BHCA President Lee Tawney named Beth Brenner, Jeff Thompson, Charlie Duff, Davin Hong and Sallye Perrin to a neighborhood State Center Working Group to keep tabs on the sometimes confusing and conflicting plans for the soon-empty campus of public buildings just south of Bolton Hill.
In the spring of 2021, then-Gov. Larry Hogan’s office announced the allocation of funds to begin relocating more than 3,000 state workers to Baltimore’s central business district. This initiative aimed to address vacancies and stimulate the downtown economy with no evident regard for its impact on the residential neighborhoods and businesses surrounding the outdated state office complex.
The current number of relocated workers has expanded to 5,160, according to the Downtown Partnership, with the remaining few hundred expected to vacate in 2026. State Center, which runs parallel to Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., consists of five Brutalist high-rise office buildings built in the middle of the last century. Plans to renovate the campus and add new housing, retail locations and a supermarke, have been debated and litigated since 2005.
Hogan stopped the project and eventually announced plans to deed the empty 28-acre property to the city. Early in 2024 , the city Department of Planning shelled out more than $300,000 for a market study of possible uses for the tract, one of the larger central city parcels available in any major city. But the city never took possession. In June, Gov. Wes Moore and state officials posted an RFP for a “transit-centered” redevelopment of the site. Proposals were due by summer’s end, but no announcements have followed.
According to The Baltimore Banner, a consultant hired as a result of that RFP likely would take a couple of years at a cost of roughly $2 million to produce a vision for the site. The consultant will review all the prior State Center plans and studies, identify options for building and rebuilding, and come up with cost estimates and potential funding sources.
Download PDF