Business & Tech

Come Home Baltimore Looks to Rebuild Oliver

A North Baltimore based company is developing a new model for community revitalization in Oliver.

The North Baltimore-based development company Come Home Baltimore is attempting to do more than just renovate homes in Oliver.

It’s trying to rebuild a community.  

So far, Come Home Baltimore has rehabbed 23 homes in the neighborhood, and mostly sold them to purchasers from outside the community. They own about 40 more houses. At this point, the company has invested $2.5 million in the neighborhood and expects to put another $6 to $7 million in during the next two years.

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But the company has a unique approach to rebuilding a community. It pairs a profit-making development company with a nonprofit foundation to help encourage activism because rehabbed homes are not enough to rebuild a community, according to David Borinsky Come Home Baltimore's founder.  

Sitting in his office in the 4600 block of Falls Road, Borinsky, explained how a loan for a high-end renovation of a run-down house in Oliver led him to create a company that is trying to revive a neighborhood through green renovations and volunteerism.  

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“I started out as a pitiless money lender about six years ago,” Borinsky said.

As chief executive officer of Bridge Private Lending, Borinsky had been lending money for rehabs of scattered site housing throughout the Baltimore area. One of the projects that Borinsky made a loan to was a high-end renovation in the Oliver neighborhood, where about 40 percent of the homes were boarded up.

“[The developer] renovated this house with a spectacular finish with marble counter tops, hardwood floor and exposed brick. It was just something that would be a high-end renovation in Canton or Federal Hill,” Borinsky said.

What impressed Borinsky further was that the home sold to someone who wasn’t already from the neighborhood.

“So the fact that someone from outside the neighborhood, with a choice of where to live, would buy this house is remarkable,” he said.

So Borinsky made a second loan to the same developer to renovate a second house in the neighborhood, which also sold. Eventually Borinsky and other developers obtained about 15 houses in the neighborhood and started doing LEED certified rehabs. He also sought outside investors and eventually formed Come Home Baltimore.

“The idea that what we were doing attracted people that had a choice where to live was pretty astonishing and energy giving,” Borinsky said.  

Borinsky said what was drawing people to the homes is the quality of the renovations—which are done by a regional suburban home builder—and also that some of the buildings were LEED certified with the savings of an energy-efficient dwelling.

But Borinsky is adamant that this isn’t an attempt to gentrify the neighborhood and wants to make sure his efforts don’t displace current residents.

“So we realized that what people valued, and the dynamic that was attracting all these people to the neighborhood, was the fact that there was a bringing back an old sense of what neighborhoods should be like,” Borinsky said.  “Neighborhoods that are economically integrated with school teacher and a doctor or dentist living next to a more modest blue collar person."

The company has also participated in several unique initiatives to encourage more community activism among residents. One of those has been reaching out to veterans through organizations such as the Sixth Branch and the Pat Tillman Foundation through Earl Johnson, a former Army Ranger who had deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq.

Johnson, who is now the executive director of the Come Home Baltimore Foundation, the nonprofit leg of the company that handles efforts to improve the community, and his wife purchased one of the rehabbed homes in Oliver 18 months ago, and has partnered with Borinsky to help bring to fruition the concept of a community thriving through volunteerism.

“It’s figuring out what makes Oliver tick," Johnson said. "We pretty much know that we need some jobs to give people some other options, people like David need to continue to invest and get rid of some of the blight. And the ... city needs to show everyone that services are available, and volunteers need to come in and show people we still want to help and we care.”


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