Moore administration unveils plans to demolish State Center office complex, redevelop site

For a period spanning 20 years and four governors, Maryland has been flummoxed and hamstrung over what to do with State Center, a dilapidated 28-acre state office complex in Baltimore’s center.

Now, Gov. Wes Moore’s administration has a plan: tear State Center down and build a mixed-use campus in its place.

Preliminary concepts unveiled at a community meeting Tuesday indicated the site could support up to 1,600 residential rental units, 64 for-sale residential units, 85,000 square feet of retail, a 125-room hotel and 165,000 square feet of office space. A developer has not been selected, and no timeline for construction has been given. City regulations require that some of the rental units be affordable housing.

The site is ideally located. The parcel sits at the intersection of Baltimore’s Bolton Hill, Mount Vernon, Upton and Seton Hill neighborhoods, has a Baltimore Metro stop and is near Penn Station and a light rail line.

“I truly cannot think of another site in the city that has such great access” to transit, said Amber Wendland, an architect at Ayers Saint Gross. She explained the preliminary plans at Tuesday’s meeting.

The Moore administration has made transit-oriented development a priority, seeing it as a way to spur the state economy and address Maryland’s housing shortage. In 2025, Moore hired consultants to figure out how best to use the site.

However, previous redevelopment efforts have failed to launch, regardless of who was in the governor’s mansion. In 2006, Republican Gov. Bob Ehrlich’s administration first floated the idea of building something else there. Three years later, when Democrat Martin O’Malley was governor, the state spending board decided to go forward with redevelopment and awarded a contract.

Construction never started, though, and Gov. Larry Hogan in 2016 sought to cancel the $1.5 billion deal. That spurred a lawsuit that wasn’t resolved until 2024, when the spending board, under Moore’s direction, agreed to a landmark $58.5 million settlement with the developer.

“We’re finally now in a position to move forward and move on to a new chapter that is actually about how we’re focusing on developing this property into a transformative economic project and actually benefit Baltimoreans and Marylanders to come,” Moore said in 2024, adding that State Center had “gotten to the point of being a continued hazard without a long-term solution.”

Built starting in the mid-1950s, State Center is showing its age, having fallen into disrepair. In 2024, the complex was temporarily closed after Legionella was detected in the water.

The State Center redevelopment would be the latest in a series of ambitious real estate projects underway around Baltimore.

“This is probably going to be the most significant development outside of Harborplace,” said state Sen. Antonio Hayes, a Democrat representing Baltimore’s West Side, who has long advocated for the State Center project.

City officials are poised in the coming weeks to approve tax breaks for Harborplace, a massive redevelopment of the Inner Harbor. A plan to revitalize a long-dormant industrial campus on the city’s East Side is also underway, as are discussions about reviving the beleaguered Howard Street corridor.