When officials with a new development authority for West Baltimore’s North Avenue corridor arrived in Baltimore in 2022, they held a series of listening sessions to learn more about the community. And in Sandtown-Winchester, residents consistently told them they felt left behind.

There were only two new developments in the neighborhood in the years after the death of Freddie Gray: a new police station and a funeral home.

“For them, that psychologically represented how the Police Department at the time treated them, and ... the challenging environment they have, that you’re going to end up in a funeral home,” said Chad Williams, the head of the West North Avenue Development Authority.

It has been a decade since Gray, a Sandtown resident, was arrested and taken on an unbuckled ride in police van, leaving him with a severe spinal injury. The medical examiner later ruled the ride on April 19, 2015 caused his death, labeling it a homicide. Massive unrest followed, capturing the nation’s attention.

Promises arrived from all corners, pledging to improve the urban ills that activists and politicians said helped lead to Gray’s tragic death. Among the key areas: reform the city’s Police Department to improve its treatment of Baltimore’s Black residents and boost neighborhood redevelopment, including in the struggling area where Gray was born and raised.

But 10 years after Gray’s death, many say little has changed for the better in Sandtown-Winchester and other economically challenged corners of the majority-Black city.

Eric Stephenson moved to Sandtown at the end of 2015, partially in response to the unrest. It was obvious the community needed investment, he said, and he wanted to be a part of the change.

When he takes stock of what’s happened since, he thinks of the losses — the city tearing down the six largest buildings in Gilmor Homes, the public housing project where Gray was taken into custody; the school closures; and the shuttered recreation center.

Yet he knows there are people like him working to make things better.

“Things continue to move in a positive direction, and at the same time, go nowhere,” Stephenson said.

Today, block after block in Sandtown-Winchester are filled with vacant, grassy lots. In some ways, it’s a sign of progress: a post-unrest initiative led by the state to tear down blight. But vast emptiness is also a reminder that almost no new development has replaced it.

Sitting in a neighborhood park on a torn-down block, Tyrone Thompson, 60, enjoyed a recent afternoon on Mosher Street. While the park was clean and spacious, he said it would be nicer with a basketball court or playground.

“I don’t see no improvement other than they tore things down,” Thompson said.

There are projects on the horizon, including $15 million in approved funding to revive a long-dormant recreation center. The Salvation Army is moving toward relocating their headquarters, as well as adding a gymnasium and kitchen, into an empty school building.

And there are signs of other nearby improvements. The Mondawmin transit hub, where the rioting of April 27 kicked off, received a $20 million federal grant for improvements, including those to make it more pedestrian- and bike-friendly. Nearby, Douglass High School is undergoing a $120 million renovation. Farther along North Avenue, development around Coppin State University is sprouting.

Mayor Brandon Scott, who was a young city councilman when Gray died, said these neighborhoods were created by “literally a century of policies put in place for purposeful disinvestment” and “turnover and turmoil” in the years that followed the 2015 unrest.

He acknowledged that leaders need to be honest about the scope of the problems.

“We should’ve told people, ‘It’s going to happen, but it’s going to take time,’” Scott said in an interview. “We’ve made a lot of progress in Baltimore since 2015, yet we still have a lot more work to do.”

Decade of despair

Following Gray’s death and the ensuing unrest, Baltimore at large went into a multiyear tailspin from which it is only now emerging.

It all started on April 12, 2015, when Gray was walking through Gilmor Homes and locked eyes with two bicycle cops.

The 25-year-old tried to run away but was caught, detained for having a folding knife, and dragged into a police transport van. By the time the van arrived at the Western District police station, Gray was dying from a snapped neck, and succumbed to his injuries a week later.

At the time, a series of deaths of Black men in police custody captured by citizen video were generating outrage and protests across the country. And Baltimoreans followed suit.

On the day of Gray’s funeral, April 27, the Mondawmin Mall metro station was shut down, choking off a hub used by students to get home.

A clash with police ensued and violent destruction broke out, leading to a curfew and the deployment of the National Guard. Images of the burning CVS at Pennsylvania and West North avenues and young men stomping on police cars ricocheted around the world.

Baltimore’s new State’s Attorney Marilyn J. Mosby announced charges against six officers connected to Gray’s arrest on May 1. It was a move heralded as courageous at a time when prosecutors seemed resistant to charging police officers, but was derided by others as a rush to judgment.

The case fell apart and officers were either acquitted or had their charges dropped; all but one today remains employed by the Police Department.

Violence shot up dramatically. Homicides reached all-time, per capita highs and stayed there for the next six years. The city’s Police Department fell under a federal consent decree and went through five commissioners in four years. Catherine Pugh, the mayor elected in the first election following the unrest, later went to federal prison for fraud conspiracy.

The city’s population, which had just started to tick up in the 2010s to 623,600, plummeted by more than 55,000, or about 9%, by 2023.

Like the rest of the country, Baltimore largely shut down during the COVID-19 pandemic, though that crisis also brought a windfall of $640 million in federal coronavirus relief funding from the American Rescue Plan Act.

Recent years have seen stabilization. Surging violence has subsided. There have been two consecutive years of declines in homicides by more than 20%. In the first quarter of this year, Baltimore has seen the fewest homicides for that time period in at least 50 years.

The city’s Police Department remains under federal oversight, but the judge in charge of the case, U.S. Circuit Judge James K. Bredar, said this week, “I am persuaded that this department, at this point in its history, has fully embraced a culture of compliance.”

Mayor Scott won a second term and is in his fifth year guiding the city. Police Commissioner Michael Harrison stayed in his post for more than four years before departing in June 2023 and handing the reins back to an agency veteran. For the first time in more than a decade, the U.S. Census estimates the city’s population slide finally reversed in 2024.

“Today’s population figures confirm that Baltimore’s renaissance is here,” Scott said at the time.

Uneven progress

Despite some signs of progress for the city, there is a mixed record for several of the specific public policies and programs that launched after Gray’s death.

A White House task force for Baltimore under President Barack Obama helped direct grants to city-led programs such as Safe Streets and job training programs catering to West Baltimore residents

One of the very first local initiatives was a public-private partnership called #OneBaltimore that aimed to coordinate businesses, nonprofits, religious and community organizations, and others to focus on fixing short- and longer-term problems.

From the start, officials seemed unsure.

By August 2015, Michael Cryor, the civic leader tapped to lead the initiative, told WBAL-TV that #OneBaltimore had secured about $20 million in funding through grants and public partnerships. He alluded to “a major developer and utility company” that had pledged to build a job training facility within the next two years and a program that planned to train high school students in computer technology.

But Cryor, who did not respond to messages seeking comment, later said the promised millions never materialized. Within 18 months, #OneBaltimore had folded.

Also in 2015, then-Council President Bernard C. “Jack” Young introduced legislation later approved by voters calling for a dedicated fund to support young people. The fund sets aside $12 million annually, but Young said last year that he did not believe the fund was operating as it was conceived and called for an overhaul.

Among the recipients is the city’s YouthWorks summer job placement effort, which has grown from serving 5,200 young people in 2014 to an expected 8,500 this summer.

In 2016, state lawmakers in Annapolis used their first session after the unrest to direct hundreds of millions of dollars intended to spark a renaissance in Baltimore.

They passed bills to create mentorship programs for children from low-income families who hope to attend college; expand after-school programs; demolish and redevelop blight; and improve six city parks. Others extended library hours in low-income neighborhoods, created incentives for universities to set up shop in blighted areas, and studied how to form an adult high school where dropouts could earn a diploma.

An adult high school was indeed created, the first of its kind in the state. But the South Baltimore Adult High School went to Cherry Hill, far from West Baltimore where activists had hoped such new investment would land.

State Sen. Antonio Hayes, a Democrat from West Baltimore, said he thought the bills were “a great start” and the “impetus to a lot of things to come later,” such as the West North Avenue Development Authority, a state agency created in 2021 to shepherd a rebirth of that corridor.

But former Del. Maggie McIntosh, an influential Democratic member of the House of Delegates who represented North Baltimore for 31 years until 2023, had a less rosy assessment of the legislature’s post-unrest response.

“I really, at the time and certainly now, look back on it and say, ‘Hey, what did we do?’” McIntosh said in an interview.

Jill Carter, a Democrat whose representation of West Baltimore in the legislature ended this year after more than two decades, was particularly frustrated by the legislature’s lack of action on police reform. Following Gray’s death, the lawmakers quickly put together a work group to look at what they could pass.

“They took the very bills they killed for two years, they watered them down and passed them,” Carter said.

The experience prompted her to leave elected politics.

“I felt it was a waste of my life to be in a place that failed to recognize the humanity of Black people,” she said.

But Carter eventually returned, and after George Floyd’s killing in Minnesota, a number of substantive bills passed.

Back in West Baltimore, Crystal Parker, a long-time resident of Walbrook, remembers the immediate years after the Freddie Gray unrest as an active time on the community level, when neighbors regularly held trash cleanup days and a church began an after-school program for children.

But amid COVID-19, a local bookstore and bakery closed and Parker said it has been hard to attract the types of businesses she wants to see to the area.

“When people who have lived here for years have asked for help, whomever they’ve asked for help, nobody’s shown up,” Parker said.

Awash with vacants

One of the most tangible signs of action following Gray’s death was increased effort to tear down vacant homes.

The state-led push came through Project C.O.R.E., announced in January 2016 by Gov. Larry Hogan and Rawlings-Blake as a multiyear initiative billed as a nearly $700 million plan to tear down blighted homes, replace them with green space and encourage redevelopment.

The initial plan called for $75 million in state funds over four years, plus in-kind contributions from the city. They tore down the 1000 block of North Stricker Street in Sandtown at a kickoff press conference. The state also said they would “leverage” $600 million in private financing opportunities in the demolished areas.

“Essentially, this will help us put demolition on steroids,” Rawlings-Blake said at the time.

Over the years, officials have boasted about the program’s success. In a 2023 report, the state said it spent $68.6 million to tear down or stabilize nearly 5,400 units and awarded $76.6 million in funds to nonprofit and private partnership projects for redevelopment. It said the projects supported by those awards had total project costs of $750 million.

As such, much of West Baltimore is now marked by grassy lots.

“Everything’s gone,” said longtime resident Brunthelia Lake, 62. “They should’ve had contractors get them out and rebuild them, not tear them down and leave an empty lot.”

According to the Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance, by 2020, Sandtown-Winchester and Harlem Park had a rate of vacant homes of 32%, four times the citywide average. In the decade of the 2010s, there was “very little to no new construction” in Sandtown-Winchester/Harlem Park, the report said.

Williams, of the West North Avenue Development Authority, noted that the corridor is the second-busiest bus transit corridor in the state. For it to be in the shape it’s in, he said, is “a travesty.”

Owen McEvoy, who served as deputy secretary of the state Department of Housing and Community Development under Hogan and Gov. Wes Moore until 2023, said the program took a few years to get organized.

“It helped jumpstart a lot of great projects in neighborhoods that needed it most,” McEvoy said.

McEvoy said it was understandable that residents would have preferred rehabilitation, but he said many structures are unsuitable for rehabilitation and that developers prefer to start fresh with new construction. He acknowledged many distressed communities lack the infrastructure developers desire.

“You can’t just tear a building down and expect someone is going to replace it,” he said.

Sandtown resident Stephenson said there’s still a problem with availability of livable housing.

“Sure, there’s tons of vacants, but good luck finding a place you can move into,” he said. “Between Section 8 kind of setting a floor for rent prices, and then the limited availability, it makes renting more expensive than you would expect. Not everyone is in the market to purchase a home.”

Gov. Moore renamed and revamped the program as Baltimore Vacants Reinvestment Initiative in late 2024 and set a goal of eliminating another 5,000 homes in the next five years. Earlier this month, state Housing and Community Development Secretary Jake Day said the state would be fast-tracking the process to get development funds to community organizations.

Locals say the city hasn’t offered tax-increment financing for areas like Sandtown, instead historically favoring downtown areas. But Scott is trying to change that, with a new zone approved in December that reaches across the city and will assist with the rehab of about 8,000 city-owned properties targeted for revitalization, most in East and West Baltimore.

For signs of construction progress, Hayes, the state senator, points to the Dorothy I. Height Elementary School that opened in 2018, although it was a project that was underway prior to Gray’s death, as well as a new recreation center on North Fulton Ave.

“It’s moving a lot slower than what I would’ve hoped,” Hayes said, “but it’s definitely going in the right direction.”

Reviving recreation

Residents also want the Lillian Jones Recreation Center, which closed in 2021, to reopen. Some have decades-old memories of going to the center to coach teams, play sports or enjoy after-school programs.

It’s a renovation project that City Councilman James Torrence said was promised “when I was 7 years old.” He’s now 38.

Earlier this year, neighbors filed into the Sandtown-Winchester Academy auditorium to speak with Baltimore City Recreation and Parks about their plans.

“If all things align, we’ll be able to build in 2027,” Torrence said.

More broadly, residents like Ashiah Parker, executive director of the No Boundaries Coalition, continue to try to get others involved to help revive their corner of the city.

“People who wake up and do this work every day, it’s just a part of their life. The way I look at it is, the work never ends, right?” Parker said. “I hope when we have this conversation in year 20, we’ll say we have great development and restaurants, and one of our kids went to Harvard.”

Banner reporters Jasmine Vaughn-Hall and Alissa Zhu contributed to this article.