Wearing brown leather shoes, a blue plaid suit and a white hard hat, Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott climbed into the cab of the excavator, pushed and pulled on the levers, and — under the supervision of a trained operator — began to demolish the final vacant building in what was once a block full of public housing units.
The made-for-TV moment capped off a groundbreaking Wednesday afternoon for the second phase of one of the city’s most ambitious housing developments.
Baltimore is now several years into the demolition and reconstruction of Perkins Homes, part of a larger, $1 billion plan known as Perkins Somerset Oldtown that will span 244 acres in East Baltimore between downtown and the Johns Hopkins Hospital campus.
City and state officials gathered near the intersection of Bond and Gough streets to give an update on the development, which is expected to one day house thousands of Baltimoreans in a mixture of low-income and market-rate units.
Click here to read the rest of the article written by Giacomo Bologna over at The Baltimore Sun
