BALTIMORE OBSERVED: DEVELOPMENT    After-School Special

Urbanite #43 January 08

(Baltimore Business Journal, Nicholas Griner | Staff)            Donald Manekin, left, and his son, Thibault.

By: Greg Hanscom

It’s an unlikely spot for a meeting. I’m sitting in the corner of a vast unlit warehouse in a bleak section of Charles Village. The chairs are of the beige, metal folding variety. The “conference table” is foldable too, like one you might find in a church basement, only this one looks like it has been through a flood. (It probably has, but more on that later.)

I’m talking with Donald and Thibault Manekin, the father-son team behind Seawall Development Company. This is the same Donald Manekin whose father and uncle created the Manekin Corporation, which has thrown down millions of square feet of office space in the Baltimore-Washington corridor. You’d think they could find a better table. And they could, of course, but they’re proud of this one. It’s a stand-in for this derelict factory: Where others see decay, the Manekins see opportunity.
 

(Kristine Buls/Examiner)
Widely known as the “Census Building,” the hulking brick factory on North Howard has been largely vacant since 1953.

Most people in the neighborhood call this hulking brick structure on North Howard Street the “Census Building,” because the U.S. Census Bureau used it as its Baltimore headquarters in 1990. The bureau was only here for a short time, but the name stuck. (“It might as well be called the Baltimore Opera Company Building, since they stored their stuff there for a while,” quips Remington Neighborhood Alliance President Joan Floyd, who lives up the street.) The structure was originally built in the 1890s by the H.F. Miller & Son Company, which made tin cans for Baltimore food processors, tobacco producers, and druggists. The plant closed in 1953, and aside from the Census Bureau and a few other short-term tenants, the building has sat empty ever since.

Even on this sunny October day, the air inside is cold and damp. Here on the first floor of the warehouse, the wood floors have buckled. Locals say that a pipe broke a few years back, flooding the building and sending water gurgling out of the sewer grates outside. Floyd says windy days have sent glass shards and wood fragments flying out of the windows of the four-story structure. At one point, neighbors complained so vociferously about the building’s condition that the city threatened to haul longtime owner Bernard Kapiloff, a local doctor, into court.

Thibault Manekin, apparently oblivious to the chill, sits with his sleeves rolled up, cheerfully pointing out how much light filters in through the cracks in the plywood covering the arched windows. “We think we have what it takes to make this work,” he says. If the Manekins have their way, the warehouse will become open, sunny office space for the nonprofit organizations that buoy Baltimore’s public school system—outfits like Teach for America, the Baltimore Urban Debate League, and New Leaders for New Schools.

“Right now, these organizations are spread around the city,” says Donald Manekin, who sits on the board of Teach for America Baltimore. The plans call for 35,000 square feet of offices, plus shared conference rooms and meeting areas that would allow the groups to mingle and exchange ideas. The rest of the building would house forty-two one- and two-bedroom apartments for teachers, renting for $700 to $1200 a month.

The plan is audacious. Not only do the Manekins want to create offices and apartments that rent for below-market rates, but they want to do it in an environmentally friendly way. Using local and recycled materials, along with energy-efficient appliances and water-saving fixtures, they are gunning for a gold LEED certification from the U.S. Green Building Council. “Most important, we’re not hauling the building away to the landfill,” says Tom Wahl, executive vice president of Hamel Builders, a partner in the project.

Oh, and the Manekins want to make a buck on the project as well. Says Donald, “There’s nothing wrong with making money.”

The concept is a marriage of two ideas that are catching on nationally: shared working space for nonprofit organizations and affordable housing for teachers. Putting nonprofits into one building where they can share meeting rooms and other facilities saves precious dollars, says China Brotsky, managing director of Tides Shared Spaces, a San Francisco nonprofit that helps groups create these kinds of offices.

Many of these buildings are themselves owned and operated by charitable foundations or nonprofits that hold the rent down, protecting tenants from spikes in local real estate markets. The Interchurch Center in Manhattan, for one, has been providing office space for nonprofits for nearly forty years; rents are roughly a quarter of those for commercial spaces. A handful of developers have built such centers for profit, says Brotsky, but the whole idea is to keep rents stable and below market value, so developers have to be creative with their financing.

Creating affordable, desirable housing options for new teachers requires no small amount of ingenuity either. High-rent cities such as New York and San Francisco are wrestling with the issue, but there’s a good example just a few blocks northeast of the Census Building. At Astor Court on St. Paul Street, local developer Michael Rock teamed up with the Abell Foundation to create a combination of business spaces and teacher apartments. Renovating the building, which had sat vacant for more than a decade, ultimately involved eleven different funding sources, according to Beth Harber, the foundation’s senior program officer for community development. A side agreement with the developer guarantees that the apartments will remain below market rates. They currently rent for $650 to roughly $1100 a month, and every one has been full since the building re-opened in summer 2005.

The Manekins’ plan for the Census Building includes $5.25 million in historic tax credits from the state and federal governments, and another $5.25 million from the federal New Market tax credit program, which encourages investment in low-income communities. They estimate that the project will ultimately cost $19 million. Donald says their projections are about to run up against reality as they finalize plans, but he doesn’t anticipate any big surprises. “Unlike a lot of historic buildings, this one is wide open inside,” he says. “I don’t think there are a lot of ghosts in the closets.”

Still, many a developer has eyed the Census Building in the past two decades, and most have walked away. The two redevelopment efforts that did get off the ground ended badly. The first attempt crashed and burned in 2003 when developer Louis Salomonsky landed in prison for bribing a city councilwoman in his hometown of Richmond, Virginia. Salomonsky’s proposal to turn the building into ninety-six apartments had drawn opposition from neighbors, including Joan Floyd, who said there weren’t enough parking spaces. A second attempt to carve the building into apartments ran aground in 2006 when D.C.-based Georgetown Restoration ran out of money.

The Manekins still have hurdles to clear if they hope to avoid a similar fate. They will need to clean up lead paint and a leaky underground fuel oil tank. And there are the requisite city permits. Nonetheless, they hope to have crews working in early 2008, with apartments ready for incoming teachers in the spring of 2009.

The optimism seems to be catching. Floyd says the Remington Neighborhood Alliance doesn’t have an official position yet, but “there’s been good, clear communication from the developer, which is a breath of fresh air.” (The building technically sits within Charles Village, but Remington is right across the street.) Her group has been working to build a public grade school in the neighborhood, which has seen little of the revival that has swept through much of Charles Village in recent years. “To have this education-centered development come in at the same time is very exciting,” she says. “Remington has lots and lots of kids, but it’s never been a neighborhood where education was at the center.”

Beyond that, the building could bring new life to a long-neglected corner of Baltimore, says Alfred Barry, a former city planner who provided consulting to the first two would-be redevelopers. “Any time you invest a substantial amount in a building that is that prominent, you reinforce people’s opinions that there’s something going on in that area. Homebuyers are more willing to invest there. New investors think the area will ultimately be better,” he says. “More people on the street will be a good thing for that part of Charles Village.”

Just up North Howard Street from the Census Building, a new sign hangs above the door of the Two Sisters Bar and Grille. Cathy Carter and Debbie Crum, who grew up in Hampden, bought the place a year ago. At the time it was a Korean karaoke bar. “It was a mess,” says Carter. “Everything was black. There were holes in the bathroom walls.” A good scrubbing and a couple fresh coats of paint (much of it Ravens purple) have improved the mood significantly.

“The neighborhood seems to have picked up since we got here,” says Carter. Renovating the Census Building will be “good for business, nice for the neighborhood,” she says. She gestures across the street to an abandoned storefront. The downstairs windows are boarded up. The upstairs windows are empty sockets. “You know, you could make something of that place,” she says. “You could put in a little shop or something. You can fix up the neighborhood if you just put some effort into it.”

—Greg Hanscom