From Neighborhood Streets to City Hall with Zac Blanchard

Danny Caine

Let’s say you bump into someone you know at the grocery store. Someone you always see when they’re walking their dog, a fellow parent from your kid’s T-ball team, that yoga teacher you keep promising that you’ll drop into one of their classes. In certain kinds of neighborhoods and grocery stores, this kind of thing happens all the time. You say hi, ask how they’re doing, share some shock about the price of eggs, and move along, your cart and its squeaky wheel in tow. But to newly elected Baltimore City Councilman, Zach Blanchard,

This kind of interaction is far from mundane. Indeed, to Blanchard and his political journey, neighborhood connections are the central element in building local power. Blanchard, now the councilman for Baltimore’s 11th district, started his political journey in neighborhood associations. Eventually taking on the role of president in the Federal Hill Neighborhood Association, he also became involved with several other neighborhood groups.

In 2024, Blanchard built his neighborhood organizing experience into a city council campaign, ultimately winning a surprise victory and unseating District 11’s incumbent. Today’s conversation with Blanchard on Building Local Power charts that journey and dives into the links between neighborhood organizing and city politics, as well as exploring some of the big issues Baltimore faces. We hope you’ll enjoy this rousing discussion.

Zach Blanchard, thank you so much for appearing on Building Local Power. We’re really thrilled to have you.

Zac Blanchard

Yeah, thanks Danny.

Danny Caine

So to start, why don’t you tell us about your political journey? How did you get interested in public service and then how did that kind of lead to your new seat on Baltimore City Council?

Zac Blanchard

Yeah. So I got involved in politics because I was really involved in my neighborhood, in my community. And I got involved. That was an intentional choice because about the last 10 years, I’ve been a really big believer in the importance of social connection and sense of place. And so we made the decision.

I was in the Marine Corps for a long time. My last duty station was Annapolis. My wife had been in Baltimore. you know, we wanted to live in a row home neighborhood where you have a chance to know your neighbors and be able to walk places and things like that. So, we made the decision to, live in South Baltimore, and immediately got involved in, multiple different things with, restarting a block captain program. I coached football at high school in the neighborhood involved in our church, that sort of thing. And then the process of being involved in all this stuff.

I kind of ran into my predecessor on a couple of issues and was sort of sometimes you got to be the change you want to see. and I was getting out of the Marine Corps, decided to against the incumbent. It was a very, very close race, ended up winning, I think, with 48 out of like 8,000 votes.

it took a week for all the votes to come in, but, ended up on top obviously. And then I was inaugurated on December 5th of last year. So been in office for a little over two months now.

Danny Caine

Great, thanks for that. I really love that it started just in the neighborhood. I’m going to ask you more about that later. But first, Baltimore, talk about sense of place. It’s a city I really love. I’ve been there many times. My first book came out with a Baltimore publisher, so shout out to Mason Jar Press out of Baltimore for publishing my debut poetry collection. But for folks unlike me who have not had the joy of visiting Baltimore, can you tell us just how would you describe the city to someone who’s never been there and also specifically the 11th district which you represent.

Zac Blanchard

Yeah. So, citywide, I think the most distinct thing about Baltimore, Baltimore and Philly are the number one and number two places in the country for the percentage of residents who live in row homes or town homes, as I think they’re in a lot of the country. know, long thin buildings with shared party walls with the homes next to you. So you fit a lot on the one street. It’s just so you have a lot of very historic homes.

On our block, think every home is older than 1900. you have, you have the sense of history. You have the sort of, you know, medium for us standards, pretty high level of a very neighborhood level scale. Yeah. I mean, I think that, you know, that in itself is wonderful. We obviously, we have a lot of waterfront in the city, different things like that. the city is 60 percent Black. So you get a lot, but I say We’re a you know, predominantly Black city with a large white minority. but the culture of the city, you know, ties into that, I think very closely as well, specifically for my district, the 11th district. So that’s all of downtown Baltimore. then what non-Baltimoreans probably know best, the Inner Harbor, is also mostly in the district.

And then the area south of there is a lot of row home neighborhoods and the area north of there is some row home neighborhoods, some kind of more denser, almost downtown-like level of density, neighborhoods as well, everything ranging from kind high-rise condos to very large public housing projects to row home neighborhoods where the average price may be, for a new build, maybe 600,000 to…

We have over 400 abandoned properties in the district alone, about 13,000 in the city. So the full scale of city life and you see the vibrancy and the inequality really all juxtaposed together in the district very closely.

Danny Caine

I’m really interested in how architecture senses the sense of place in Baltimore. When I asked you about Baltimore sense of place, you went right for architecture, which I think is totally true and really, really interesting. I think that brings us back to the question of these neighborhood You talk about it on your website, you’ve talked about it already on the podcast. Can you talk about the importance of neighborhood associations and now that you’re on city council, how can city government work with neighborhood associations to make Baltimore a better place?

Zac Blanchard

Yeah, so I mean, they’re they’re kind of naturally convening places for someone who wants to get involved in community. And so that’s something it’s something I like to do. You sometimes I’ll get people reach out and like, hey, I’m trying to get involved. Like, you know, what do I do? I’ve had a couple of those conversations already. And that’s like, hey, if you want to just get a sense of like kind of the pulse of what’s going on in your neighborhood, as well as what things are out there, just getting to know your neighbors around you.

Because I think that really any meaningful change in a neighborhood almost inevitably has to involve a lot of people from the neighborhood. I think there’s a lot of people, and I get emails like this all the time, where someone’s got a great idea and they’re the only person who has it, and I’ve got 50,000 constituents. so it’s being able to show that there’s a coordinated, like a lot of people feel this way and we’ve sort of liberated and come to this consensus, think super And, you know, I will say maybe one, one sort of natural challenge with neighborhood associations though, kind of the caveat, and this coming from someone who is a neighborhood association president and all that, is you by virtue of how neighborhood associations work, you kind of sort of tend to, get a lot of people there for, a reacting, like reacting to a specific thing. In Baltimore, the two most common things we see are if there’s a particularly egregious violent crime or a proposed redevelopment that maybe a lot of people don’t like.

It can be, it’s a little not natural for a bunch of volunteers right to be able to get together and think like practically. Hey, what do we want our neighbor to be? Hey, what do we want to go after? What do we want to see that isn’t here already? So I think that’s that’s always an inherent challenge with neighborhood associations because you know, a lot of a lot of people are not necessarily going go out and spend an hour, you know, once a month in a in a formal meeting type environment unless they’re mad, you know.

And so that, it’s kind of balancing that is always kind of important to keep in mind. But as far as how, from the elected officials perspective, right? Like that’s the most direct way to get to know people in a neighborhood outside of like campaign level door knocking and things like that, right? One-on-one conversations. It is a super useful way to have those meetings and say, what challenges do you guys have? You know, what would you like to see here?

These types of things, or even if you have maybe, you know, I have an idea on X or Y thing and kind of floating that to at a neighborhood association meeting and see what people think about it. There’s a, there’s a lot of goodness there. had, I was at two association meetings last night and at one of them got a lot of recurring feedback that they’ve been having. They have a wonderful park at Seton Hill. just north of downtown. They have a wonderful, really large park from the downtown area and a lot of challenges, I think, over last couple of years with this city, rec and parks, maintenance and upkeep of the park and whatnot. And so that’s not really something that I would have ever have probably recognized had it not been that feedback from them. Right. And so and then say like, hey, can we do a walk around where a bunch of folks like me and a bunch of folks from neighborhood and the right person, from rec and parks, get together and walk and say like, OK, what do we want to see fixed here? You know, what are the next steps, that type of thing?

Would never have come up with that idea on my own. Right. That’s and probably one person may never have come up with that. It was when a group of neighbors was in a room together with an elected official who has the ability to convene those meetings with the right city agencies right to help. So, and it’s for more familiar with the different tools we have to solve problems. I it’s kind of where the magic happens.

Danny Caine

Mm-hmm.

That’s really interesting. I guess it’s interesting to me because the podcast is called Building Local Power and it strikes me that these associations and your interactions with them, that’s exactly what you’re doing, is building local power in these neighborhoods. So, it strikes me as I was researching this and looking at your website and reading about your city and your work intersect with a lot of ILSR’s broader interests. So I want to ask you a series of questions about things we’re working on and have you weigh in. Starting your campaign website, you list more grocery stores as policy priority saying if you can’t walk to a grocery store, your neighborhood isn’t complete. Can you tell us why having a grocery store is so important for a neighborhood.

Zac Blanchard

Yeah. So I think probably two reasons. You know, one in a city like Baltimore, you can walk to a lot of things. The neighborhoods are for almost all the city are very dense. like in my neighborhood, we don’t have a grocery store. If we had one, then I don’t know what a regular resident would need to do outside the neighborhood in a given week unless you work outside it, Primary schools, high schools, churches, markets, restaurants, bars, all those types of parks, you know, all those types of things, right, are all within a 10 minute walk from you. So I think just being able to like root to a place and how being outside a car and being able to walk through things like…connects you to your place and a lot more in a very strong way. Also, I think that, there is a level of like grocery stores, particularly, I think, smaller grocers as a place where you’re likely to see other people you know, almost taking that sort type of role.

You know, we’ve got a grocery store chain, Streets, It’s been expanding in the city. I think they’re originally from dc and Streets they see their target audienc as like the six blocks around their grocery store, right? They don’t if they think it’s viable. That’s what they’re looking at They don’t have they typically don’t have parking right? because they’re assuming people in a walk to and from the place.

So like that, if there’s 10 customers in the store, when you walk in there, mean, there’s a decent chance you’re know one of them. And I think that in itself is from a community perspective, actually, pretty important.

Danny Caine

That’s great. I’ll just pause right here to note that both Zach and I are fathers of young children and you may hear some children in the background as we’re talking, but so it goes, podcasting as dads. So staying at the topic of grocery stores, at ILSR we’ve done a ton of work recently about food deserts and their cause and we’re fighting for the revival of a law called the Robinson-Patman Act that can reverse the decline of independent neighborhood grocers. And in fact, pausing enforcement of that law is largely a cause of all these food deserts. But that’s federal policy. I’m interested on a local level, from your seat on Baltimore City Council, what can you do to solve the problem of not enough neighborhoods having grocery stores?

Zac Blanchard

Yeah, yeah, thanks, Danny. And actually, I am familiar with that. read a good article, I think it was in the Atlantic, couple months ago about that act and was like, wow.

Danny Caine 

Yeah, well, that was Stacy Mitchell, my boss. So we’ll put a link to that in the show notes. Yeah. Yeah, “The Great Grocery Squeeze.” Yeah, no, the article had an amazing life and so many people read and talked about it. So I’m glad you found it too. And we’ll definitely put a link to it in the show notes.

Zac Blanchard 

Oh, did she write? Was it was her? Was it an Atlantic? All right. That’s awesome. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, I mean, a couple of things. actually I’m having a, we have an opportunity right now where we have a commercial real estate agent working to sell a property. They have a buyer. The buyer has a letter of intent from a grocery store chain that we’re, it’s actually like, was working on this for a months before I took office, you know, as I was in like that, the opposite of a lame duck period. And so just you know, letting folks know like, look, I will fight for this. Please let me know what I can do to help. Like if it’s grant funding for a tenant build out, if it’s permitting approval, I mean, I think in this case, I said, like, if you get it done without me, that’s awesome. If you don’t get it done and you didn’t ask me for help, I’m going to be upset.

Because like we are missing a really important opportunity for a neighborhood here. I think just helping make clear that as, you know, a council member and someone who can kind of make connections to maybe grant funders or, state grants or whatever. Right. communicating that in of itself is, is I think a really important thing, can organize the neighborhoods getting, you know, neighborhood association expressing support for that type of thing, right, is very in line with that. This sort of falls outside the policy route, but it’s something I’ve been seeing is that when I think as a local elected official where it’s not about this great policy or even about like moving things around in the budget always sometimes getting the right people together in a meeting.

Right, having the power to get the right people together and meeting and work those types of things. And so, I know that’s probably not the answer that a lot of listeners, certainly myself a couple of years ago, I would not have been looking for that. but I think that’s actually important outside of that there are obviously there are ways to, have tax credits and other types of things of that to attract grocery store tenants. and then just having the, like we have the Baltimore Development Corporation, right? They have economic development folks, you know, making sure that that’s a good priority for them. All these things are actively helping, looking for grocery store chains that fit in our case in our dense urban environment, right?

Because a lot of the national chains have a specific model that rarely makes sense here. a big part of the reason we have a food desert problem is because the US is dominated by a small number of grocery store chains and their model is inherently very intensely suburban. need, or at least you think you need 200 parking spaces and you need an aisle for your tomato sauce, right? Your 50 different brands. And not to be disparaging there, but because where space is cheap, right?

You can’t do that. And that’s just a challenge we have. The last one that I’ll say that is a specific interest of mine is a state level law in Maryland that does not allow beer and wine in grocery stores. There’s been some discussion the last two years. Maryland is one of three states in the country that does not allow beer. One in 10 that does not allow wine in grocery stores. And what’s nice about beer and wine is they’re dense. The profit margins are high and you’re not worried about.

Like the logistics are a lot easier. You’re not worried about things going stale and all that type of stuff. And so we actually have had a couple of our members of our state delegation, meaning the state level elected officials in Baltimore city who have been advocating for basically allowing for grocery stores to sell beer and wine in places that don’t have grocery stores. And they’ve had some really creative ideas.

Delegate Marlon Amprey in West Baltimore had a particularly cool set of things where it was like, it’s like we can have a surtax on the beer and wine that’s allowed in the grocery stores and that would go towards funding projects and efforts for our, for breweries across the state and like helping with smaller scale, beer and wine production. And so like that, that type of thing, I was like, man, this is, this is my jam. Unfortunately, the liquor lobby is actually really strong in Maryland.

Right now, I don’t think the political will to push through that opposition is going to allow that. And there’s a lot of places in the state that have that negative impact from this that Baltimore city does. Right. And so it’s hard to get votes, you know, in the state level for that. But so there’s multiple things there that all overlap in figuring out how to get more groceries.

Danny Caine

Yeah. And I like that from our conversation, you kind of realize it’s a multi-level fight. Like you need people pushing for federal change, and then you also need someone who can put the right people together in a room in Baltimore to talk about a solution. So it’s fun and interesting to view so many different angles of the same fight.

Zac Blanchard

Yeah.

Danny Caine

So as we wind down, I want to ask you about two more initiatives ILSR is working on in and around Baltimore. ILSR did some work that found that the city of Baltimore, which is home to large waste incinerators, has repeatedly ranked for poor air quality and the worst urban heat among US cities, which is a problem that’s exacerbated in poor and Black neighborhoods. ILSR,

We’ve been working with state delegate Regina T. Boyce on a bill to create a solid waste surcharge to help fund food waste prevention and composting programs, which could be seen as solutions to this problem. the issue show up in your district and how can city council help ensure environmental equity all Baltimoreans?

Zac Blanchard

Yeah.

Yeah. First off, delegate Boyce is great. That’s awesome. I didn’t know you were working with her. I’m going to text her after this. She’s had a she had a really big legislative win last year in allowing and enabling legislation to allow the city of Baltimore and counties across the state to tax abandoned properties at higher rates to disincentivize blight. That was huge. Yeah. Yeah. And I’m looking forward to learning more about this from her, So they’re actually a big example. The 10th largest trash incinerated in America used to be in the 11th district, my district and with redistricting that moved into the adjacent district, the 10th.

That incinerator, because of some pretty bad state laws, or regulation, I should say, has been receiving millions of dollars a year out of our renewable energy portfolio. somehow a push to stop that in 2019 died, but it actually is back on the chopping block a state level thing that has to happen.

It has support from from my state senator who is the Senate president. So the fact that he sponsored the bill now is is a really good sign that it’ll push through. They actually have the hearing tomorrow. Councilman Porter just introduced a resolution on the council level to say, hey, we all support the state removing incinerators out of the renewable energy portfolio. That’s $25 million the state of Maryland government is going to save just by not pretending like incinerators are the type of energy we want in our state. And so that’s huge. Also talking incinerator stuff, you have to look at compost, right? You have to look at what are landfill options.

There is a, if you lose an incinerator, you, right. That there it is generating electricity and our electrical rates, which is another conversation, have been going up substantially. And so like what the impact on that is figuring out how to offset that with substantial investments in in green energy, as well as figuring out what to do with the trash and being proactive with it. All these things are they’re easy to brief but then figuring out the nuts and bolts of how you run a municipal composting program, like of the scale that actually gets things out of the burner.

It is not easy and especially in the city that’s as racked with the challenges of both the know history of racism as well as like car centered everything right like we’re really broke financially so being smart and being able to work these things out is kind of how you have to do it.

Danny Caine

Yeah, well, and I know the compost team at ILSR is really proud to provide great resources and help for exactly that. OK, Yet another intersection with ILSR’s work. We do a ton of work with local broadband and connectivity. And that team has found that Baltimore has one of the highest rates of digital disconnectivity in the nation. ILSR profiled Baltimore’s Project Waves, which is an organization working to close that digital divide.

I’ll link to that story and some others in the show notes. Why is connectivity important for the Baltimore community? And what do you think some solutions could be when the Comcast monopoly is so clearly leaving so many Baltimoreans behind?

Zac Blanchard

Yeah. And this is a specific thing where my job in the Marine Corps was a little tech related. And so like, I’ve got a little bit of an understanding of more than I would otherwise, right? Of the technical side of this. first off, you know, we have a lot of challenges with internet connectivity across the, even in a more affluent neighborhoods, which is crazy because they’re relatively affluent even on national level, but also, they’re very dense. So it really makes no sense why you’d have a problem there. But then of course, where is it worse? It’s always gonna be worse in your historically disadvantaged neighborhoods, right? Your lower income neighborhoods. the most blatant example of that was during COVID, When schools went virtual and then, I mean, the amount of kids who dropped out of school.

Grades, truancy rate, all that type of thing, I mean, just like took a massive hit. It was the most obvious example of that. But I mean, the full scale of there’s so many things, know, there’s reasons to be moving towards telehealth. There’s obviously impacts on the education system. There’s all these different, just getting information, you know, getting, applying for a job, all these types of things that like tie into network and I think that people understand that. But figuring out what options are out there for municipalities is really important.

Danny Caine

And again, ILSR, ton of resources, ton of work in local broadband. And again, we’ll link that to the show notes. All right, one more question. You’ve already mentioned Delegate Boyce being awesome. I’m interested in where your political inspiration comes from. So where do you see great work happening? And what kind of stuff and cities inspire you to keep doing your work?

Zac Blanchard

Man, that’s cool. Yeah, here’s like maybe three of them.

So in Baltimore, we have real challenges around, as with any area that’s gonna have large areas of concentrated poverty, right? We have all sorts of challenge with substance abuse, with violent crime, with things like And the way that you can, a lot of times the most effective way to get people the resources they need and understand what’s going on and whatnot is to have people who share that life experience being the messengers and coordinating that.

And that’s everything from, we recently started a program and including at the high school that I coach at where we’re piloting it now, but it’s looking really effective where we have, know, adults who come from the same neighborhoods that the kids are coming from serving, you know, outside of school hours in the surrounding neighborhood, as well as inside of school hours, providing wraparound services, know, mediating things kind of like.

You know, just like bringing the temperature down when that needs to happen, right? the value of being able to have people who understand where the people who are most vulnerable are coming from and can communicate them from a credible master perspective is, awesome. And I think when it comes out local power and recognizing that like the having the, that neighborhood level or like life understanding that people have, and a lot of times not everyone.

Not everyone can make those connections, right? And so that’s actually really inspiring. I think we’re doing some really good stuff, both the city and some of our nonprofit partners there, actually. The homicide rate in Baltimore last year was like 40 % lower than it was two years ago. It’s been dropping. It looks like it’s going to continue dropping. We’re seeing the same with shootings, but know, like these types of things, there’s real outcomes here, some of the lowest we’ve had in 50 years.

Another example, another thing I’m really excited about changing subjects, but when it comes to like interstate and highway removal, because there’s nothing that destroys a neighborhood like putting an interstate or highway by it. And a lot of times that was done intentionally because there were certain neighborhoods that for whatever reason the city wanted destroyed. A lot of times, know, aspects of race and class play into that are like prime candidates for that. And so, I know in Rochester has a successful example of that. there’s some older examples, I think, San Francisco, Milwaukee had, has had one last 15 years or so. and so looking at that type of things, which make stronger neighborhoods, connect neighborhoods, and just generate the revenue that a municipality needs to be strong are incredibly important, really exciting stuff being done kind of across country there.

Main streets commercial neighborhood corridors is like having a vibrant neighborhood space, particularly in, you know, to kind of brag about Baltimore, the bones of the city are just like, there’s not a lot of places that can compete with it. And so, you know, if you have, it’s the place itself it’s part of the reason people are coming. It’s part of the reason people are spending their money there. Right. It’s, also has a huge impact on how people think about the neighborhood and about the city. Right. So being able to have meaningful support for these types of programs and nonprofits that support the commercial corridor in a space is huge. I know there’s been some work in Atlanta and Boston that looks at these commercial corridors and says, hey, like all these like crazy national, like tax write-offs and whatnot you get for having retail vacancy, like we are going to, like you will be fined or have a fee or whatever to.

Basically, if you’re going to blight the surrounding neighborhood, because it’s in your federal tax interest to do that, we are going to do our part to discourage that behavior. I think that type of stuff is, we have to get a good holistic package of effort there as a city. And that’s super inspiring stuff.

Danny Caine

Yeah, well, and one of the reasons I love Baltimore is it’s small business. As I’m a bookstore guy and you’ve got just incredible bookstores there, Red Emma’s, Atomic Bookshop, these places are great. And I’ll mention that ILSR just published a post city governments can work with independent business alliances to accomplish these kinds of goals that you’re talking about with bolstering up Main Streets. Well, Zach Blanchard, what a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you so much.

Zac Blanchard

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks a ton, Danny. And thanks for having me on the show.

Danny Caine

I really enjoyed talking to Councilman Blanchard about all the ways his experience and ideas intersect with ILSR’s priorities and resources. Please do check out the show notes for links to all kinds of those resources, from composting to local broadband to the grocery price crisis and how to fix it. To keep up with our work on all these issues and more, subscribe to our flagship Localism Works newsletter, which you can do with the link in the show notes. Here at Building Local Power, we’d love to invite you, our listeners, into the conversation.

If you have thoughts about this or other episodes, ideas for future guests, or if you just want to get in touch, send me a note at [email protected]. And as always, if you like what you hear, please like, subscribe, review, and share with your friends. This episode of Building Local Power was produced by me, Danny Caine, with the help of Reggie Rucker. I did the editing with help from Taya Noelle who also composed the music. Thank you so much for listening and see you in two weeks.

• In The Atlantic: “The Great Grocery Squeeze“
• ILSR: “As Heat Islands Worsen in Baltimore, Local Composting Can Relieve Its Effects“
• ILSR: “Reintroduced Maryland Bill on Wasted Food Reduction and Diversion“
• ILSR: “Making Waves in Baltimore with Community-Driven Connectivity“
• ILSR: “Cities and States are Partnering with Local Business Organizations“
• Sign up for ILSR’s Localism Works newsletter