DescriptionIn the early 2000s, newly-elected Mayor of Baltimore Martin O’Malley announced support for a community revitalization strategy to attract middle- and upper-income homeowners that diverged from prior community development efforts which focused on providing a wide range of services primarily to poor neighborhoods. O’Malley worked with a Philadelphia-based community development financial institution, The Reinvestment Fund (TRF), to target six initial neighborhoods that could potentially support homeownership. Community development actors coalesced around this strategy, exemplified through the Healthy Neighborhoods Initiative (HNI), which fit the broader mid-2000s trend of cities using data-driven mechanisms to direct resources to neighborhoods with market potential. In this dissertation, I conducted a case study to answer who the primary actors were in developing this approach and how this differed from previous community development efforts. While this community development effort looks different from prior approaches, I traced a clear path through Baltimore’s community development history and the changing local and political economic landscape, from the protest politics of the 1960s all the way to middle-class homeownership of the 2000s. My findings suggest that there was a change in the community development approach in the 2000s as community development organizations, foundations and the city, under new political leadership, turned their attention to previously overlooked neighborhoods to which they could attract middle- and upper-income residents as homeowners. The experiences of two Baltimore community development organizations, Patterson Park Community Development Corporation and Belair-Edison Neighborhoods Inc. help illustrate how the approach was carried out on a neighborhood level. While community development organizations historically reacted to downtown development and insular decision-making, some organizations became part of the city’s neighborhood redevelopment effort. I also answer how community development organizations responded to and were transformed by the rise of foreclosures in the 2000s, which threatened gains in homeownership and negatively impacted the city and its community development organizations. However, the city, foundations and community development organizations remain committed to homeownership as a community development strategy.