After years of fighting it, Poppleton developer pays $1 million water bill

The city of Baltimore scored a win against one of its most egregious water bill scofflaws.

According to a disclosure filed last week, La Cité Development said it had paid $917,000 to settle the water bills at its West Baltimore apartment complex.

The New York-based developer had been accruing them since November 2022 and repeatedly maintained it wasn’t to blame.

In 2023, La Cité pointed the finger at the residents of its Center\West apartment complex, saying they hadn’t been properly billed for their water usage. The developer later told investors the city’s billing system was to blame and a water main break caused improper charges.

The mounting debt led to simmering tensions with city officials before hitting a boiling point in spring 2025.

That’s when Baltimore’s legal department filed two lawsuits against a subsidiary of La Cité in an extraordinary attempt to force the developer to pay.

La Cité fought the lawsuit for months, rebutting the allegations in legal filings.

Then, in February, court records show La Cité and Baltimore settled their lawsuit. It led to a sizable payment to the city, which has been struggling to enforce water bill collection.

Public records show tens of millions of dollars in water and sewer bills go unpaid every year. According to audited financial statements of the city’s water and wastewater systems, those unpaid bills totaled more than $365 million as of last summer. Roughly half of that debt comes from accounts considered “doubtful,” meaning the city suspects it might never get repaid.

This year, the wastewater system had to notify its bondolders about its weakened financial position, which was partly caused by customers not paying their bills.

Mary Stewart, spokesperson for the Department of Public Works, declined to comment on La Cité’s water bill, saying the agency cannot disclose information about a bill without the customer’s consent.

La Cité President Dan Bythewood Jr. did not respond to multiple requests for comment. But, in a disclosure to investors, his firm said the nearly $1 million payment demonstrated its “good faith efforts to resolve these matters” and again blamed tenants for not paying their bills.

Bythewood and La Cité have controlled a swath of city-owned land in Poppleton for two decades. The city displaced more than 100 households in the predominantly Black neighborhood to make way for Bythewood’s vision.

The developer was supposed to build a mini city evocative of Manhattan, but La Cité has finished only the Center\West apartment complex.

Made up of two buildings on North Schroeder Street, the 262-unit complex opened in 2019 and has struggled to attract tenants. Public documents show, as of this spring, a third of its market-rate units were empty, and a long-promised grocery store has never opened.

The city canceled its development deal with La Cité in 2024, but the developer continues to control acres of vacant land in the heart of Poppleton.

A federal appeals judge recently ruled against a group of Poppleton residents who sued La Cité and a smattering of current and former city officials. The lawsuit aimed, in part, at wresting control of the land from La Cité and Bythewood.

However, Bythewood has more litigation ahead of him.

In February, his sister, Brie Bythewood, sued him and La Cité in New York state court, claiming she’s owed more than a million dollars in unpaid wages.

Brie Bythewood said she was fired after refusing to take part in a scheme involving unpaid water bills.

According to her lawsuit, Brie Bythewood spent about 18 years as the vice president of marketing and communications of La Cité. While working for her family’s development firm, she also starred on the Bravo reality TV show “Blood, Sweat, and Heels,” which followed a group of ambitious New York women in business and media. She did not respond to requests for comment.

Part of her lawsuit involves La Cité’s only other major development, a 29-unit apartment complex in Hempstead, New York, a Long Island suburb.

In her lawsuit, Brie Bythewood said her brother asked for her help in 2024 to deceive Hempstead’s mayor about a $20,000 unpaid water bill. Her lawsuit said she “refused to lie” to the mayor and called it a “fraudulent scheme.”

In March, Brie Bythewood filed a new complaint that removed any mention of fraud. Her brother has yet to file a response.