Our area planner, Nick Chupein, presented at our November 24 meeting about community plans. He shared plans that Upton and Oliver have made, and we agreed to work towards getting a new one made for Mount Clare this year - the last plan for our neighborhood was a 1970s urban renewal plan that expired over a decade ago.
This forum is one of the first steps in this process. We are going to canvas all households in the neighborhood for desires and feedback to be put into the plan, and now that this discourse is up my next project is to get us an interactive neighborhood map to put notes on that we can all use to plan out our, well, neighborhood plan.
Here are some of the big goals that we’ve come up with so far for this plan:
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Get feedback from everyone how they want Impact Investment and Reinvest Baltimore to impact their block. Get each block to agree on what they want their block to look like, and collect them all into a shared neighborhood vision map. This also helps support the Southwest Partnership Housing Action Plan target blocks.
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Get consensus on blocks that want neighborhood commercial use. We already have a lot of businesses but many have to operate without a big public presence because the city does not allow them in residential zoning. This can help the work of eg Make Space to open and operate businesses in our neighborhood.
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Have a long term vision plan for our streets, alleys, yards, and all public spaces. This can include traffic calming, road diets, street trees, bump outs, parklets, playgrounds, anything we can imagine as a feature of our public sphere we might want we want to have in this plan to help get funding for it in the years to come. A big item here is going to be to get direct, official trail connections into Carroll Park over or under the railroad tracks on Stricker and Fulton streets.
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Match vacant property to current residents if anyone wants to try to get a specific parcel to either rebuild or adaptively reuse.
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Determine priority demolition targets for the Strategic Demolition Fund. We have some vacants that are risking bringing properties around them down or are endangering whole blocks, but the city at large isn’t paying attention to where they are or how they are impacting us.
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Figure out what want our neighborhood to be and look like in 5, 10, 20, 50, 100 years. Put together an action plan as an addendum to move towards those goals.
We are seeing a lot of things moving behind the scenes, with everything up to federal dollars being put into work in our area - many of the neighborhoods seeing coordinated and effective investment are doing so because they have a plan like this in place. So we don’t want to miss out on this opportunity to put to paper what we want Mount Clare to be like tomorrow and for generations to come.
https://mountclare.net/community_plan.pdf
https://mountclare.net/17_upton.pdf
https://mountclare.net/24_oliver.pdf
Reply to this post with anything you want to see done with the process or final plan, or email us at info@mountclare.net