Regina Hammond, high-heeled and smartly dressed, snapped the meeting of her Johnston Square neighborhood organization to attention at 6:30 p.m. sharp.
There was much to discuss: grant awards for longtime homeowners, neighborhood cleanup crews and free computer training. On a side table, apples, Hostess snacks and bottled water sat ready for the taking.
Wide swaths of Baltimore suffer from disinvestment, deterioration and an absence of community organization. Vacant homes can spread like an infection: unchecked and seemingly everywhere.
And then there’s Johnston Square.
The number of vacant homes in this 110-acre East Baltimore neighborhood has plummeted to 81 from its peak of about 240 in 2008. Violent crime has eased, property values are rising and residents are moving in.
Success hasn’t been cheap — or painless. The organizations steering Johnston Square’s improvements have raised about $150 million over the last 13 years to put toward housing and home repairs, parks and programming. And neighborhood improvement has become a full-time job for Hammond, a retiree who has owned her home here for more than 40 years.
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Hammond has forged relationships with elected officials — the mayor calls her “Boss” — and helped her neighbors largely embrace the changes happening around them, smoothing the path for developers.
The combination of investment, city attention and community buy-in has transformed Johnston Square from an actual set from “The Wire” into a neighborhood replete with modern apartment buildings and the city’s first new Enoch Pratt Free Library branch in more than 15 years.
In 2023, Mayor Brandon Scott, Gov. Wes Moore and other leaders set a goal of eliminating the city’s vacant homes by 2038. Johnston Square’s turnaround could serve as a blueprint.
Other communities want to replicate its success. They need a key ingredient: people who care and can connect money to solutions.
“It’s not even an inspiration, but a driving force behind why we do things the way we do,” Scott said in August after touring a redeveloped block. “You can see the results of what happens when everyone works together.”
But Johnston Square is also a source of frustration in a city with some 3,000 blocks in need of money and attention. And even with so much progress, the neighborhood’s transformation is far from complete.
The Hammonds
Hammond and her husband, Keith, have lived in their home since 1984. They raised two children there and never gave up on it — even as Baltimore’s problems with shootings, drugs and other petty crimes spilled over into their orbit.
They’ve been involved in almost every big decision this neighborhood has made over the last 13 years. They’ve testified before Maryland power brokers in Annapolis, held the too-big scissors at ribbon cuttings and wooed potential funders during block tours.
The Hammonds are so instrumental in turning the community around that the newest apartment building there, The Hammond, is named in their honor. A portrait of the two was part of a Baltimore Museum of Art exhibit called “Baltimore Heroes.”
For most of their time in Johnston Square, the Hammonds were a regular Baltimore family trying to make it work. Regina pulled long hours as a legal assistant in a downtown law firm. Keith drove trucks.
They bought their house through a housing program with Apostolic Housing Corp. and moved there from a rental home in Baltimore County. They wanted to be homeowners, but couldn’t ignore the neighborhood’s more uncomfortable realities: the couches and mattresses littering the grounds, overgrown hedges crowding out the sidewalks, a community swimming pool with no bathroom.
Eager for conditions to improve, Regina Hammond attended neighborhood meetings. While she appreciated what community leaders had tried to do, she saw countless other problems and opportunities for improvement.
One day, at a particularly tense meeting in 2012, Hammond met Terrell Williams, an organizer at BUILD, an interfaith community advocacy group. He’d been trying for months to make inroads in the neighborhood so that residents could build more political power, and he felt he was spinning his wheels.
Williams was stunned by the tenor of the community meeting, where leaders seemed painfully at odds with members. Community leaders berated him for showing up, he recalled, and Hammond spoke up and defended him before walking out the door in exasperation.
Williams went with her, seeing a potential ally.
Hammond was emerging from a period of caregiving for family members, and taking on the role of a neighborhood leader was not a dream she had harbored.
“Why were you so angry in there?” Williams remembered asking her. Hammond told him about the recreation, funding and programming she felt were lacking, and the long disruption of her peace by the ruckus outside when she came home from work every day.
Williams understood.
“We got to work the next day,” he said.
Community organizing
BUILD leaders became interested in Johnston Square and stepped up their East Baltimore efforts after a tragic arson in neighboring Oliver in 2002. Community watchdog Angela Dawson had alerted police about drug activity and other crimes outside of her home, and a neighbor, Darrell L. Brooks, lit the house on fire in retaliation. She, her husband and five of their children were killed.
For BUILD, the city’s failure to protect the family sparked questions about racism and the unequal distribution of services in predominantly Black communities. The organization wanted to help people organize and demand better treatment.
Starting in 2012, BUILD leaders sent Williams to focus on Johnston Square, which has about 800 buildings and is bordered by Interstate 83 and Greenmount Cemetery. Williams knew it as one of the city’s trickiest neighborhoods to organize because of the neighborhood association’s unwillingness to collaborate. He had felt unwelcome there — until he met Hammond.
To restore Johnston Square, Williams said, the community would need to see results — and fast. It would also need to lean on partners outside of government to do what city agencies had not. People would also need to feel heard and respected enough to want to play a part in the turnaround, Williams added. They needed to get to know their neighbors.
Williams set out first to help the homeowners on the Hammonds’ block to reclaim and beautify the courtyard that had fallen prey to trash and illicit activities. Eventually, they installed a fence, laid new grass, planted rose bushes and set up picnic tables. They held a party in the newly decked-out space, and Regina met up with a neighbor friend she hadn’t seen in years; both thought the other had moved away.
Soon Hammond formed a new community group and, with the help of BUILD, decided she would lead it. The other neighborhood association eventually fizzled out.
Together, Williams and Hammond knocked on doors and asked anyone who answered what they wanted to see happen in Johnston Square. They recorded their responses. When they held community cleanups and other events, they began setting out free food — a way to engage. They built better relationships with law enforcement officers. And they started small, with “winnable” problems and a close-knit circle of supporters that would eventually expand to include more helpers and bigger wins.
“A lot of it has to do with trust,” Hammond said. “Because I live here, I think they trust me and don’t think I’m going to do anything to hurt the neighborhood, or hurt them.”
They also formed a constellation of partnerships with dozens of other organizations, including the Irvine Nature Center, Baltimore Arts Realty Corp., the Parks & People Foundation and Johns Hopkins Neighborhood Nursing, which brought in more volunteers and donors to help maintain the neighborhood. Mount Sinai Baptist Church and Episcopal Church of the Redeemer also showed support, as well as the 6th Branch, a local veteran-led nonprofit, which manages the Johnston Square Farm & Garden.
But the most important relationships may have been with ReBUILD Metro, a nonprofit developer that entered Baltimore after the Dawsons’ killings and aspired to take on a bigger role in East Baltimore.
Since 2019, ReBUILD has had an exclusive agreement with the city to control more than 550 properties and lots in Johnston Square, and the group has worked closely with neighborhood leaders to create a long-term plan for housing, parks and services. Through ReBUILD, longtime neighbors can apply for grant funds to repair their homes. So far, about $3.5 million has been distributed to 48 homeowners.
ReBUILD president Sean Closkey has been described by those close to him as a visionary and a miracle worker for his ability to fundraise and bring people together. He said the development progress would not have been possible without the Hammonds’ leadership.
It hasn’t always been easy. Closkey and his team, which includes a former Baltimore assistant housing commissioner, have navigated turbulent financial waters, delayed construction timelines, and impatience from community members. Hammond, he said, has learned not just how to wield her voice but how to be part of the solution, too.
Empowering neighbors
When Closkey’s team dove in, they did so with the idea of getting rid of every last vacant house between Baltimore Penn Station and the Johns Hopkins Hospital. They are making progress but still working on meeting that goal, according to a Banner analysis.
Johnston Square’s location adjacent to these two major draws, plus its small size and existing assets — including Saint Frances Academy, which boasts one of the best high school football programs in the country — made it a prime contender for reinvestment. The team is getting its first practice field soon, thanks to $1.5 million in private funding.
Hammond and the community group she leads showed that developers and the people already living in a community can work together in relative peace, and that there can be something in it for everyone.
Sharon Duncan, 69, a Mura Street homeowner who has lived in Johnston Square most of her life, said she welcomes the renewed investment in her neighborhood and has enjoyed being involved in the change.
Duncan, who retired from her administrative job at MedStar Union Memorial Hospital’s counseling center in 2023, received a $75,000 home repair grant through ReBUILD Metro’s legacy homeowners program and redid her kitchen and floors. Workers later repainted the front of her house for free, too.
With Hammond’s encouragement, Duncan now regularly attends community meetings and volunteers at events. And best of all, the two vacant homes next to hers, empty for years, will soon be renovated by ReBUILD and filled with new neighbors.
Almost every inch of Johnston Square has been incorporated into the plan. In it are flower beds and cheerful murals, street art and benches, and now two big side-by-side apartment buildings on the site of once-derelict land.
Over the last decade, shootings and homicides in the neighborhood have sharply declined, according to a Banner analysis of publicly available data. That’s coincided with a rise in median property values, which have grown nearly fivefold during the same time frame. Median home prices reached a peak of $244,000 in 2025, according to data from Live Baltimore, which tracks home sales.
A blueprint?
Cecilia Gonzalez, executive director of Action Baybrook in South Baltimore’s Brooklyn neighborhood, described her attitude toward Johnston Square as one of “healthy envy.”
Action Baybrook, along with other community groups, has received a fraction of the financial assistance that Hammond’s organization has, and Gonzalez said the city and state’s concentration on small areas at a time inherently means there are fewer resources to go around.
“We have to protect the people who are here now,” Gonzalez said, no matter where they might live.
Consultants who have studied Baltimore, which reports having some 11,000 vacant houses, have backed the concept of starting small and keeping a foot on the gas.
A 2023 report from czbLLC, a housing consulting firm, commissioned by some of Johnston Square’s main players, found that any area seeking to eliminate vacant housing once and for all needs a handful of essentials: “Substantial” resources; a commitment to community engagement; an all-hands-on-deck mindset; and patience.
Liz Kozub, director of technical assistance at the Center for Community Progress, a national think tank that specializes in vacant housing research, said Johnston Square also smartly identified its “community champions” and involved them in every step of the process.
“Having that kind of committed focus is going to lead that change,” she said.
Williams, the former BUILD organizer, said replicating Johnston Square’s success is possible. But it requires backing from trained organizers and financial investment in other future community leaders.
There are more Keiths and Reginas out here, he said. But right now, “they have the heart, but not the head.”
Regina now
The Hammonds start their days early and sometimes don’t let up until dark.
Keith Hammond has found new purpose as the community’s Mr. Fix It. He often rises before the sun so he can begin his daily lawn care rounds, rotating among the 30 greened lots under his stewardship.
Regina Hammond has her own long list of to-dos — everything from answering emails to mingling at fundraising galas.
Through it all, the Hammonds said, they’re a team.
They are under no illusion that their work is done. Blight has been reduced, not eliminated; homes are selling, but property taxes are rising; and Regina Hammond has not run out of ideas for amenities or programs.
State leaders, cognizant of how long some of the newly renovated vacant homes are taking to sell, have made more money available to homeowners who choose to live in Johnston Square and other city neighborhoods. Available aid includes a low-interest loan and up to $20,000 in down payment and closing-cost funds that can be layered with other city and state assistance.
If Regina Hammond is thinking about slowing down, it doesn’t show. Nowhere is this more evident than at the monthly community meetings she runs with playful efficiency.
She’s learned to keep them to an hour, no more, no less. They typically start and end with prayers of gratitude, a reflection of her relentless faith.
As Keith Hammond tidied the room one warm spring evening, Regina intercepted a newcomer on his way out the door.
“Come back real soon,” she told the young man, who had moved to the neighborhood for a job with the Frederick Douglass tunnel project. “If you have any problems, let us know.”
Banner photojournalist Jessica Gallagher and data reporter Sahana Jayaraman contributed to this story.
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