How Nneka N’namdi grew up to fight Blight

By Charm Report Staff | April 25, 2023

Nneka N’namdi started Fight Blight Bmore because she saw the destruction the blight of 15,000 vacant properties was causing throughout the Baltimore community, a very different Baltimore than in the 90s when she was growing up.

Edmondson used to have a thriving culture of people who just want to be accepted and loved but the rise in vacant or blighted homes has destroyed community relationships and contributed to a system that disenfranchises marginalized communities, such as Edmondson. To stem that tide N’namdi created Fight Blight Bmore in 2016 as a housing organization that does tech-enabled community-focused advocacy work. Through the organization's mobile app it identifies, reports, tracks, and analyzes blighted properties throughout the city to give community members the data they need to pressure the city into solving the problems blight causes in the community. 

“Edmondson village of today is different, much different than the Edmondson village of 1990," N’namdi said. "There are many more properties that are in poor condition today than there were 25 years or 30 years ago when I moved into the village. Coming from living in Parkville I was happy to be in the village because most of my childhood I lived in neighborhoods and attended schools where there were very few black children. In places where the presence of black children was not welcome."

When N’namdi was growing up, in her neighborhood the Murphy Homes which was a public housing project was still there. It was a high-rise/low-rise project that was dismantled during the 90s and forced many low-income families to be effectively displaced from their homes. N’namdi says that this caused the people of that community to sue the United States Department of Housing Urban Development in the court case Thompson V. United States because of the condition that the federal government itself had allowed those projects to fall into.

“I do this work because I owe them a debt and that debt must be paid," N’namdii said about the Murphy Homes residents that sued the government.  "Making sure that we're creating a neighborhood where people do not further get displaced and that we are creating opportunities, creating spaces, creating vehicles for those people who pave the way for us to be able to come home.”

N’namdi has recognized through her work that everyone in Baltimore is affected by blight, whether they are young, or old, in the segregated historically disenfranchised black communities known as the “Black butterfly” or the heavily invested in “White L.” She hopes for a future in Baltimore where no neighborhood is impacted by blight. 

"That we will see a transformation in the butterfly wings," N’namdi said about the future of Baltimore. "We will see neighborhoods that have all of the human needs met hyper-locally. And those things happen without displacing the people who are living in those neighborhoods right now."