[Baltimore Sun] Former unhoused, working poor residents to move in to new Hope Village
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Three years ago, Mya Brown and her 1-year-old daughter lived at a women’s domestic violence shelter in Baltimore. On Monday, the mother and daughter stepped into a newly built and fully furnished home they will soon own.
Brown, an Amazon employee, and Nova, now 4, got their first glimpse at a place to put down roots, a tiny three-room house with a narrow porch and side yard lining newly paved Holbrook Street. It’s one of 13 single-family homes at Hope Village, a public-private project in East Baltimore’s Oliver neighborhood where formerly homeless and working poor families can become homeowners.
City officials and supporters hope the community can become a model for tackling housing insecurity in a city where more than 5,200 people experience homelessness and low-wage earners struggle to find affordable rents.
Led by nonprofit founders and a developer, the project offers 400-square-foot homes priced at $25,000 with affordable financing for successful applicants. They must have jobs and complete financial literacy and budgeting courses. Mortgage payments are just $200 a month.
“When we were in the shelter … I wanted freedom, really not even the financial freedom, but just like freedom and peace, peace of mind, because being in a shelter for the first time was so stressful and scary,” Brown said.
Minutes later, she explored her new living room, kitchen and bedroom where businesses and groups donated furniture, stocked a closet with sheets and towels and filled cabinets with dishes, utensils and cleaning supplies. “I love it. I’m so excited,” she said.
Hope Village, a $2 million project, started about six years ago as the brainchild of Baltimore couple Christian and Pam Wilson. The Wilsons ran a weekend food program for children then began exploring whether they could convert unused steel cargo containers into stable homes for some of those children and their families who lacked housing.
“One day my husband turned to me and he said, ‘We’ve got to get these people into homes,’” Pam Wilson said. “‘They have to be able to have someplace to take their children at nighttime to sleep and not worry about that.’ Little by little we contacted all different types of organizations.”
That idea evolved into the current plan after they were joined by city developer Mark Sapperstein of 28 Walker Development, his wife, Stacy Sapperstein, and their son Jay Sapperstein.
The nonprofit overseeing the project, Heart’s Place Services, purchased vacant overgrown lots in the 1300 block of Holbrook Street from the city, which will contribute residents’ closing costs. Baltimore architect Randy Sovich, principal of RM Sovich Architecture, offered pro bono architectural plans, and The Neighborhood Design Center, a nonprofit, developed a landscaping plan with a community garden.
Sapperstein, who covered the difference between the construction cost of about $200,000 per home and the selling price, oversaw development. Numerous businesses chipped in with features such as windows and foundations.
The vision called for building homes for people who earned from $30,000 to $40,000, a range in which it was too costly to rent or to buy and create equity.
“This provides them certainty, housing security, instead of moving in with friends and families and living on a sofa or cot in somebody’s home,” Sapperstein said. Offering home security lets people “come home to refrigerators filled, have their own bed, their own shower their own living room. Then they can focus on their families and other things.”
On Monday, the soon-to-be homeowners gathered with city and state officials to officially open Hope Village.
Alice Kennedy, Baltimore’s housing commissioner, said she hopes to see the community model replicated in other areas of the city and already has “meetings set up.”
“This is what we want to see in the city of Baltimore,” Kennedy said. “We want to see people coming together with the vision and the ideas and then marry that with the entities that can get it done on the ground.”
Sovich, the architect, recalled that his first house in Baltimore in 1980 was 12-feet-wide by 40-feet-long and two stories high, “Only slightly bigger than this.”
When he was approached about designing Hope Village, “I thought it was just a beautiful idea, because it was an opportunity for people to build equity, and the kind of equity that everybody who can afford to buy a home gets,” he said.
Marcel Cox stood on the porch of one of the narrow houses and recalled days he’d lived out of his car and at shelters, often darting into doorways to seek shelter from rain. On Monday, he and his wife of three months, Formithia Cox, stood under their own porch roof before showing off their new home.
“I love everything,” he said, showing off a combination washer/dryer and opening cabinets. “Everything you need is actually here already.”
Cox heard about Hope Village about two years ago when he getting help from Paul’s Place, in Southwest Baltimore, where he would go for meals, showers and clothes, and which also connects people with housing.
Cox said he had prayed “to be inside, not out on the street.”
He had gotten a job. He enrolled in financial courses hoping to get into Hope Village. Then, he said, his prayers were answered.
That showed him, “If you don’t try, it’s not gonna happen.”
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