A graffiti-covered shed that has sat boarded up for years on the 1400 block of West Baltimore Street is now the focus of an ambitious grassroots renovation led by two college students barely out of their teens. Isonah Ngouabe Dlodlo, 22, and Jaylen Daley, 19, began internships with Women's Home Preservation last month, and in that time, they have drawn up designs, secured a contractor, and pitched the project to city officials, all while racing to raise the money needed to finish the job.
The shed once served as a storage area next to the Ford Building and sat vacant for many years before Nadine Ngouabe Dlodlo's organization purchased the property in 2022 with the intention that young people would eventually put it to use, according to The Baltimore Banner. Women's Home Preservation, founded by Nadine Ngouabe Dlodlo, owns several properties along West Baltimore Street and focuses its work on disinvested communities. Isonah Ngouabe Dlodlo envisions the finished space as a coffee shop, community market, or visiting-artist workshop, and says the project centers on community resilience and embedding residents' needs into the space itself, per the Banner's reporting.
A Month of Permits, Pitches, and Paperwork
Getting to this point has meant navigating red tape as much as swinging hammers. Isonah Ngouabe Dlodlo spent about a month addressing historic-preservation requirements and applying for permits, since the shed sits within a historic district. The Union Square Historic District, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, is defined by 19th-century Federal, Greek Revival, and Italianate rowhouses that rose alongside the city's early industrial expansion and the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, according to the National Park Service.
The two students have also applied for at least a half-dozen grants and secured Straight Weld Harris LLC as the local contractor for the project, the Banner reports. They gave site tours to the Baltimore Development Corporation, the mayor's office, the city Department of Planning, and state Sen. Antonio Hayes, who was raised in West Baltimore. Hayes told the outlet that community transparency and engagement will go a long way, and he encouraged the students to seek out state capital funding opportunities.
A GoFundMe, a TikTok, and a $21,000 First Phase
To pay for the work, Isonah Ngouabe Dlodlo and Daley created a GoFundMe campaign with a $30,000 goal, which had raised about $800 as of the Banner's report. The campaign is meant to cover electricity, plumbing, walls, and insulation. The first renovation phase alone, covering the shed's doors, walls, windows, and roof, is estimated to cost about $21,000, and a second phase would require additional permits and at least $100,000 more in funding.
The pair have also built out a newsletter to keep supporters updated, and a TikTok video promoting the project has been viewed more than 25,000 times, according to the Banner's account. Not every funding attempt has panned out: Women's Home Preservation applied for a STEM-related grant through a technology nonprofit but did not receive it, the outlet reported.
Beyond the shed itself, Daley has nominated the surrounding area to become a federal Opportunity Zone, a designation that offers tax incentives to investors. Federal Opportunity Zones, created under the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, let investors defer capital gains taxes while qualifying projects for additional state property and job-creation tax credits, according to The Daily Record. Plans also call for redesigning nearby North Norris Street as a colorful street mural, part of a broader ambition to make the shed a gathering place serving multiple generations across the Union Square and Franklin Square neighborhoods.
Part of a Bigger Vision for the Block
The shed project is one piece of a far larger undertaking on the same block. Women's Home Preservation is leading a $17 million redevelopment of the vacant, 30,000-square-foot Ford Building carriage factory into a mixed-use complex with ground-floor retail, performance space, artist lofts, and 30 affordable housing units, according to ImpactAlpha. In July 2024, the organization also secured a $1.6 million grant from the Maryland Energy Administration's Smart Energy Community program to equip its West Baltimore Street properties with a solar microgrid and Passive House net-zero energy design.
The city has also backed the block's revival with public money. Baltimore's Department of Housing and Community Development allocated $840,000 from its Affordable Housing Trust Fund for 1420 W. Baltimore Street, after previously awarding $260,000 for the adjacent properties at 1401–1403 W. Baltimore Street. Plans for 1420 West Baltimore Street call for a ground-floor micro-manufacturing hub and retail marketplace developed with ISONAH to support local textile makers, artisans, and women-owned businesses, per Women's Home Preservation's own project materials.
A Corridor With a Commercial Past — and a New Wave of Investment
The 1400 block was once a bustling commercial corridor. It was home to businesses such as Blackman's Piano Company, which operated from 1967 to 2000, during an era when the street had five separate piano stores, according to historical research compiled by Baltimore Traces. Decades of disinvestment followed, part of the citywide vacant-property crisis Hoodline has previously reported on, which includes receivership programs and a dedicated vacant-property tax set to take effect next July.
The shed effort also arrives alongside other West Baltimore Street revitalization pushes. Just blocks away, developer Venroy July acquired and began repositioning nine contiguous mixed-use buildings in the 1000 block through the Baltimore Renaissance Opportunity Zone Fund earlier this month, creating a commercial hub called The Greenwood, according to the Reinvestment Fund. It echoes another recent Hoodline story on a shuttered Thurgood Marshall school building being reborn as a community hub, part of a pattern of long-vacant West Baltimore landmarks finding new life.
Two Students, One Deadline
For Isonah Ngouabe Dlodlo, a rising senior studying computer science and media at Hamilton College in Kirkland, New York, and Daley, an incoming sophomore studying mechanical engineering at Tufts University near Boston, the clock is ticking. Daley is set to return to college at the beginning of September, and the pair says they plan to continue fundraising and handling paperwork even after they head back to campus.
Nadine Ngouabe Dlodlo, who founded Women's Home Preservation as a Cameroon native and Harvard Business School graduate to fight property tax foreclosures and provide housing prioritized for single mothers and widows in Southwest Baltimore, said adults should trust young people and give them room to express their creativity, per the Banner. Her daughter Isonah put it more simply, telling the outlet that being young inspires more people to get involved.
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