In 2018, Angela Banks received bad news from her landlord: Baltimore officials were buying her family’s home of four decades, planning to demolish the three-story brick row house to make room for a beleaguered urban renewal project aimed at transforming a historically Black neighborhood. Banks and her children became homeless almost overnight. With nowhere else to go, they spent months sleeping in her aging Ford Explorer.
Roughly five years later, the house remains standing, and plans to redevelop west Baltimore’s Poppleton neighborhood have largely stalled, even after the city displaced Banks and many of her neighbors.
