The Baltimore attorney who won’t give up on Poppleton

Tom Prevas is having trouble sleeping. The Baltimore attorney has poured hundreds of hours into a legal fight that he is very likely to lose — and he knows it.

As soon as Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to say whether it will hear the appeal of a case involving the West Baltimore neighborhood Poppleton and a New York developer who has failed to deliver on virtually every promise he made two decades ago.

Prevas believes what happened in Poppleton is so egregious that it could be used to overturn a controversial Supreme Court decision that has allowed cities like Baltimore to take people’s homes and demolish them for the sake of private developers.

“No politician’s going into the middle of Roland Park, taking half the houses, tearing them down and giving them to some guy from out of town to redevelop,” Prevas said, referencing the affluent, mostly white neighborhood in North Baltimore.

But that’s what happened in Poppleton, a working-class Black neighborhood. More than 100 households were displaced to make room for New York-based La Cité Development’s idea to create a dense, upscale neighborhood, evocative of Manhattan.

For Prevas, a former city planning commissioner, this legal fight is personal.

In 2018, minutes after learning about the situation in Poppleton, he and his fellow commissioner were asked to vote on a seemingly perfunctory issue that allowed one of Baltimore’s biggest redevelopment flops to continue. They all voted yes, a decision he’s come to regret.

Prevas signed on in 2024 as the pro bono attorney representing Poppleton’s neighborhood association and several of its remaining residents.

Dan Bythewood Jr., the president and founder of La Cité, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Eminent domain

Eminent domain is the power of the government to seize private property when it benefits the public. For much of U.S. history, it was used to build railroads, electrical infrastructure, highways or other large infrastructure projects.

In recent decades, cities have broadened that power, using it to take homes, clear the land and give the property to private developers — as long as the development would create jobs, new housing, or some other kind of public benefit.

Prevas, 47, was a student at the University of Maryland’s law school in downtown Baltimore when the Supreme Court affirmed the right of cities to use eminent domain. The 5-4 ruling in 2005 is known as Kelo vs. City of New London.

Susette Kelo sued the Connecticut city after it had taken her home as part of its plan to lure the Pfizer Corporation. Officials wanted to build an “urban village” with hotels and condominiums surrounding a new Pfizer campus. Kelo’s neighborhood was leveled, the development was never completed, and Pfizer’s campus shut down in 2010.

Prevas studied the case in law school, but he had no idea that an almost identical scenario was beginning to play out just a few blocks away.

La Cité’s deal

The year the Kelo case ruling came down, Baltimore began negotiating a deal with Bythewood and his firm to redevelop 13.8 acres in the heart of Poppleton, spanning several city blocks on the west side of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.

Bythewood had little experience in large-scale development work, but his four-phase plan called for 2 million square feet of new development, including 1,650 condos, apartments and houses, as well as space for businesses, including a grocery store. The city agreed to buy up hundreds of homes in the proposed development area under the power of eminent domain, relocate the residents, and tear down the buildings.

The project limped along for years, spanning multiple mayoral administrations. In all, two apartments buildings have been completed.

Like many Baltimoreans, Prevas had never heard of Poppleton.

His family moved to East Baltimore from Greece in the 1800s and owned Broadway Market in Fells Point for more than a century. His grandfather was an attorney for John Paterakis, the founder of H&S Bakery. Prevas grew up mostly in Glen Arm in Baltimore County, but he spent almost every day in the city.

He attended the elite, private Gilman School for 12 years, where his favorite teacher went deep on the Civil Rights movement and made him read “Gideon’s Trumpet,” the story of an indigent prisoner whose Supreme Court case established the public defender system. His family went to the Greek Orthodox Cathedral of the Annunciation on Sundays. He played baseball at the Johns Hopkins University.

After getting his law degree, he took a job as a land use and environmental lawyer at Saul Ewing LLP in Harbor East. He moved to Homeland, a wealthy, mostly white neighborhood in North Baltimore, where he lives with his wife, two daughters and a dog named Buddy.

“I haven’t gone anywhere,” he said.

Meeting Sonia

In 2018, Prevas sat at a table on the eighth floor of a city office building, examining a proposed extension of the urban renewal plan for a neighborhood in West Baltimore.

The city was essentially asking the planning commission to grant La Cité more time. Bythewood was there to testify. Not only were two apartment buildings under construction, he said, but a supermarket, a gym, and even a movie theater were in the works.

Then Sonia Eaddy got up to talk. She and her neighbors were not polished speakers, Eaddy said; they had no lobbyists and little money for political donations. But she wanted these city officials to understand her lived experience in Poppleton. Families had been uprooted. Homes had been leveled. Almost nothing had been built.

Eaddy’s home sat on land slated for Phase 4 of La Cité’s redevelopment plan. Bythewood had barely started Phase 1. Yet the city was still demanding she give up her home.

Prevas started asking questions. He was puzzled by the delay. Bythewood blamed the Great Recession and the city was taking too long to buy and demolish homes.

When it came to vote, Prevas, a relatively new appointee, went along with the rest of the commission. It was another loss for Eaddy. Still, she said that Prevas did something that few other officials had ever done before — he listened.

“That right there let me believe that this man cares,” she said. “He sees it.”

Over the years, as Prevas learned more about Poppleton, he grew to regret that vote. One day, after he had left the planning commission, he ran into Eaddy at a fast-casual Indian restaurant downtown. She had recently notched her first victory. In 2022, the city paid La Cité $260,000 to amend its redevelopment plan and spare her home.

Now, she wanted to broaden her fight; she wanted the entire deal scrapped. And here was a lawyer.

Reexamining the deal

Not long after that, something unexpected happened: New details emerged about the origin of La Cité’s deal with the city. A Banner investigation found that officials did not want to sign a contract with the New York firm in 2005. Documents showed they had concerns about the developer’s lack of experience.

But before an official selection could be made, Essence magazine brought then-City Council President Sheila Dixon to New York for a two-day makeover and photo shoot. Susan Taylor, the longtime editorial director of Essence, is a partner in La Cité and a family friend of Bythewood and his father.

After Dixon got back to Baltimore, city officials reversed their decision and signed an agreement with La Cité. Taylor would later emcee Dixon’s mayoral inauguration.

Dixon has denied any political favoritism, but to Prevas, the feature in Essence magazine was the crucial piece of information that Eaddy and her neighbors needed to file a federal lawsuit.

He remembered a detail from the Kelo case he’d studied in law school. When then-Justice Anthony Kennedy cast the deciding vote, he wrote that political favoritism should prompt deeper scrutiny on any deal involving eminent domain.

Prevas picked six residents of Poppleton, including Eaddy, who lived adjacent to the current redevelopment site, and the lawsuit was filed in August 2024. The suit claimed the stalled project and its vacant land were harming the residents’ property values, among other things.

The final try

La Cité asked the judge to dismiss the case, saying the plaintiffs had no standing because they hadn’t had their homes taken. The judge largely agreed, dismissing the case.

Prevas appealed. La Cité raised the same argument. This time, the appellate judges said the plaintiffs did have standing and they were likely harmed. But they still dismissed the suit.

One question remained unanswered, the judges said: If someone improperly takes a home, you can return the home to the injured party; but how do you order someone to restore your neighborhood?

Prevas petitioned the Supreme Court. He compared his argument to an environmental nuisance case: If a person can sue the company that pollutes the pond next to their home, why can’t someone sue the developer who effectively destroys their neighborhood?

Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University who has written a book about the Kelo decision, would like nothing more than to see it overturned. But he said in an email that this is not the right case for it.

Four current justices have previously indicated their interest in overturning Kelo, but Somin said a person can’t bring a “takings” claim if they didn’t have their property taken.

Prevas said he has heard this before. But he believes his novel approach is the exact reason why the Supreme Court will take it up.

Eaddy said she has faith in Prevas and his lawsuit. She called him “courageous” for even trying it.

To Prevas, it’s about doing the right thing. He knows he has lived a privileged life in Baltimore. Everyone should enjoy the same rights, he said, no matter what neighborhood they live in.

“Whether I’m white or Black or whether you’re rich or poor,” he said, “I want the rules to be the same.”