Mayor Pugh recently announced a $1 billion strategy to redevelop East Baltimore, spanning from the vibrant Harbor East waterfront development to the Hopkins Hospital research complex. This is exactly the transformative vision the city needs. But it needs to be transformative for all of Baltimore’s citizens, which returns me to the same question I’ve struggled with over the past year and through many columns. Does economic success have to come at a cost to those most in need of change?

The G-Word. Gentrification is a loaded concept, most often suggesting a community in flux, moving from poverty to wealth, from exclusion to opportunity –resulting in displacement of those most in need of such change. The reality is this East Baltimore redevelopment, however well intentioned, should require us to explore what gentrification will mean. If we don’t, as experienced with many similar efforts in other cities, we will end up marginalizing those neighbors among us most in need of a different future.

The Paradox of Redevelopment. Does gentrification – the economic reinvention of a community – inevitably result in displacing its poor residents? According to Jennifer Vey of the Brookings Institution, not necessarily. “Sometimes it feels like an accusation, underpinned by a somewhat paradoxical assumption that innovative economic growth in cities will inevitably have a destructive impact on poor residents.” Vey suggests that efforts around innovative growth should focus not on who is getting “squeezed out” but on how the greatest number of residents can “connect in.”

Neither Wasteland Nor Enclave. As I explored in my recent columns discussing the redevelopment of the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood in Cincinnati, we should rethink gentrification. We should not accept as an ineluctable reality the change of state displacing poor for rich; we should work to ensure the result is an equilibrium including everyone. We should avoid entropy at either end of urban life – working to ensure communities neither end up as dystopian wastelands or as exclusive enclaves, as Richard Florida cautions. The residents around Old Town Mall, Perkins Homes and surrounding communities deserve no less.

If We Get it Wrong. Vey’s research focuses on the dynamics of concentrated poverty with Philadelphia’s University City redevelopment around Penn and Drexel. Vey acknowledges the tension that the benefits of such economic growth likely go to the well-educated, privileged few and that this drives the gentrification question. Her view is that “it is not gentrification that is widening the gap between the people and communities who are succeeding in the economy and those who are not: it’s the rise in concentrated poverty. With the success of Philadelphia’s University City district has come increased poverty in surrounding neighborhoods. As Vey cautions, “while development in the innovation district [in Philadelphia] might not yet be driving gentrification, it is not yielding many spillover benefits either.”

Access to Opportunity. As Vey notes, the irony in Philadelphia, and with most such efforts, including in Baltimore, is that a majority of jobs being created in these innovation districts do not require a college degree. They are sufficiently well paying that they would enable meaningful improvement in the lives of those neighborhood families most in need – provided they still live there. As Vey suggests, the question isn’t whether gentrification displaces our poor; but whether we are willing to focus on how to ensure the communities most in need are able to remain in their neighborhoods and gain access to the jobs being created. In East Baltimore, accessible jobs will be created, neighborhoods will be reimagined; the question is whether we’re ready to do what is takes to ensure the most disadvantaged among us will be written into this new chapter.

Don’t Chase our Tail. The irony is that those cities which get inclusive economic development right are actually growing faster than those which don’t. It’s in everyone’s self-interest to get gentrification right. These cities have realized that their economic development focus should be more about optimizing the potential they have and less about chasing what they don’t. But that’s for the next column…

With more than 30 years’ experience in law and business, NewtFowler, a partner in Womble Bond Dickinson’s business practice, advises many investors, entrepreneurs and technology companies, guiding them through all aspects of business planning, financing transactions, technology commercialization and M&A. He’s the past board chair of TEDCO and serves on the Board of the EconomicAlliance of Greater Baltimore. Newt can be reached at newt.fowler@wbd-us.com.