The houses at Brooklyn Homes stand in long rows. They’re squat, little two-story brick structures with tidy green patches of lawn in front.

In December 1979, then a three-year old Yolanda Smallwood moved with her mother to their new house in the project. Even though the trees were bare and the air cold, Brooklyn Homes was paradise.

“It was great literally growing up… there were Caucasian, Hispanics, Black people. Initially, most of the minorities were smaller,” she recalled with a glimmer in her eye. “Up until I got to middle school. My best friends were like two different white girls, and it was never a problem.”

Brooklyn Homes then, as it is now, is a housing project run by the Housing Authority of Baltimore City. Residents need to make below 30% of the median income.

Nowadays, the name of “Brooklyn Homes” brings to mind for many the mass shooting that killed two and injured 28 others in early July. Around 90 residents have requested relocation help from the city, according to the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement. A recent survey found that most Brooklyn Homes residents don’t feel safe in the area while many put crime, food insecurity and a poor police presence as among their top concerns for quality of life.

Smallwood doesn’t feel sure that Brooklyn Homes is less safe than elsewhere, but she does feel like the area she lives in now is remarkably different from the one where she spent her own childhood.

For kids in the 80’s, Brooklyn Homes was busy. Going to the rec center was like a full-time job.

“I was on the swim team. I learned how to swim. They had karate classes. They had skating on weekends for the kids,” she remembered.

“Like these kids have nothing to do,” she said, gesturing outside her window where kids could be seen walking to the project’s small playground, clearly designed for younger kids, on a hot August day.

“Miss Ronnie. She was a coordinator up there. She always made sure our weekends were packed,” said Smallwood.

That rec center has since been privatized. Just a few short blocks away from the project is Farring-Baybrook Recreation Center which according to Baltimore’s parks and recreation website specializes in therapeutic recreation for adults and children with disabilities.

Smallwood is now 47, a mother to a 23 and a 16-year-old. She sits on a couch in her small living room where pictures of her two children and extended family adorn the walls. Although there’s the Boys and Girls Club and library programs, she worries her kids have had fewer opportunities.

“I don’t know what happened,” she wondered.

Brooklyn Homes was originally a white housing project. In 1968 it was desegregated in a move that was so upsetting to some white residents that the Ku Klux Klan marched and burned crosses in protest. The project didn’t have a significant Black population until the 1980’s. Now, 95% of public housing homes have a Black head of household, according to HABC.

Smallwood, who is Black, recalled seeing the make-up of the area change.

“They [HABC] relocated a lot of other people here from other houses and places that they gentrified or knocked down or whatever, like Flag and I think it was Lexington Terrace… and it [Brooklyn Homes] became predominantly black people,” she said.

According to a 2007 report from the Abell Foundation, Baltimore’s occupied public housing dropped by 42% from 1992-2007, exactly during the time Smallwood began to feel her community shifting. As the authority sold and demolished homes, they did not replace them.

Smallwood laid out what sounds like a pattern of disinvestment. In 2014 and 2015 Brooklyn Homes failed its HUD inspection although scores have improved since and recent inspections have the project as “passing.”

And the stores she shopped at are shuttered– everyone has to travel further for everything. “Now it's just like, everything's gone… we had a Family Dollar, A Rite Aid. We used to have a diner called Centuries. Like one of them old fashioned diners with the little things you turn around and a big thing you sit at… and over time, everything just shut down.”

Smallwood won’t say that Brooklyn Homes has always been crime free. But she thinks now crime feels more “out in the open.”

“It just became like a drive thru like Burger King. Have it your way, you can get you a burger and get you some drugs and go home,” she said, with an incredulous laugh.

For decades, only one officer was responsible for handling calls for service in the area that includes Brooklyn Homes. Yet a recent after-action report by the city’s police department conducted in response to the Brooklyn Homes shooting found that the neighborhood was the city’s second busiest in calls for service. Police redistricting went into effect in mid-July, shortly after the shooting. The two events are not related. Now there are three officers responsible for the area that includes Brooklyn Homes.

Smallwood, like many other residents, think people can come to the project to do what they want without consequence.

“It's like Brooklyn has been known to let people just come into this neighborhood and things, usually when somebody else shows up, bad things happen,” she said. She noted that while she didn’t go to the Brooklyn Day block party, for a long time she has felt like the event wasn’t “family-friendly”, she did see many people walking around who “weren’t from here.”

Smallwood isn’t convinced that other parts of Baltimore are safer. Her desire to move has more to do with frustration generally with the housing authority and the neighborhood; she says repairs can be slow and she needs a bigger house so that both her kids can have a room. Still, the decision is difficult: she has her aging mother and a sense of community in Brooklyn Homes she needs to think about.

HABC has hired additional private security for the neighborhood, along with all of their other properties, although that security update was already scheduled to go into effect before the shooting at Brooklyn Day. The city has been pouring resources into the area since the July 2nd shooting and according to officials, those efforts remain ongoing although the original response had been planned for 45 days, now long past.

Smallwood, like the 90 others who requested help to move, are now weighing their options and wondering: where else can they go and be safer?