Baltimore Mayor's Race: Harborplace redevelopment

Описание: We asked the candidates about the current plan to re-zone and redevelop the area.

Sheila Dixon:
When asked about the Harborplace redevelopment, Dixon mainly punted to the voters.

"That's an effort that the voters will have a choice in November," says Dixon. "It's coming for a referendum."

"There's mixed emotions about it," she adds. "I mean, something has to be done with the Inner Harbor. It's clear that it's gotten deteriorated and we want to attract residents to go downtown, but we also want to attract visitors."

Dixon feels a balance needs to be struck for development downtown.

"The voters will make a choice in November."

Thiru Vignarajah:
"No one wants to see the revival of Harborplace more than me," Vignarajah told Jamie Costello.

He reminisced about when he was growing up in Baltimore and people flocked to Harborplace, and watched the ships come into the port.

"There's nothing fundamentally broken about Harborplace," he says. "The problem is we've mismanaged it for decades and now people are afraid to go down there."

He feels that increasing the feeling of safety will also help.

"If you start managing and you provide programming, you start providing a sense of security, some of that will rebound," says Vignarajah. "Don't get me wrong, I want to see a magical investment in the Inner Harbor."

His issue with the current plan is the luxury apartments and tearing down the promenade.

"To tear those down and to replace them with something as unimaginative as 900 luxury apartments, that's crazy," he says.

"I guess that's what the developer wants, but that's not what the public wants," he continues. "The public wants more public space and I'm fully committed to blocking those luxury apartments."

His hope is to bring back Harborplace to "what it used to be."

Brandon Scott:
"I think that what we have to do is level set what we're talking about with Harborplace," says Scott. "We know that Harborplace literally sat sitting there deteriorating on itself for a long, long time. No one did anything. Everybody that was in my seat had the ability to do something, they didn't."

He says he took a different approach and challenged the former City Solicitor to try getting the property moved into a receivership.

"Then we have to reimagine what the Inner Harbor looks like," he says. "Shopping malls are not dying, they're dead, so to have anyone say that we're going to rebuild the Inner Harbor the same exact way that they did before, it's just an asinine thing to say."

He adds that the developer is from West Baltimore and that the development is centering everybody in the city.

"That person who has centered the city in its entirety, not a specific group, everybody in the city as part of reimagining what Harborplace is going to look like," says Scott.

That includes places to live.

"Downtown is our fastest-growing residential neighborhood," he tells Megan Knight.

Scott added that the redevelopment would actually add more public space than there is today.

"And we have to also, have to always, say this: We have to fix the promenade," he continues. "Climate change is real and it's happening and we have to do it. What.. will behoove us to do is actually build the Inner Harbor that works for all of us, that works for the 21st century and helps us unlock the full potential of downtown."