Dan Bythewood Jr. was an ambitious 29-year-old.

The son of a wealthy Long Island orthodontist, Bythewood had no background in large-scale development when he and his newly formed real-estate development company sent a proposal to Baltimore in 2003. Give us a big chunk of land in West Baltimore, he wrote, and we will transform it into a glitzy, upscale neighborhood evoking Manhattan.

The city gambled on La Cité, but the developer’s heralded transformation of Poppleton went bust.

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Water bills & Sheila Dixon nudges: Emails show rancor between Poppleton developer and city officials

Jul 31, 2024

Since winning its bid in 2005, La Cité Development has built a fraction of what it planned, leaving several blocks of vacant land in one of Baltimore’s oldest Black neighborhoods. The city grew so frustrated with inaction that last month it canceled La Cité’s exclusive development deal.

But documents obtained by The Baltimore Banner and interviews with people involved in the Poppleton project show that the city’s nearly 20-year history with La Cité has been rocky at every stage — and from the very outset, when Poppleton was set to lose its bid until high-level city housing officials intervened.

Community members, a panel of city employees and the office overseeing the selection process all warned: La Cité was too inexperienced. Officials under the administration of then-Mayor Martin O’Malley picked the firm anyway.

Bythewood, now 50, declined a request for an interview. In a statement to The Banner late Tuesday, La Cité said the city was as much to blame for delays in Poppleton as the developer — and vowed to move forward with its plans.

“Throughout the years, we have remained dedicated to building a more prosperous, safer, and inclusive neighborhood,” a La Cité spokeswoman said.

In speeches over the years Blythewood has acknowledged the difficulty of redeveloping Poppleton, comparing it to wrestling a dinosaur or landing a man on the moon.

“People often ask me, ‘Why didn’t you find an easier project or cut your losses a long time ago?’” Bythewood said in 2017. “My answer has always been: There are no losses until you give up.”

As city officials now try to extricate themselves from a deal struck five mayoral administrations ago, the housing commissioner who signed off on the selection of La Cité defended it in a recent interview. The early 2000s, Paul Graziano said, were “a period of great hope,” especially for a neighborhood like Poppleton.

After decades of residents fleeing the city, Baltimore’s population appeared to be stabilizing. The Red Line, a proposed east-west connector, was to have a subway station in Poppleton. Nearby, the University of Maryland was breaking ground on a life sciences campus called the BioPark.

La Cité’s proposal cited those promising signs, and Bythewood pitched a total reimagining of Poppleton.

What actually happened is one of the biggest development flops in Baltimore’s history. The city spent at least $15 million to buy property, displace more than 100 households, demolish buildings and clear the land for La Cité’s vision.

But La Cité has built just a single apartment complex, known as Center\West. It has been plagued by financial and construction problems, struggled to attract tenants, and failed to deliver a long-delayed grocery store.

Those signs of hope that Bythewood cited also dimmed, at least for a time. The city resumed its pattern of population loss. Gov. Larry Hogan halted the Red Line subway, though Gov. Wes Moore is now trying to revive it. And the BioPark was slower than expected to get off the ground.

It’s unclear why Bythewood set his sights on Poppleton. He was from New York. He graduated from college on Long Island and went to work for a nonprofit specializing in residential financing.

While Bythewood lacked large-scale development experience, he had proximity to money and celebrity. His family owned a home in Sag Harbor, a longtime Black enclave in the Hamptons.

Their next-door neighbor was Susan Taylor, the fabled editorial director of Essence magazine. She and her husband joined the Bythewoods as founding partners of La Cité. Taylor did not respond to requests for comment.

Bythewood became the new company’s president, and his father held the title of CEO. In its 2003 proposal, La Cité claimed that doctors and young professionals would flock to Poppleton after they rebuilt it in the fashion of SoHo, a swanky neighborhood in New York City.

Residents of Poppleton didn’t buy it.

Other developers — with local ties and more experience — submitted ideas for the neighborhood. When the city organized a community meeting at Poppleton church in December 2004 to review five development proposals, records show residents ranked La Cité's plan last.

Still, the developer advanced to a round of three finalists. There, a panel of city employees ranked La Cité last once again.

The office overseeing the selection process advised against picking La Cité, citing a lack of experience. When La Cité learned it was about to lose the bid, the developer scrambled to add WestPac, a more experienced developer from California, as a partner, according to a memo.

Housing officials — following a review by “high-level” staff — used the last-minute addition to justify flipping their recommendation. But WestPac would never build anything in Baltimore: The developer left the project after La Cité clinched its deal with the city.

Attempts to reach WestPac officials were unsuccessful.

In the spring of 2005, Graziano made it official. The little-known firm from New York won the exclusive development rights over 14 acres of land.

The decision surprised Baltimore developer Wendy Blair. She submitted a joint bid with Enterprise Homes and Hailey Development. Blair said their proposal featured low-density housing that seemed more marketable in Poppleton.

“We didn’t really see them as a true competitor,” she said of La Cité.

City staff ranked Blair’s team above La Cité, documents show. They wrote that Blair and her partners had a “strong” proposal and the capability to pull it off.

But Blair said she had a feeling they would lose the bid when she attended an event where then-City Council President Sheila Dixon was talking about a profile in Essence Magazine. The March 2005 issue featured a makeover of Dixon and praised her for revitalizing Baltimore.

To Blair, it seemed like “strange” timing for a national publication to do a feature on Dixon, especially because its editorial director was an investor in La Cité.

Dixon said there was nothing strange about the timing because she and Taylor had an “on-going relationship for years.”

Essence brought Dixon to New York for two days of “pampering and primping,” The Baltimore Sun reported at the time. The Afro-American reported that Dixon was “fulfilling a lifelong dream that has evolved from her connection with Susan Taylor.”

Taylor emceed Dixon’s January 2007 mayoral inauguration, after O’Malley became governor. O’Malley had his own connection to La Cité: In the summer of 2005, he had traveled to the Long Island home of Dan Bythewood Sr. for a political fundraiser, according to a friend of the Bythewoods who attended the event and donated to O’Malley.

Dixon left office in early 2010 amid a corruption scandal and has run for mayor three times since then, including this year. Dixon said that if she hadn’t been forced to step down as mayor, she would have made sure the redevelopment of Poppleton was finished.

O’Malley, now commissioner of the Social Security Administration, did not respond to a request for comment.

La Cité, in its statement Tuesday, said it has “received support from many hundreds upon hundreds of individuals, political appointees, businesses and community groups over the years.”

Graziano said he was unaware of any ties between Dixon and La Cité during the selection process and never learned of the O’Malley fundraiser. There was no political pressure to select a developer for Poppleton; La Cité simply offered the most compelling vision for the neighborhood, he said.

“The decision — right or wrong — it was made independently by my team,” Graziano said.

In 2006, Graziano signed a deal that put much of Poppleton under La Cité’s control for at least 15 years, even if it sat vacant.

Similar deals in Baltimore typically include language that discourages developers from sitting on vacant land, said the city’s current housing commissioner, Alice Kennedy. This one didn’t.

“Certainly, in hindsight, it wasn’t the tightest contract,” Graziano said.

The looseness of the contract became apparent in 2012. Nothing had been built. La Cité couldn’t secure financing for the first phase of development. When the city tried canceling the deal, La Cité sued the city and turned to Jonathan Stern for help.

Stern was a longtime friend of the Bythewoods and a developer. He said he befriended Dan Bythewood Sr. in the 1980s in New York and later asked him to the be godfather of his daughter. Stern said he attended the 2005 fundraiser on Long Island for O’Malley. Campaign finance records show he donated $2,000 to O’Malley that year.

With La Cité at risk of losing its lucrative development deal in Baltimore, Stern said, the Bythewoods begged him to testify on their behalf.

On a muggy morning in July 2012, Stern walked into the federal courthouse in Baltimore where an attorney for La Cité described him as a “serious, major player” with powerful contacts in retail and finance, according to a transcript of the hearing.

The emergency hearing would effectively determine who controlled the land in Poppleton.

Stern’s job was to convince the judge that the Bythewoods were competent developers. Don’t blame them for the empty lots in Poppleton, Stern said; blame the economy.

The housing market had collapsed a few years earlier, causing major developments everywhere to grind to a halt, Stern said, but credit was now loosening. He said he planned to join La Cité as a co-developer and invest up to $7 million in the Poppleton project.

The judge sided with La Cité, citing, in part, Stern’s testimony, the transcript shows.

But Stern now regrets what he told the judge that day, and he questions why Baltimore ever signed a deal with the Bythewoods.

“How did a Long Island dentist with no development experience and his son win this thing? It absolutely makes no sense when you think about it,” Stern said in a recent interview.

Stern said he never ended up investing $7 million. Years later, after much prodding by the Bythewood family, Stern said, he invested $150,000. He now wishes he’d never handed over even that small amount.

“He just talks a very good game,” Stern said of the younger Bythewood. “He has no substance. None.”

La Cité eventually secured financing for a 262-apartment complex in 2016, something Stern called a “minor miracle.”

Construction started the following year. The project finished over budget and behind schedule.

By June 2020, just 15% of the apartments were occupied. The ground-level commercial space sat empty. And Stern was losing patience.

On investor calls, Stern said Bythewood always found someone else to blame, whether it was a construction company, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, or even the Black Lives Matter movement.

Stern said he became convinced the project was going nowhere, so he cashed out his investment earlier this year for “pennies on the dollar.”

Mayor Brandon Scott’s administration reached a similar conclusion this summer.

After La Cité failed to secure financing for its next proposed building, an apartment building age-restricted to older adults, the city canceled its deal with La Cité. That could spell the end of La Cité developments in Poppleton beyond the senior building.

“While the redevelopment of Poppleton has seen some signs of progress, the area’s revitalization has mostly been met with delays and shortcomings that we can no longer endure,” Kennedy said in a June statement.

Kennedy declined to comment beyond the statement.

In response, La Cité blamed the city for recent delays and threatened to sue the city — again.

The project has now taken up the bulk of Bythewood’s adult life. At the 2018 ribbon-cutting ceremony, he joked about the gray hairs on his head. Then, in a serious turn, Bythewood said he felt a sense of obligation to bring hope and opportunity to Poppleton, a community that has long suffered from disinvestment and blight.

“People of lesser incomes aren’t bad because they have lesser incomes. They were born into a specific portion of life. There’s a doctrine called the ‘Divine Right of Kings,’ and it talks about birth right. And it’s the birth right of kings — given by God ― to be birthed into their station in life,” he said. “Some people are just not that lucky to be born into a royal family.”

Read part 2: Water bills & Sheila Dixon nudges: Emails show rancor between Poppleton developer and city officials