Grant Maker Who Rebuilt Blighted Neighborhoods Still Energized About Baltimore

When Timothy Armbruster drove through derelict sections near Baltimore’s downtown 34 years ago, agog at endless stretches of abandoned row houses and businesses, he wondered whether he could handle the challenge he’d undertaken.

“I thought I was in wartime Berlin,” he recalls of his trek east after living for years in Cleveland. “My wife wondered what I’d gotten us into.”

Now, after serving as president of the Goldseker Foundation for half of his life, Mr. Armbruster, 68, has decided to step down next June, satisfied he’s done at least a small bit to turn that blight around. Though Baltimore remains a city marred by decades of deindustrialization and middle-class flight, many of its neighborhoods have rebounded from years of teetering on the precipice of extinction.

During Mr. Armbruster’s tenure, Goldseker awarded $81-million in grants to 450 institutions and organizations. Nearly all of them were made in Baltimore, where the foundation—now with $95-million in assets—focused on rebuilding the parts of the city with the most potential, starting with “target blocks” that offer neighborhoods some hope of renewal.

Morris Goldseker, whose $11-million bequest started the fund in 1975, “made his fortune in Baltimore’s residential real-estate market,” Mr. Armbruster says. “Our founding documents were clear that we should put the money back into strengthening the real-estate market, which meant helping a lot of these middle neighborhoods. Those are the places where the fate of Baltimore will be decided—not in the well-to-do neighborhoods or the ones on the bottom that are almost completely hollowed out.”

From Fragile to Stable

In his lifetime, Mr. Goldseker was controversial. He was accused of selling homes to black buyers and then buying homes from panicked white homeowners in the same neighborhoods at bargain prices, a charge he denied.

Mr. Armbruster took over a decade after those allegations were raised, and a key to his success, say those who know his work, is that he tried hard not to be a conciliatory force and backed ideas that would not disrupt neighborhoods, as many gentrification efforts have. Mr. Armbruster is credited with turning a $1-million Goldseker grant to Baltimore’s Healthy Neighborhoods program into a $100-million project, financed mostly with private money, that now supports 41 city neighborhoods.

“Tim believed with relatively modest financial and people-to-people-based interventions, a fragile neighborhood could stabilize and attract city residents,” says Rachel Garbow Monroe, president of the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation, also in Baltimore. “External evaluations have confirmed what Tim believed.”

Mr. Armbruster plans to keep his hand in Baltimore affairs, “to be a part of the conversation,” he says. “I hope that in a year or more, I’m just as energized about the city and solutions to its problems.”

“I’ve been at this for a long time,” he adds. “It’s fair to give someone else a turn at bat.”