Over the past few years, the university has made significant progress in its efforts to strengthen the neighborhoods surrounding our campuses.

The Eager Park neighborhood near the Johns Hopkins East Baltimore campus is undergoing a major transformation, with new housing, community institutions, offices and lab space, a central park, and retail. Some highlights:

• More than $1 billion has been invested in the 88-acre area since 2004.
• The current development surge — the largest the area has seen — includes a 194-room hotel, a park that will serve as the centerpiece of the community, an office building housing Johns Hopkins’ Fast Forward accelerator, and a large number of new and renovated homes.
• Forty-eight of those homes were sold during a one-day lottery event in September 2016, when Johns Hopkins’ employees secured their new homes with the help of the Live Near Your Work program, which offered a $36,000 grant toward a down payment and closing costs.

The university has also embraced the 10 neighborhoods near its Homewood campus through the Homewood Community Partners Initiative, or HCPI, an ongoing effort to work with local stakeholders to attract 3,000 new households to the area. The university is spending at least $10 million over five years, which is playing a central role in leveraging the estimated $65 million needed to advance goals drawn up by community leaders and residents, such as improved schools and public spaces. Over the past two years and in the coming months:

• The Whiting School of Engineering partnered with Baltimore City Public Schools in fall 2015 to create at Barclay Elementary/Middle School, blocks from the Homewood campus, the city’s first pre-K through eighth grade school dedicated to giving students a foundation in engineering and computer skills.
• Johns Hopkins support of off-campus real estate projects such as the Centre Theater, Niarchos Parkway Theater, and Remington Row produced $170 million of new construction.
• Helping to fulfill our goals to support a thriving neighborhood, about two dozen restaurants, shops, and arts venues, as well as more than 100,000 square feet of office space, opened in the area in 2016.
• The university was a partner in the September 2016 launch of the Explore the Core campaign, focused on the promotion of living, shopping, dining, and patronizing the arts in Central Baltimore.
• JHU is supporting a data-driven safety improvement strategy to reduce crime along N. Charles Street.
• JHU has provided $300,000 for 30 matching grants for neighborhood-driven improvement projects valued at $2.3 million.
• Major streetscape improvement projects are scheduled in 2017 for North Avenue, the St. Paul Street/N. Charles Village retail district, and Greenmount Avenue in the area of East 33rd Street.