Baltimore Grows

There’s no doubt the Struever Bros. Eccles & Rouse (SBER) have delivered great projects and helped transition Locust Point into a new era.  But did SBER save Locust Point?  I was on their website today (which is nice) and came across the following narrative about Locust Point and their work in the neighborhood.  They discuss how 2,500 jobs were lost in the 90’s but 1,800 were created via their recent projects.  However, the thing they don’t mention is that the vast majority of those jobs were filled by people outside the community.  So it’s a bit of a stretch to make the correlation between jobs lost and gained and it’s affect on the overall health of Locust Point.  But we do love that promenade…

The Locust Point community lost 2,500 jobs to plant closings in the 1990’s. This long time blue collar neighborhood was fast losing homeowners and faced increasing drug activity and crime. SBER bought the shuttered P&G factory and invested $80 million in its adaptive reuse as state of the art office campus which houses SBER’s main office and headquarters. It is home to many other businesses and commercial tenants, including Under Armour, Ayers St. Gross Architects, and the Harvest Table café. Tenants of Tide Point mingle with local residents on the public promenade.

SBER subsequently converted the vacant Coca Cola plant into the world headquarters for Phillips Seafood and the blighted White Lead Paint Factory into a health club, retail and office space. In the last five years, 1,800 of the lost jobs have been replaced.