Baltimore’s small business owners want the city to codify more protections

Zehbras CrossFit is the thriving, Black-owned, affordable, and accessible fitness space owner and CrossFit coach Jeanelle Spencer long wanted to bring to Baltimore’s Black Butterfly. On any given weekday afternoon, barbells slam onto rubber mats as Spencer’s neighbors in Waverly cycle through burpees, pull-ups, squats, and more in the small gym at 3302 Greenmount Avenue.

Spencer was prepared to overcome the usual obstacles that come with starting a small business so that she could give people access to life-changing fitness coaching, become an anchor in the neighborhood, and help turn the tide against decades of blight and disinvestment that had long marked the commercial corridor. But Spencer never expected a dispute over basic repairs with her landlord to derail her plans before she could even open.

Spencer’s first attempt to open Zehbras was in early 2023, at a long-vacant building on Greenmount Avenue, a long-vacant building across the street. With significant work needed to make the building usable, Spencer hired a broker and lawyer to help her navigate the deal. 

Under the lease, the landlord was responsible for making the building functional, including structural and roof repairs, restoring electricity, and providing running water and air conditioning. The lease required Spencer to handle the work needed to turn the space into a gym. She paid about $8,000 for the first month’s rent and security deposit, then spent tens of thousands more hiring architects and engineers, securing permits, and completing renovations, including framing, flooring, electrical work, and an accessible ramp.

A year passed, and Spencer had completed her portion of the work. But she was still waiting to open the doors. The landlord had restored electricity and partially installed the HVAC system, but the building still lacked gas and running water, and the roof still leaked. Spencer said the landlord then told her it had done all it would do and that she needed to begin paying rent.

The lease spelled out penalties if Spencer missed rent, but offered little recourse if the landlord failed to complete its work.

“What I did not have in the lease were protections for me if they didn’t do their part,” Spencer said.

When Spencer asked for proof that the work had been completed, the landlord terminated the lease, so she sued. A judge ruled in her favor, but the case is now on appeal. Attorneys for 3313 Greenmount Avenue LLC did not respond to requests for comment.

“In my inexperience, I thought, of course they want to rent the space,” Spencer said. “So why wouldn’t they do their part? It never crossed my mind that they wouldn’t.”

Spencer was ultimately able to open Zehbras at its current location in 2024, but her ordeal highlights how few protections commercial tenants have when landlords fail to hold up their end of a lease. 

Baltimore landlords have refused to renew leases, sharply raised rents, and locked tenants out. Commercial leases often shift major building repair costs onto tenants.

Unlike residential properties, commercial landlords are not required to provide running water or heat, and when repairs don’t happen, a tenant’s most effective option is court — something Spencer has learned is costly and can take years.

Now, as inflation, rising energy prices, and higher rents squeeze Baltimore’s small businesses, Spencer is part of a wave of small business owners organizing across the city. Along the Greenmount corridor, she’s rallying neighboring businesses to push for public information on who owns commercial properties and how long they’ve sat empty, a standard commercial lease template that spells out protections and responsibilities for both tenants and landlords, and more accountability from landlords to the community.

More than 50 small businesses and their supporters have formed the Baltimore Small Business Coalition, which is pushing the City Council to pass a Small Business Bill of Rights with new protections for commercial tenants including 90 days’ notice before rent increases or evictions, minimum maintenance requirements for landlords, and penalties for landlord harassment.

Maryland’s small business survival rate fell from 19% to 12% in 2024, one of the steepest declines in the region, according to the state chamber of commerce.

“Small businesses are an economic lifeblood of a city. They’re a major tax base, they’re major employers, they’re major drawing points for people to move to the city,” said Billy Dalton, communications chair of the Baltimore Small Business Coalition and a city resident who helped launch the group.

In neighborhoods across the city, it can feel like “almost every other storefront” is shuttered, Dalton said, kept empty by landlords hoping property values and rents will increase.

“They just kind of view us and our community as a portfolio,” Dalton said.

The coalition noted that cities like San Francisco tax owners of commercial space left vacant more than six months. In 2024, the tax raised $2.74 million towards small business assistance, such as waiving startup fees and grants, and technical assistance negotiating leases. It also shows how such a measure can fall short: a lack of enforcement and a 2025 exemption for businesses near construction sites have left it with little bite.  

Advocates are also borrowing from New York, which a decade ago became the first city to ban landlord harassment and has a Business Owner Bill of Rights that outlines how city agencies must treat business owners. 

Baltimore passed a vacancy tax on residential properties in 2025, and the coalition wants the same logic applied to storefronts. City Council President Zeke Cohen said in June that he supports the idea.

In addition to the 90 days’ notice requirement before a rent increase, lease termination, or eviction, the coalition wants to make landlords responsible for a building’s structure, core utilities, and HVAC system — costs they would not be able to shift onto a tenant through a lease.

“We looked at real-world examples from other cities because this isn’t exclusively a Baltimore problem,” Dalton said.

Even successful small businesses operate on thin margins, so landlords who refuse to make basic repairs can quickly put them under. Dalton said it isn’t just the business owner who loses — the city loses community anchors. He pointed to coalition member Chopped Broadway Bodega & Deli in Upper Fells, which opened to fanfare in 2025 as Baltimore’s first Black- and women-owned bodega.

Co-owner Ernestine Chambers built Chopped Broadway Bodega & Deli as a social enterprise, investing $73,000 of her own savings into the business to bring quality food to a neighborhood in a food desert and create employment pathways for people usually shut out of the labor market. Her hiring reflected that mission.“One hundred percent of my team has overcome significant barriers — either reentry, homeless, foster care,” Chambers said. “These are people who there’s not a lot of employers that’s lined up to hire and give them a first real opportunity or a second chance.”

Instead, a series of crises exposed how fragile that investment is when the city doesn’t hold landlords accountable. First, a fire in an upstairs apartment in August forced the deli to shut down for a weekend. One week later, a pipe burst in another unit upstairs, sending sewage cascading into the shop. With no subfloor to contain the leak, “there was nothing to stop the water … it just really poured into the space,” she recalled.

The community rallied behind the shop and was ready to rebuild, but the landlord, who lives overseas, never fixed the building, she said. Without a safe, functioning building, there was no way to reopen.

After just eight months serving the community, Chopped Broadway Bodega & Deli closed.

For Chambers, it was a clear lesson in what’s at stake: when a city lets an absentee landlord walk away from their responsibilities, it isn’t just losing a storefront — it loses businesses that make Baltimore more livable by investing in its residents. That’s why she joined the Baltimore Small Business Coalition to push for a Small Business Bill of Rights, so other owners won’t see their businesses — and their employees’ futures — wiped out by negligent landlords.

Another focus of the coalition: cutting the red tape an owner must deal with before they can open. Permitting requirements and inspections can be difficult to navigate, and delays can stretch for months. That happened to Aru Aru on Eastern Avenue, where owner Marvin Rodriguez was set back three months after the city changed its online permitting portal and materials he had already submitted didn’t carry over. The coalition wants the city to create a centralized portal where business owners can navigate permitting requirements, tenant protections, and available grants.

“All of the power is in landlords’ hands when it comes to commercial real estate,” said Gina Lee, a senior program manager at the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development, a New York membership organization of community development and grassroots housing groups that advocates for affordable housing and equitable economic development.

This summer, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced more than 50 measures to cut bureaucratic red tape for small business owners, including a case manager for every new business to handle permits and applications.

“Having one person respond to their requests — no matter what kind of regulatory process they’re dealing with — is something business owners have said they really need,” said Lee.

After rent, fees and fines are the burden owners bring up most, Lee said. New York’s reforms aim to streamline permits and licensing so owners stop losing money to rules they did not know applied to them. 

Changing the rules is only part of the challenge. A recent New York City survey found that just 9% of business owners knew the city had a bill of rights. The administration has since sent staff into all five boroughs to hold roundtables and hand the document out in person.

“It’s great that the administration is boots on the ground trying to talk to small business owners,” Lee said. “[Owners are] not sitting around reading city resource pages. So the way these reforms actually reach people really matters.”

Lee’s organization was part of the coalition that helped pass New York’s commercial tenant anti-harassment law in 2016, but its 2023 survey found that nearly one in five respondents reported landlord harassment, including many of the practices the law is intended to ban: 

“The enforcement mechanism is the commercial tenants themselves being able to take their landlord to court over harassment allegations,” she said. “So that is not a realistic way to stop harassment when it’s all on the tenant to use their own funds and time and resources to go to court with their landlord.”

“The full implementation of policy changes and the impact of those changes are still to be seen, but the government is showing responsiveness to the real concerns that small business owners are raising to advocates,” Lee said.

That’s how the protections New York does came about in the first place, according to Lee: Through years of work by owners who stopped treating their problems as private disputes with a landlord and started treating them as a shared condition they could change together.

Lee described it as “breaking through that individualism and talking to business owners as a constituency.” 

Dalton sees the same organizing potential among business owners in Baltimore.

“Baltimore has a strong mayor with a ton of power,” he said. “If City Hall really uses that power for small businesses — to cut red tape, enforce basic protections, and keep storefronts from being warehoused — it could be transformative.”

For now, one of the only mechanisms a business owner in Baltimore has is taking the landlord to court. 

“Business owners are at the mercy of the property owners,” Spencer, the owner of Zehbras CrossFit, said.

A judge ruled in 2026 that her landlord had breached the contract and ordered him to repay $75,000 for buildout costs. The landlord has appealed the ruling, so she has yet to see any of that money. So, Spencer is working on tools to help other owners better protect themselves from problems she faced: public information on who owns a building and how long it has been vacant, and a standard commercial lease that spells out protections and responsibilities for tenants and landlords. Neither requires a new law, but both require reaching and organizing small business owners.

Chambers reached a similar conclusion after she lost the deli and joined the coalition.

“Unless we organize and come together as a collective to address the bigger issues, there’s going to be a lot of Chopped Broadways shut down,” she said. “They just have different names.”

The Baltimore Small Business Coalition’s next town hall is Monday, October 12, at 6 p.m. at Impact Hub, 10 E. North Ave.