Baltimore’s environmental issues and their burdens have never been distributed equally. For communities beyond the city’s majority-white center, blocks of bare pavement create “heat islands,” where temperatures can reach 10 degrees higher than the tree-lined streets of Mount Vernon. Asthma rates skyrocket to some of the highest in the nation, and industries release lead and contaminants, legally or not.
Yet, Baltimore’s youth have long been at the forefront of creating solutions to these issues across the city. In South Baltimore, where the environment is dominated by facilities polluting the land and air, young people have organized for over a decade to take ownership over their environment and their community’s well-being. South Baltimore Community Land Trust is one of the fruits of that labor.
Rooted in Curtis Bay, South Baltimore Community Land Trust works at the intersection of environmental justice, affordable housing, and community development without displacement. Organized by youth and residents, the land trust’s mission grew out of years of community activism by Benjamin Franklin High School students, specifically “Free Your Voice,” a coalition first formed in 2011 to fight the Fairfield Renewable Energy Project. The grassroots movement of students mobilized against the proposal to build the trash incinerator less than a mile from their school, and over five years of work, they pushed stakeholders like Baltimore City Public Schools to divest from the project and ultimately defeated the proposal.
For 19-year-old Maynor Flores, inheriting this history when he was a highschooler at Benjamin Franklin compelled him to see how powerful his, and his generation’s, voice could be.
When Flores stumbled across Nicole Fabricant’s participatory action course as a student, he started to become aware of some of the aspects of his neighborhood that he says, until then, he was “kind of fazing out.”
Though he moved to Southeast Baltimore when he was 11 years old and went to school in Curtis Bay, Flores says he “never really understood the pressures that residents living specifically in Curtis Bay were facing until I got involved.”
In Fabricant’s dual-enrollment research class on environmental justice, Flores and other students earned college credit designing research projects on pollution, vacant housing, and other environmental concerns. Through the course, Flores became involved in the movement for South Baltimore Community Land Trust.
“I feel like youth especially have a hard time really grasping the idea that our voice matters and can be heard,” says Flores. “That’s what I believed. Like my voice, it exists. I can talk. I can post on social media, but I didn’t realize how much momentum can be caused through advocacy.”
“I feel like youth especially have a hard time really grasping the idea that our voice matters and can be heard,” says Flores. “That’s what I believed. Like my voice, it exists. I can talk. I can post on social media, but I didn’t realize how much momentum can be caused through advocacy.”
In particular, the work of former Benjamin Franklin student Shashawnda Campbell, who is now the land trust’s Environmental Justice Director, deeply inspired Flores’ investment in community advocacy. Campbell was one of the co-founders of Free Your Voice and has served on the front lines of Curtis Bay’s environmental justice organizing since the successful takedown of the Fairfield Renewable Energy Project.
“Seeing how much impact they had in not allowing what would have been the nation’s largest incinerator to be built. Seeing that and hearing that was very eye opening to me,” Flores says.
Like Flores, Fabricant, a co-founder of the land trust, witnessed the power of the students organizing at Benjamin Franklin, and she says their vision laid the foundation for what would become the land trust’s mission.
“When I moved to Baltimore in 2011, 2012, the youth had already been organizing from the high school to take on this proposal,” Fabricant says. “So really the momentum for organizing and thinking about questions of overburdened communities was already [there].”
Fabricant watched in her classroom as students made connections between environmental and housing justice and identified a vacant green space across from the school to reclaim for the community’s use.
“They wanted to know who owned it and could it be turned into a space for community members to come and learn about some of the environmental work, zero waste,” says Fabricant. “They got enough money, and they acquired this plot of land across the street. I want to say that a lot of that was the impetus for thinking about questions of land and who controls and owns land in our community. And if we could acquire more and more land, then we could make decisions about development, right?”
The youth’s centering of land ownership as a means towards community agency and environmental justice motivated further research that eventually led to the acquisition of South Baltimore Community Land Trust’s first home on Hazel Street in 2019. After seven years of growth, the land trust now has more than half a dozen homes in Curtis Bay directed towards first-time homebuyers whose income is below 50% the area median income.
To purchase one of the land trust’s homes, community members first express interest. Then, the organization supports potential homebuyers with coaching, assistance in applying for financing, and access to “homeownership counseling” through Druid Heights Community Development Corporation, an organization that provides workshops on homeownership and financial planning.
South Baltimore Community Land Trust subsidizes the housing so that it remains permanently affordable and offers what Fabricant calls “wraparound services” including credit assistance and mortgage assistance for residents.
Alongside the land trust’s expansive vision for affordable housing, environmental research led by the community’s young people continues to play a critical role in keeping the community safe. Recently, Maryland Department of Energy cited environmental violations documented by South Baltimore Community Land Trust’s youth and neighbors in their lawsuit against Curtis Bay Energy, the medical waste incinerator previously found guilty of 40 counts of state environmental law violations in 2023. Despite the plant’s guilty plea and penalty payment, the community of Curtis Bay continued to observe air pollution from the plant, and the young researchers of the land trust spearheaded community documentation of the environmental impacts — collecting key data to prove to MDE the continued existence of pollution and sparking a new lawsuit.
Now, with the facility settling the lawsuit and permanently stopping medical waste incineration, this success underscores for Flores the ongoing responsibility that youth, and all community members, have to each other.
“I hope MDE has the desire to keep our health the priority, but working here, you realize that it’s complicated,” says Flores. “So we actually have to advocate for the sake of our own health. If we don’t do that, we can’t promise that anyone else is going to do that.”
As in South Baltimore, the push by Baltimore’s youth to take ownership over their homes and environment has been mobilizing communities in West Baltimore’s Panway for years. At the heart of the community, between N. Dukeland Street and Poplar Grove, lies what feels like a sanctuary, a tranquil green space with flowering magnolia trees and covered resting places. This land was transformed from a disused space into a refuge for and by the many teens who live in the neighborhood and lead the community development organization The Urban Oasis.
Co-founded by residents Arica Gonzalez and Geraldine Taylor, The Urban Oasis first grew from a desire to see the infrastructure of their neighborhood “reflect the beauty or dignity of us as people here,” says Gonzalez.
Gonzalez started what would become The Urban Oasis in 2020 when she, her husband, and her daughter began to walk the neighborhood with trash pickers and clean up the streets. As their presence became known and they partnered with young people such as 21-year-old Jeffrey Gonzalez (no relation), a coalition quickly began to grow.
“My neighbor, Ms. Arica, we live in the same block called Clifton Avenue. And so I remember one day she approached me, and she asked me if I would be down and available to join her to see if we could pick up trash and walk around the neighborhood,” Jeffrey Gonzalez says. “Then we had one more member. His name is Malieak. He was also my neighbor … And we just started growing from there.”
As one of the first youth involved, Jeffrey Gonzalez helped lay the foundation for what would become the Oasis Teens Environmental Program, an experiential youth program for ages 13 to 19 practicing environmental justice and social responsibility. Since 2020, the program has grown from three teens to seasonal cohorts of 15 youth who steward the land of their community, spending their time planting flora, designing green spaces, picking up trash, and organizing community members.
Jeffrey Gonzalez, who began the program in his late teens and has since aged out, now continues to shape the initiative as a supervisor, and in this way, Oasis Teens has become a generational right-of-passage for the community. Many friends and relatives of former teen organizers, including Gonzalez’s brother, have gone on to join the growing work of The Urban Oasis.
“At this point, it’s just family,” says Jeffrey Gonzalez.
The creation of the eponymous Oasis was one of the first projects undertaken by Oasis Teens and their mentors. In 2020, Arica Gonzalez and Taylor imagined the possibility of converting the space behind their homes, which had long been left for dumping and abandoned cars, into a multifaceted green space and community center; the new life of this land would be a safe place for residents and families to gather. For Arica Gonzalez and Taylor, actualizing that vision required fostering community support through grassroots campaigning; the pair went door to door until they garnered the signatures needed to successfully petition to gate the space’s four alleyways to stop the dumping, and the youth took it from there.
Cody Booze, who has been an Oasis Teen for five years now, lives in one of the houses bordering The Oasis. For him, the revitalization of the land has also revitalized a sense of community.
“I was here when this, our Oasis space, used to be garages that were falling apart. I wasn’t allowed to come out and play and meet the kids out here because they were like, ‘Well, we don’t want you around that because we don’t know, it could fall down. It’s very, you know, risky,’” Booze says. Once the community took control of the space though, Booze says he and other youth were able to transform it.
“I remember our first day having it. We had all the teens and everyone who was with the group come out, and we all with pickax broke the foundation down and planted everything that you see here now. And I hold that day so dear to my heart because it was so uplifting and there was so much pure love.”
“I remember our first day having it. We had all the teens and everyone who was with the group come out, and we all with pickax broke the foundation down and planted everything that you see here now. And I hold that day so dear to my heart because it was so uplifting and there was so much pure love.”
The Oasis of today appears almost like a fantasy, where strings of solar-powered fairy lights hang over the free community library in the main alley entrance, garden beds bloom with vibrant flowers, and a mural of animals and magical creatures covers the ground. Likewise, just around the corner from The Oasis on N. Dukeland Street stands The Lot, a former abandoned dumpsite turned green space boasting a performance stage and special clubhouse for the youth.
Six years into the life of The Urban Oasis, both The Lot and The Oasis stand as visible testaments to the power of Baltimore’s young people dedicating themselves towards a shared purpose. Now, the youth and other residents utilize these spaces for community markets, resource sharing, festivals, kids storytimes, and simply leisure.
For Arica Gonzalez, all of this, born from the early days of cleaning the streets, is a direct product of the tenacity and vision of the youth.
“These are the kids that are the boots on the ground, and they’re dreaming and visualizing their world,” she said. “These kids have done this with their hands, with their heart. I think it just shows the power that they possess, and if we encourage them properly, we can achieve great things.”
As The Urban Oasis grows and Panway’s youth continue to take leadership in their neighborhood’s future, Booze keeps in mind that though the work remains challenging, community is what makes it possible. It’s what Flores in South Baltimore says defines their work as well.
“There’s a famous saying that goes, ‘what you seek is actively seeking you,’ where it’s like, if you put in the effort to this, even though you may not see it right away, over time, you branch out into all these things,” Booze says. “Did it ever become easy? No, but it became, you know, less of a hassle. And especially once you build those connections, you can accomplish anything together.”