New owners, again, for Pedestal Gardens apartments?

Pedestal Gardens, the collection of substandard low-income apartments on both the east and west sides of Eutaw Place, apparently once again has been sold – adding new uncertainty to long-standing plans and hopes for redevelopment and the construction of mixed-income housing there.

City and other real estate sources said The Community Builders, a Boston-based developer of large-scale urban housing, has shut down its Baltimore office and is hoping to close on the sale of the four buildings early in the new year. TCB bought Pedestal Gardens in 2016 for approximately $5 million and was looking for major subsidies from the state, city and federal Department of Housing and Urban Development to complete the new development.

It’s not entirely clear who the buyers are or what their plans might be for the roughly 200 apartments, many of which are empty for what once was to have been a model redevelopment project. Plans for that project date back more than a decade ago when then-Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake convened a community group to develop a comprehensive “transformation plan” for Central West Baltimore. It called for renovating and repurposing the units at 325 McMechen St and 1613-1617 Eutaw Place in Bolton Hill and 1715-1717 Madison Ave. and 1213-1215 Madsion Ave. in Madison Park.

That proposal called for up to half of the rental units to be available at market rates, a similar percentage subsidized as “workforce housing” and about 20 percent set aside for low-income families. There also were to be townhouses constructed to add homeownership to the mix.

BHCA and community leaders in Madison Park and Historic Marble Hill pressed the Boston developers to adhere to that strategy but discovered in 2020 that TCB was moving toward fewer homeowner units and a large share of low-income units. The two neighborhood associations then met with state and city housing officials to urge that they not fund TCB’s altered vision, which they characterized as “concentrated poverty.”

City housing officials said lately that they knew of TCB’s plan to sell the properties and abandon their commitments but offered no further information.

—Bill Hamilton