Lexington Lofts apartments could fit easily into one of downtown Baltimore’s trendier areas. Units come with soaring ceilings and windows, granite finishes, free Wi-Fi and Under Armour gym memberships. The glass-front building with sleek professional offices on the street level sits about a mile from the Inner Harbor.

But the renovated six-story building occupies a block in downtown’s west side, where anticipated redevelopment has met with false starts for decades. Former anchors of the city’s Howard Street retail district, before the rise of suburban malls, stand vacant. Blight persisted amid repeated, failed urban renewal plans.

That hasn’t deterred Chukes Okoro, owner of 109 W. Lexington St., or other small developers from buying into revitalization in recent years. They’re attracted by the nearby harbor, the redevelopment of Lexington Market and other spots, and west side anchors such as the University of Maryland and Hippodrome Theatre.

They’ve also been encouraged by a reversal in the city’s approach to urban renewal, one that favors small-scale redevelopment as complementary to larger projects. That strategy, which emerged in recent years, has begun to pay off, officials say, despite recent challenges of the coronavirus pandemic and rising construction costs.

“The big projects are important, but there’s a real role for smaller projects to get things moving quickly,” said Dan Taylor, managing director of business and neighborhood development for Baltimore Development Corp., the city’s economic development arm. “Big projects take a long time to materialize, and you can’t bet everything on those happening.”

While major investments such as the $250 million renovation of CFG Bank Arena and a $45 million rebuild of historic Lexington Market in recent years have paved the way for revitalization downtown, strategic, small-scale projects are having an impact, economic development officials say. Below-the-radar projects, often by minority developers, have been reshaping the area block by block.

Over the past five years, 14 projects by 13 different development groups have been completed on the west side, with a total investment of $50 million. They’ve included historic rehabilitations and affordable housing, half of them led by minority developers.

An additional $250 million worth of plans are moving through the design or development pipeline, including the latest iteration of the long-planned and long-stalled Superblock. The proposed $155 million Compass project in the Superblock would bring apartments, parking and a hotel to the 200 block of West Lexington in the Five & Dime historic district. After past Superblock projects fell through, the city in 2019 selected Westside Partners, a joint venture of Mayson Dixon, Vitruvius and Partnered, for the project. It faces a deadline this month to finalize financing. Westside did not respond to requests for comment.

Developers such as Okoro view the Compass project as critical to the west side but still feel confident in the area.

Okoro, who completed and rented the 15 market-rate apartments at 109 W. Lexington in 2022, is pushing ahead with his next challenge. Across the street, he’s turning a former women’s clothing store and theater into apartments.

The developer, born in London to Nigerian parents, came to the U.S. in 1998. He said he relishes the role of pioneer in shaping the city for the future, and the prospect of transforming blocks one building at a time. He runs Okoro Development out of Lexington Lofts, where his wife has a law office.

He started as a developer in Reservoir Hill, then turned to the west side.

“I couldn’t believe you have a downtown area so close to the Inner Harbor that is vacant,” he said. “I believe it’s going to correct itself. It needs some help. It just needs a couple of crazy people like me.”

City economic development officials have found that smaller projects such as Okoro’s can be controlled and completed more easily and build confidence, prompting more private investors to step in where the city does not control land.

“It’s happening on the insides of buildings, and you don’t even realize it until you walk by a building that you haven’t paid any attention to before, and it’s not empty,” Taylor said.

City officials decided a new approach was needed after a deal fell through in 2013 with previous Superblock developer Lexington Square Partners. Rather than counting on large projects to propel fill-in development, the idea was to sell off city-owned buildings, many acquired for the original Superblock, in smaller bundles. Many were well-suited to smaller or relatively inexperienced developers who could take them on in small pieces.

The strategy is succeeding, and “smaller projects are now building momentum for what we hope will be some larger projects,” BDC President and CEO Colin Tarbert said.

John C. Murphy, a longtime Baltimore attorney who has criticized the use of eminent domain in city renewal, said he’s glad to see a focus aiming to attract — not force out — small business.

Decades ago, officials in Baltimore and elsewhere sought to transform blighted areas through renewal plans to clear out, start over and deal multiple blocks to large developers. That approach to urban renewal has largely fallen by the wayside, he said.

Renewal plans were “based on a fear of the spread of blight,” but many businesses in the west side 20 years ago were actually thriving and contributing to the city’s tax base when they were removed.

“A terrible mistake,” he said.

He blames “nostalgia for the old days of the downtown retail district when it was the shopping district for the entire Baltimore area, but after that ended, it went through a change and became a shopping district for more inner-city residents.”

Murphy represented numerous businesses and property owners who fought condemnation in the mid-2000s as part of a city plan to redevelop the Howard Street corridor. The city acquired properties in an area bounded by Park Avenue and Howard, Fayette and Lexington streets, many of which sat vacant as plans stalled.

Murphy helped some small retailers stay, including a few who remain on West Lexington Street. Others relocated, but he suspects most simply went out of business.

Many of the properties the city has sold to developers in the past decade were those originally acquired for the Superblock.

A strategy of preserving, not knocking down, buildings and attracting small, diverse businesses is right for the area, said Nicole King, an associate professor of American studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who has researched and lived on the west side. Too often blocks are cleared for development that never happens, further destabilizing an area, she said.

“Small businesses, and Black-owned businesses, immigrant-owned businesses are the heart and soul of the city,” King said. “That’s how downtown can grow, and it’s the opposite of what Baltimore has done in the past. … These big, large mall-like, suburban-type projects that the city has invested in previously have not worked out.”

When he began work on the west side, Okoro recalled, there was an expectation of big development coming.

“People were waiting and waiting,” Okoro said. “There’s not many people who had the courage to just jump in a play a part. You might have to be pushing uphill a bit.”

Okoro completed his first west side project in 2008, buying two buildings from the city in the 300 block of Park Avenue, one a burned-out shell. He consolidated and transformed them into a basement office for his company, a shop, an office and an upstairs apartment. He sold that building.

In 2015, he purchased three separate, contiguous buildings from the city, including two on West Lexington and a corner parcel at 124 N. Liberty St. The redeveloped buildings include space for an office and two restaurants with five apartments above.

That project kicked off a nearly decade-long transformation of the 100 block of West Lexington that’s nearing completion and has set the stage for at least three additional nearby projects, BDC officials say.

One is Okoro’s next challenge. On a recent Friday, he unlocked a grate protecting a long-shuttered former women’s clothing store, one of three buildings he’s acquiring across from his office on West Lexington. Inside, debris covers the floor, remnants of display cases line a wall and pieces of the ceiling droop. An unsteady stairway leads to what appears to be a mezzanine.

Next door is a small former theater where the city’s Commission for Historical and Architectural Preservation has required Okoro to preserve the historically significant exterior, a job he predicts will be “another tough project. And that’s probably why the buildings stayed vacant for so long.”

He plans to spend $12 million converting the buildings into 48 market-rate apartments and two commercial spaces.

At the block’s east end, the 100 W. Lexington Lofts are under development at the intersection with Liberty Street. Around a corner, the city sold a parking lot on Marion Street between Liberty and Park Avenue in 2019 for the L on Liberty affordable housing building, spurring more private redevelopment underway in the 200 block of Park.

Another west side developer, The Civic Group, began leasing apartments last year at Crook Horner Lofts, a redeveloped former plumbing supply business, then furniture store that had stood vacant at North Howard and West Saratoga streets. An interior design firm and home furnishings shop will become the first commercial tenant this month. A restaurant could follow.

Christopher Mfume, the Baltimore-based company’s founder and managing partner, said open floor-plan apartments, with rents from $1,800 to $3,300, appeal to artists and entrepreneurs for use as live-work studios. Tenants include photographers and a seamstress. Just two of the 15 units are left. Before Crook Horner, the housing developer had completed two other west side projects, including workforce and affordable housing on North Howard Street.

Mfume said big investments in Lexington Market and the arena “signaled to us that this was a priority for the city, and that there would need to be new, quality, moderately priced housing” as downtown evolves from predominantly office to residential.

He believes Howard Street is becoming a haven for diverse businesses and eateries, spurred in part by a decade of small-scale development in the 400 block of Howard, both city and privately led. That block contains artist-owned space, market-rate apartments and small shops. Mfume’s first commercial tenant, the dede. shop, was scheduled to open yesterday, further bridging gaps along the Howard corridor, he said.

That shop will be run by sisters Ellen Odoi and Yvette Pappoe, of the interior design firm Decorelle. Odoi, principal designer/CEO, and Pappoe, the operations manager, started Decorelle seven years ago hoping to diversify the sector and make design services accessible to a middle-income market.

The Howard Street space will be the firm’s first physical office and launch the home furnishings shop. The sisters, who immigrated from Ghana and grew up in the city and Baltimore County, hope to boost foot traffic in that stretch of Howard.

“It sort of puts our mission right up to the test, because the idea is to democratize interior design,” Pappoe said. “As a Black-owned business, to be first on the block to carry on what Howard Street is already doing feels inspiring.”