed 

rowhouses contain two- and 

three-story elements. Above 

each one-car garage the architects 

proposed a sleeping porch, helping 

residents maintain surveillance 

of the street. 

Bottom Right 

Site plan for the proposed 

Francisville rowhouses shows 

how units that are mainly one 

room deep would wrap around a 

courtyard, the center of which 

could be shared with neighbors. 

The design has not been built. 

Good ideas have been devised in the past several years for Philadelphia 

rowhouse developments. One example is a prototype presented in a 1995 design 

competition for lower-density affordable housing with modern amenities in 

Philadelphia’s Francisville neighborhood. Cassway-Albert, a local architecture, 

planning, and landscape architecture firm, designed a prototype that turned the 

conventional rowhouse arrangement on its side. Instead of being long and narrow, 

the rowhouse proposed by Cassway-Albert is wide and shallow. Each unit would be 

one room deep and would wrap in an “L” shape around a corner. A group of four 

L-shape units could enclose a courtyard in the center of the block, with each courtyard 

in turn divided into four individual private yards. (There could be a series of 

groups of four units, extending the full length of the block, each with its courtyard 

divided into four secure, separate outdoor areas.) Much of the exterior would have 

porches or front yards, for a sociable presence on the street. Each unit would also 

have a one-car attached garage opening onto the street. Since the garages would 

occupy only a third of the street frontage, they would not dominate the street. 

The street would still function as an outdoor room, welcoming pedestrians. Such 

developments could be built wherever sites accommodating at least four of these 

units have been cleared. The ideal would be full-block sites, where this vision of the 

rowhouse – street-friendly but also light-filled and offering secure outdoor space – 

could take shape.


Where to Create Parks 

In the 1960s and early 1970s, there were experiments with razing blocks of 

alley houses in West Baltimore’s Harlem Park neighborhood and creating parks on 

their sites. The thought was that the surrounding residents would enjoy having 

access to new expanses of recreational land behind their homes. This is now 

acknowledged to have been a mistake. It ignored Jane Jacobs’ argument about the 

value of “eyes on the street” and contradicted Oscar Newman’s theory of 

“defensible space.” The interior-block parks were hard to watch over, and they 

became refuges for drug dealing and other undesirable activities. The parks ended 

up trashed. 

This is not to say that interior-block parks that are open to the public always 

fail. Society Hill is famous for tiny parks and playgrounds that are tucked irregularly 

into a densely packed section of the city. But Society Hill is relatively well off, 

without the severe afflictions that drag down North Philadelphia, two miles away, 

or that hamper drug-plagued East Baltimore and West Baltimore. 

The attempt to create parks on the interiors of blocks in Baltimore’s Harlem 

Park also did not fit neighborhood customs. Poor and working-class residents in 

Baltimore – and in Philadelphia as well – often prefer hanging out on front steps, 

front porches, and sidewalks rather than retreating to secluded areas at the rear. 

Today playground equipment lies rusting on the remnants of Harlem Park’s 

interior-block parks, and the landscape sits neglected. The lesson: Do not create 

parks that are open to the public but secluded from view. 

What frequently does succeed is a small park surrounded by streets – where the 

fronts of the houses look onto those streets and across them to a park. But even 

here, the evidence is mixed. Mark Cameron, of the Neighborhood Design Center, 

says some of the blocks of Baltimore rowhouses that face green parks or “squares” 

are better kept than blocks nearby without a square. On the other hand, in 

Philadelphia, planner Jennifer Hurley says that “when the Planning Commission was 

driving around the city to find the ‘blight line,’ we noticed that in struggling neighborhoods, 

the houses around small parks were often more deteriorated than houses 

one or two blocks away, probably because of drugs and other crime in the parks.”


Newly-created neighborhood parks or squares should be small enough that the 

occupants of nearby dwellings can easily keep them under informal observation. 

Because of budget constraints, Philadelphia and some other cities resist the creation 

of new parks unless an organization outside of municipal governments offers to 

maintain them. So parks may need to be adopted by a neighborhood organization, 

a local foundation, or some other community group. 

One place where a new park was created is Northern Liberties, an area north 

of Center City Philadelphia that a decade ago was the only zip code in that city 

with no community green space. The Northern Liberties Neighbors Association 

embraced the idea of transforming a two-acre former Superfund site into a multi-use 

open space, including community garden plots, a perimeter of trees, a central area 

for community events and festivals, a mural, and a farmers market. With help from 

the Philadelphia Urban Resources Partnership and from other organizations, 

including $15,000 worth of soil testing by the U.S. Department of Environmental 

Protection and the City’s forgiveness of a $500,000 demolition lien dating back to 

the razing of a burned-out factory complex on the site, neighborhood residents 

established their own park – one that the Northern Liberties Neighbors Association 

continues to maintain. 

If Philadelphians hope to turn the sorrier sections of their city around, some 

workable notion of open space should be part of the strategy. Norris Square, an old 

park with homes around it in North Philadelphia, was for a time dominated by drug 

peddlers. But the park has since been reclaimed and is now lively and well used, an 

anchor for the neighborhood, just as Rittenhouse Square is an anchor for its vibrant 

Center City neighborhood. 

In East Baltimore, where a half-dozen neighborhoods tend to merge together 

without much identity, the Design Collective, an architecture and planning firm, 

worked with the Historic East Baltimore Community Action Coalition to produce a 

plan calling for several new parks, among other improvements. The parks would 

introduce open space into each neighborhood and foster neighborhood identity. 

The parks would also give greater prominence to churches, schools, and other 

landmarks. Developable sites for housing adjacent to the parks could help induce 

private-sector development, which has been in short supply. Parks could also be 

created next to schools. Asphalt school playgrounds could be dug up and turned 

into green spaces. The Neighborhood Design Center has encouraged the City of 

Baltimore to look for opportunities to use demolition and capital funds to create


new urban squares similar to Union Square and Franklin Square in southwest 

Baltimore. Once a new park is developed, the houses around it could be rehabilitated 

or new housing could be built facing the park. 

An open-space alternative is the establishment of shared private landscapes on 

the interiors of blocks. These landscapes are enclosed principally by the buildings 

along their perimeter. Walls, fences, and gates are added where necessary. Shared private 

landscapes can provide an important amenity in places where public parks are 

few. 

A good example of such a landscape is Montgomery Park in the South End of 

Boston. Montgomery Park is a one-third-acre back yard shared by 85 households in 

36 brick rowhouse buildings. The park started as a fenced formal garden in 1865, 

languished for decades in disrepair, and is now part of the most sought-after real 

estate in the South End. When residents began reclaiming the park in the 1960s 

and 1970s, it was open to outsiders. A series of break-ins and assaults convinced 

residents that they should restrict access from the street, recognizing that it is truly 

a private park. While securing the park from the outside, they gradually removed 

fences around their individual back yards and created a sylvan oasis with a fountain, 

a hammock, and places to sit or dine with family and friends. An approach like 

this, which is promoted by Inerfeld’s organization, Community Greens, could be 

used elsewhere. 9 

A Comprehensive Approach 

The underlying challenge is to get the real estate market functioning in a normal 

manner in neighborhoods that are now depressed. The thinking of David 

Boehlke, a Washington, D.C.-based community development consultant, sheds further 

light on this. In the early 1990s, while running a community development program 

in Battle Creek, Michigan, Boehlke saw the importance of reestablishing the 

real estate market. He noticed that neighborhoods did not improve when houses 

were renovated with public funds and were then turned over to people who lacked 

the money to maintained them. To the neighbors, it was obvious that the new 

owners weren’t putting much into their properties. Thus publicly funded improvements 

frequently failed to spur people to invest in home improvement. 

9 This description of Montgomery Park is taken from a profile on the website of Community Greens, at www.communitygreens.org.


Ultimately, Boehlke concluded that each neighborhood is engaged in a longterm 

competition for desirable homebuyers; a neighborhood prospers to the extent 

that it attracts the best buyers possible. It accomplishes this, in part, by demonstrating 

that property values in the neighborhood are rising. In a depressed neighborhood, 

people do not invest in improvements because they realize that spending 

money on a house will not increase its value much. In looking for a remedy, Boehlke 

found that “incentives” – which he says are different from “subsidies” – can be used 

to entice people to invest more in their properties. He organized a program that let 

people get below-market interest rates and borrow more than the house’s appraised 

value if they undertook renovations and improvements. As first a few people put 

money into home improvements and then as other people follow their example, 

long-depressed values started to go up, encouraging neighborhood reinvestment. 

In addition to financial incentives, Boehlke’s program made certain skills more 

readily available to homeowners. “What if a construction specialist was available 

so you could do a three-color paint job, and you could get an extra $1,000 for 

that three-color paint job” asks Boehlke. Small, tailored investments like these 

instill confidence in the neighborhood’s real estate market, boost the value of the 

homes, increase the home equity of the neighbors, and thus make it possible for 

the neighbors to improve their own homes without fearing that the investment 

will never be recouped. 

Ideas such as Boehlke’s could be applied in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and elsewhere. 

This requires jettisoning the old idea that the best use of funds is subsidies 

for low-income people. Subsidies such as those may have virtually no positive effect 

on the neighborhood. “If I advertise ‘low-income,’” Boehlke says, “I won’t get 

upwardly mobile people.” And upwardly mobile people are critically important to a 

neighborhood’s recovery.


Conclusion and Recommendations 

Cities with deteriorated rowhouse neighborhoods should draw from the 

following ideas: 

• Rehabilitation efforts should focus mainly on transitional neighborhoods that 

have reasonable prospects of achieving stability and on areas that have a good 

chance of spurring the city’s revival. The areas that will do the most for the city 

in the long run are those possessing architectural character, major institutions, 

waterfronts, concentrations of employment, or other important assets. 

• Demolition should be guided by strategic thinking. Cities should carry out 

demolition where it produces sites large enough for redevelopment, as opposed 

to scattered individual parcels, which are difficult to redevelop. Demolition 

should be used in some instances to create new neighborhood parks and squares 

– and to assemble sites for housing and other development to face those parks. 

Redevelopment of this kind will reinforce existing landmarks and buttress 

neighborhood identity. 

• Cities should have a variety of strategies, ranging from “clean and green” 

and social service programs in the most deteriorated neighborhoods to 

ambitious redevelopment in more promising areas. Cities need to have policies 

and practices that fit each of the widely varying conditions. 

• Cities should make it easier for developers and potential buyers to find out which 

properties are available, what their condition is, and how to go about acquiring 

them. A clearinghouse may help to accomplish this. The municipal government 

may need to acquire more of the derelict properties in order to get them into 

the hands of those who will raze or rehabilitate rundown buildings. 

• There should be little or no demolition of blocks of intact rowhouses 

possessing a better than average chance of being made marketable. As the 

Design Collective proposed in its plan for East Baltimore, there should be 

efforts to save good- to high-quality rows that face each other. A sound 

principle of traditional neighborhood development is that like should face like. 

When rows of houses face each other across a street that’s not excessively 

wide, they reinforce each other.


• Programs should be tailored to result in home improvement. Cities should aim 

more toward the use of “incentives” and less toward “subsidies.” Efforts 

should be made to secure nonfederal funds – thus avoiding the stringent 

income limitations that the national government often imposes on prospective 

beneficiaries of federally aided development. Many struggling neighborhoods 

would benefit more from the arrival of middle-income residents than from 

federally subsidized housing. 

• Parks should be surrounded by streets, with houses or other buildings on the 

opposite side of the street, facing the park. Open spaces should not be created 

on the interiors of blocks unless they are secured from outsiders. One way to 

create secure yards on the interior of a block is to wrap the housing around the 

outdoor space. 

• New housing should maintain a clear, pedestrian-friendly street edge. This can 

be done even when the housing is built at lower population densities than during 

the heyday of the industrial city. 

• Old rowhouse streets can be made more pleasant by planting street trees. 

Where the streets are very wide, the sidewalks can be widened to make 

pedestrians more comfortable, and the number of lanes of traffic might be 

reduced. Landscaped medians were removed from some streets decades ago 

to accommodate a growing volume of commuter traffic. Where vehicular traffic 

has since diminished, the medians can be restored, making the houses more 

enjoyable to live in and making the neighborhoods more attractive. 

• Parking for residents should be provided at the rear of the dwellings, not 

through front-loading garages, unless those garages make up no more than 

a third of the block’s street frontage. On-street parking is a traditional urban 

amenity and should continue to be encouraged. 

• Cities should perpetuate and extend the traditional elements of urban living: 

concentration of population, mixture of activities, walkable settings, architectural 

quality, and appealing “outdoor rooms.” Those are valuable attributes, even in 

cities that are at a low point in the cycle of decline and revitalization.

Langdon/Disappearing Rowhouse 

27 

Harlem Park Rendering 

Alternative ways of adding 

outdoor structures to sides of 

surviving rowhouses in Baltimore’s 

Harlem Park neighborhood are 

suggested in these sketches 

by Matt Bell of Torti, Gallas & 

Partners/CHK.


28 

A1 Elevation| Plan 

Option A1 

Where a rowhouse has been 

demolished, its site could be 

redeveloped as a sideyard and 

deck for a neighboring household, 

according to this idea developed 

by the Neighborhood Design 

Center in Baltimore. The fence 

along the front and the connection 

between cornices would help 

the streetscape appear intact. 

(The connection between the 

cornices is part of the structural 

beam system that spans the 

entire lot. A cornice could be 

attached to the beam for 

continuity of the street wall.)


29 

B1 Elevation| Plan 

Option B1 

This design from the 

Neighborhood Design Center 

calls for relocating existing marble 

steps, building a concrete stoop, 

and constructing a screened porch 

with a deck above. (In this design 

the building’s entrance has been 

moved to the side of the house, 

and the deck is framed on the 

structural beams. For Options B 

& C the Charleston House was 

a model for having a narrow 

rowhouse with an entrance that 

is both on the street and on the 

side of the house to improve 

internal circulation.)


30 

C1 Elevation| Plan 

Option C1 

In this Neighborhood Design 

Center design, a rowhouse’s 

entrance would be moved to 

the side lot, creating a new 

entry sequence as well as a 

screened porch with a secondfloor 

deck. (Same as in B1 

except that the formal entrance 

is moved by the enclosure of 

what was a porch in B1.)


31 

C2 Elevation| Plan 

Option C2 

The vacant lot would be subdivided 

between two neighboring 

households to provide new 

entrances for both, along with 

screened porches and secondfloor 

decks in this proposal 

from the Neighborhood Design 

Center. (Identical to C1 but 

subdivided for two properties.)

The Disappearing Rowhouse Neighborhoods of Baltimore and ...

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