East Towson housing project Red Maple Place clears final council hurdle

Plans for a 56-unit affordable housing complex in Towson will proceed after years of litigation and a last-minute legislative effort to force the developer to downsize the project.

On Monday, the Baltimore County Council passed unanimously a resolution requiring the neighborhood of Historic East Towson to comply with county design guidelines. After the council delayed voting on the resolution in June, its sponsor, Councilman Mike Ertel of Towson, said he amended it to exclude any projects that had “already vested.”

That means the standards no longer apply to Red Maple Place, a planned East Joppa Road moderate-income complex that since 2017 has been the subject of litigation and community opposition to stop its construction. Ertel, a Democrat who represents the district, said the area had shrunk in recent years due to suburbanization and BGE building a substation there. East Towson was founded in 1829 by formerly enslaved people from the nearby Hampden plantation.

Dana Johnson, the chief executive of Homes For America, who is developing Red Maple Place, previously said the new resolution would kill the project by forcing it to scale back its height and density and comply with nearby buildings. Other proponents, like the local NAACP, said the project was at the center of the county’s federal mandate to build 1,000 affordable housing units by 2027 to rectify decades of racially discriminative housing policies.

In a brief statement issued Tuesday, Johnson said the project “met every county requirement” and was previously approved by the county’s design review committee.

“Now that the years of legal challenges are behind us, we look forward to bringing desperately needed, quality housing to Towson and serving residents for years to come,” she said.

In March, the Appellate Court of Maryland ruled that Red Maple Place could move forward after years of lawsuit and outcry from nearby residents who argued the project would pose environmental problems and eliminate one of the neighborhood’s few green spaces.

On Tuesday, Ertel said he has asked Homes For America to “come to the table voluntarily” and agree to “tweak” Red Maple’s design.