Media coverage of the saga has invoked familiar narratives about Baltimore’s history of segregation and redlining, recalling James Baldwin’s long-ago charge that urban renewal translates roughly as Negro removal. But the Eaddys are stayers, even rebuilding after a devastating fire in 2012, and Eaddy has become a leader of efforts to preserve the historic community. Crime-ridden Baltimore has suffered white and black flight for decades, and the city is using eminent domain to advance 15-year-old redevelopment plans in Poppleton, which is 88 percent black. Members of Eaddy’s family have called the area home for three generations in 1992, she and her husband, Curtis, bought a row home there that dates to 1900. Now Eaddy, along with hundreds of other residents of a West Baltimore neighborhood called Poppleton, finds herself in a similar fight. Adding insult to injury, the city’s grandiose plan was never realized. Kelo battled all the way to the Supreme Court but lost, the Court ruling that local governments could take private property not only for a public use (such as a highway) but for a public purpose (such as a tax-revenue-enhancing private office park). After she renovated a century-old cottage in New London, Connecticut, the city announced that it would use its power of eminent domain to take Kelo’s little pink house and about 90 neighboring properties to make room for a Pfizer research facility and related amenities. Kelo became famous for fighting in the late 1990s to save her home from the urban-renewal bulldozer. Susette Kelo and Sonia Eaddy have much in common.
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