A city panel is once again preparing to review the master plan for Baltimore’s most high-profile redevelopment: Harborplace.

The ambitious redevelopment proposal — consisting of five new buildings fronting the Inner Harbor — has cleared each legal and political hurdle since MCB Real Estate announced its plans last fall.

This November, residents will vote on a key ballot measure related to the overhaul. It asks whether the city should amend its charter to allow residences at the Inner Harbor.

But even if the ballot measure passes, a more important question could be looming: Who’s willing to bet on downtown Baltimore and the Inner Harbor?

MCB, co-founded by West Baltimore native P. David Bramble, bought the twin pavilions known as Harborplace last year. The festival marketplace once drew millions of tourists and shoppers, but it has fallen into disrepair and disuse in recent years.

While tenants lured by discount leases and grant programs have opened shop in Harborplace since the ownership change, Bramble said in an interview that the pavilions in recent years had become “sheds on the water full of crappy tenants.”

In order to reinvigorate Harborplace, Bramble will need a lot more tenants. It’s early in the redevelopment process, but the proposal has already garnered interest from potential commercial tenants, Bramble said. Still, he said much of the development will depend on securing anchor businesses — tenants that MCB doesn’t have yet.

On Thursday, MCB will give its first presentation to the city planning commission in nearly a year. Since unveiling its plans in October 2023, MCB has gone before the planning commission twice, the city’s architectural review panel four times, and made multiple presentations to the City Council. Thursday’s meeting will offer another opportunity for the public to comment on the “live-work-play” approach to one of Baltimore’s most recognizable pieces of real estate.

The proposed redevelopment of Harborplace and property near the intersection of Light and Pratt streets will cost an estimated $900 million, according to MCB, with about $400 million coming from taxpayers in a hypothetical mix of state and federal funds that have yet to be fully secured.

Play

Bramble’s vision of how people can “play” at the Inner Harbor includes not only the public waterfront promenade and parks, but also thriving retail. Most of the commercial space in Harborplace sits empty, including the once-connected Gallery across the street.

Of the 4 million square feet of dedicated retail space in Baltimore’s central business district, 8.6% is vacant, according to CoStar, a real estate analytics company.

MCB’s proposal adds more than 200,000 square feet of dedicated retail space, and Bramble said he wants to fill it with “cool” local small businesses and big national brands.

New retail leasing opportunities in downtown are few and far between, with no new inventory added since 2022, when Lexington Market opened, according to CoStar, and 2006 before that.

Adding hundreds of thousands of square feet for more retail space might seem risky, given the struggles to fill the existing smaller footprint. But Laurence Oster, broker and senior vice president of retail at commercial real estate agency CBRE, said investment in retail in Baltimore’s downtown is “not about capturing the existing demand but creating more.”

MCB wants to tap into visitors and companies that are not currently in Baltimore. Bramble believes that new, Grade A leasing space will attract them.

In recent years, retailers — especially big names — have opted for neighborhoods such as Harbor East and Canton instead of downtown.

Oster said retailers tend to follow each other: Where one major store goes, others will follow. And without “core co-tenants“ in downtown, it’s less attractive for retailers.

Even in its current well-worn condition, Harborplace has landed several “cool small businesses” to help fill the shopping center in the interim.

Over the summer, thanks to a grant program administered by the Downtown Partnership of Baltimore, Harborplace began housing seven Black-owned small businesses through the Downtown BOOST (Black Owned and Operated Storefront Tenancy) initiative.

But this is temporary. If voters approve MCB’s Harborplace plans in November, the retail pavilions would be torn down, dislodging tenants. MCB’s plan is to erect new commercial space, including a building with a curved roof dubbed “the sail.”

When new commercial space is ready, Bramble said there could be an opportunity for them to come back and for new small businesses to open at discounted leasing rates.

“Are we going to subsidize them in the future? Yes, probably,” Bramble said. “There’s potential that there will be some sort of small business program on a go-forth basis, but none of that is set in stone at the moment.”

Work

Of the five proposed buildings in MCB’s reimagining of Harborplace, perhaps the least scrutinized one has been the cube-like office along Pratt Street. On MCB’s website, the building is described as 200,000 square feet of Class A office space. In the interview, Bramble described it as 175,000 square feet.

He also said it might not get built at all.

Unlike the sail-shaped building the or the residential towers, Bramble said he won’t commit to this building without an anchor tenant. That means he’ll need to convince a company to lease a large section of space before anything is built.

It’s a challenge that Bramble knows well.

MCB previously planned to build a mixed-use tower on the parking lot directly across the street from the proposed cube office building. The 40-story tower was supposed to have about 200,000 square feet of office space. But before construction began, a global pandemic accelerated trends in remote work and slashed demand for office space. He postponed the plan indefinitely.

Bramble said he thinks it will be different this time, even though the cube building is to be about a football field’s length away from the scuttled office project.

The newly reimagined Harborplace will be a more attractive space for tenants, Bramble said. With a newly reactivated Inner Harbor, Bramble said both office buildings — the cube and the previously planned mixed-use tower — could be possible, but MCB won’t build either without an anchor tenant first.

“It’s the transformation of some of the best waterfront real estate, frankly, on the East Coast that’s going to attract users to this location,” Bramble said. “With the right product, we’re unbeatable.”

Even so, MCB could be facing stiff headwinds. Downtown has long struggled with vacant office space, and it’s about to get worse. The Baltimore Business Journal reported that when T. Rowe Price Group Inc. departs for its new headquarters at Harbor Point later this year, the downtown office vacancy rate will hit historic highs. The building it is leaving is directly across Pratt Street from Harborplace.

Aside from the office building at 1 Light Street, there has been no new office space built downtown since 2010, according to CoStar.

Live

Perhaps the most controversial part of MCB’s plan also happens to be downtown’s brightest hope in recent years: new residential space.

MCB plans to build two residential towers stretching 32 and 25 stories high and containing as many as 900 units total. But these plans hinge on voters supporting an amended city charter, which as it stands now, blocks housing from being built in that location.

A competing ballot question that would have blocked the redevelopment failed to get enough signatures by a July deadline.

According to CoStar, there are 16,880 residential units in and around downtown Baltimore — and that number has been growing. Hundreds of new units are routinely added to the downtown area each year, according to CoStar. Large additions of new units are followed by a spike in the vacancy rate, but that rate has been relatively healthy, hovering between 5.8% to 13%.

MCB’s proposal to create 900 units would be a sizable, but not unprecedented, addition of housing to downtown. In 2018 alone, CoStar reported that 1,565 new residential units came online.

A frequent concern of critics has been whether these residences will be available to all Baltimoreans or just those wealthy enough to afford the waterfront views.

In accordance with the city’s revamped inclusionary housing law, 10-15% of the units will be affordably priced for low-income households, Bramble said.

“The biggest detractors we have are ourselves. People want to be here,” Bramble said of Baltimore. “We have to grow. And if you want to grow, you’ve got to give people things they want to live in.”