I moved away from Baltimore in my mid-twenties, and each time I went home for a visit, I felt a desire to return. Now, Baltimore is where I am raising my family, working with community leaders, and employing laborers who are quite literally constructing what Baltimore will look like long after I am gone.
What I love about Baltimore is its toughness and its tight-knit vibe. We are a city of interconnectivity—referred to affectionately as "Smalltimore"—where people are friendly and fiercely proud of Baltimore’s small-town feel in a large urban environment.
But we also face challenges. The issue of vacant and blighted row homes is one of the most visible struggles. Where some see blight, I see an opportunity. I’m bullish on Baltimore’s potential, and I believe we have a rare opportunity to revitalize our neighborhoods in a way that uplifts the very neighbors who have been struggling.
That is the driving vision behind the Bmore Build Forward White Paper that has since manifested into reality, a collaborative project that transforms vacant lots into high-performance, affordable modular homes while generating community wealth and local jobs. We aren't just looking to build houses; we're looking to build a national model for urban renewal that solves the affordable housing crisis from the inside out.
The Innovation: Hyper-Energy Efficient Modular Housing & Energy Generation
Our strategy relies heavily on modernizing how we build. Through factory-built, modular construction techniques, we are producing robotically fabricated structural envelope panels alongside pre-fabricated kitchens and bathrooms. This ensures precision, scalability, and performance that over time will dramatically lower upfront costs.
These homes are built to high construction standards. They are super energy-efficient, with building envelopes so tight they allow for incredible energy performance. By placing net-positive solar panels on the rooftops, these houses are engineered to produce over 200% of the power they actually use. During the day, they export clean energy back to the grid. This surplus isn't just an environmental win, it creates a sustained revenue stream designated specifically for long-term home maintenance and building resident wealth.
Building Wealth and Rebuilding the Workforce
A housing solution is only half the battle; we also need to address skilled-labor shortages and that is why Bmore Build Forward links workforce development directly to community wealth creation.
Through partnerships like the Associated Builders and Contractors (ABC) Craft Laborer Apprenticeship and Project JumpStart, we are creating a robust workforce development pipeline. We believe the people shaping Baltimore’s future should be the people who call it home. To take it a step further, these residents who perform the finishing work on these homes will be supported to one day own their own home. We are keeping the wealth in the community by focusing on local developers from these communities, giving families the opportunity to build equity and create financial security where they live.
Community Forward
Linking, partnering, collaborating—this spirit of community is the way to create positive change, and it is woven into the fabric of Bmore Build Forward. That is why we established the BMore CoOp. We realize that no single organization can solve the vacancy issue alone. The BMore CoOp is a real estate developer’s cooperative that brings small, community-based developers, organizations, and residents together under one shared mission. By pooling our resources, sharing expertise, and working collaboratively rather than competitively, the BMore CoOp ensures that development stays in the hands of the community. Aggregating this knowledge helps reduce the risk profile of a high performance project to the developers, the builders, and even the lending institutions.
A Model for the Nation
To make this vision a reality at scale, we are partnering with Johns Hopkins to integrate artificial intelligence (AI) into our operations. This allows us to streamline the development process, manage logistics, and make this cooperative development model highly scalable. However, rather than building a tool for just ourselves, it is our intent to share it on the marketplace and allow more builders to adopt advances in construction methodology with tools that ease their learning curve.
Our goal is to prove that a city can solve its own housing crisis without displacing its people. By combining cutting-edge modular energy-saving technology, localized workforce training, and innovative wealth-building equity models, Baltimore is poised to lead the way.
The unique interconnectedness is part of what drew me back home to Baltimore; it is the essence of what I do every day – building homes and building communities.
About the author
Brendan McCluskey
Brendan McCluskey is the founder and president of Trident Builders, a commercial general contractor located in Baltimore, MD. He is a member of the U.S. Chamber's Small Business Council.
