09/03/2026
I went looking for something else this week and fell down a rabbit hole. Annapolis committed $105.8 million to housing last Wednesday and I almost missed it entirely.
This photo is the Annapolis I get paid to shoot. Everything I'm about to tell you is happening about a mile outside this frame.
The project is Robinwood. 150 homes on Tyler Avenue, going on fifty years old. The plan rebuilds it into 214 affordable homes. That's not a swap, it's an actual net gain of 64 places for families to live in a city where median rent runs north of two thousand a month. That's good news and I want to say so plainly.
For scale: we're spending $87.8 million on the City Dock seawall. Robinwood is eighteen million more than that.
And it isn't even the big one. Eastport Terrace and Harbour House together are 357 public housing units on 29 acres, built in 1953 and 1964. The plan rebuilds the whole site as roughly 722 mixed-income units, with all 357 replaced. The housing authority says it has four projects financed already and three more coming in the next eighteen months.
That is the largest rebuild of public housing this city has attempted in my lifetime. I've lived here a long time and I didn't know the scope of it until this week. That's on me, but I don't think I'm the only one.
City Dock got five years of meetings, a hundred-person committee, lawsuits, op-eds, and a groundbreaking with shiny shovels. Robinwood got a press release on a Wednesday.
The promise attached to all of this is that nobody gets displaced. Residents move out during construction, and they have the right to come home when their phase is finished. That's real, it's federal, and it's built into how the financing works.
We've done it before, too. In 2020 they took down Newtowne 20, built in 1971. Residents were moved out with first priority to return. In 2022 it reopened as Wilbourn Estates. 78 units for 78 units, plus a clubhouse, a basketball court, and a playground. Promise made, promise kept.
The part that gives me pause is what came after. In February of last year the Housing Authority was in serious financial trouble and needed a $3.3 million bailout from the state, the county, and the city to keep going. It was carrying a $2 million deficit, and more than 100 of its roughly 790 units were sitting empty, a lot of them because code violations had made them unlivable.
They've been working their way back from that, and by all accounts these new projects are part of how. I hope it works. I want it to work.
But a nine-figure promise is only as good as the attention we pay to it, and right now almost none of us are paying any.
So here's one small question I'd genuinely like answered, and I'm asking, not accusing. Last October, when the state awarded funding, 58 new apartments were planned and 14 of them were designated for people experiencing homelessness. Last week's announcement lists the bedroom counts but doesn't mention those 14.
Are they still in there? I'd love to hear that they are.
Financing on phase one doesn't close until summer 2027. That's almost a year out. There's plenty of time for the rest of us to actually learn something about this.
And if you live at Robinwood, or Harbour House, or Eastport Terrace, or you grew up in any of them, I'd rather hear from you than talk at you. This is the part of Annapolis I can't shoot from a drone.
