The Ellwood Park Community Plan is a new guiding document for the Southeast Community Development Corporation, neighborhood residents, and partners like the Family of Ellwood Park and the Friends of Ellwood Park. The plan was supported by a grant from the Enterprise Community Foundation and was co-created by the Neighborhood Design Center between fall 2020 and fall 2023 in partnership with Southeast CDC staff, residents, and community partners. This document describes the overall planning process, the history and existing conditions of the community, feedback from residents, and the strategies and actions recommended to meet community goals.
Ellwood Park residents and community members were engaged in a year-long planning process to learn about challenges, hopes, and dreams for the neighborhood. Activities included virtual stakeholder and community meetings, surveys administered online and by phone, door-to-door canvassing, and pop-up engagement at community gatherings.
The COVID-19 pandemic made some outreach methods more difficult, but door-to-door canvassing and phone surveys provided safe opportunities for residents to participate in the process.
Ellwood Park is a small neighborhood in southeast Baltimore that held primarily industrial uses at the edge of the city’s limits until the early twentieth century extension of the electric streetcar line, which brought new residents and civic buildings, and the creation of Ellwood Avenue Park in the late 1930s. Once primarily a segregated White community, made up largely of Czech immigrants, Ellwood Park is now home to Black, white, and Latino families. Latino residents now make up approximately twenty percent of the neighborhood, which is more than six times the city average. The neighborhood faces several challenges that have grown in the past decades including housing instability and large rent burdens, as well as quality of life issues such as illegal trash dumping and petty crime from informal economies.
The shared vision for Ellwood Park resulting from this planning process is organized around five goals:
To meet these goals, this document presents strategies and actions that can be completed by dedicated neighborhood partners within immediate and long-term time frames. While this remains a living document, subject to updates and input from stakeholders not available during the original planning process, the goals listed here reflect an agreed-upon vision for the future that can guide upcoming planning efforts.
Plan
View the draft plan.
View the briefing slides prepared for the Baltimore City Planning Commission.
View the Implementation Table slides.
Contact molly@southeastcdc.org with any comments or questions about the plan.
RFQ: Community Branding
Posted: 4/2/2024
Southeast CDC is seeking qualified individuals, teams, and/or consulting firms that can lead a community design process to develop a visual identity for the neighborhood of Ellwood Park in East Baltimore. Consultants will ideally be bilingual in English and Spanish.
Deadline to apply: 5/1/2024
Click here for the full RFQ.