Baltimore's Bmore Build Forward Turns Vacant Lots Into Power-Producing Homes

Brendan McCluskey wants the homes his crews build in Baltimore to generate more than 200% of the electricity they consume. That surplus power, exported back to the grid during the day, funds home maintenance and builds resident wealth under the Bmore Build Forward initiative led by his firm, Trident Builders, a commercial general contractor based in Baltimore, MD.

The program, which grew out of the Bmore Build Forward White Paper, converts vacant and blighted lots into high-performance, affordable modular homes. McCluskey, founder and president of Trident Builders and a member of the U.S. Chamber's Small Business Council, frames the city's vacancy problem as a business opening rather than a burden. "Where some see blight, I see an opportunity," he wrote in an account published August 24, 2026. "I'm bullish on Baltimore's potential."

The construction model departs from conventional site building. Trident Builders uses factory-built, modular techniques that produce robotically fabricated structural envelope panels alongside pre-fabricated kitchens and bathrooms. According to McCluskey, this approach delivers precision, scalability and performance that will dramatically lower upfront costs over time. The building envelopes are tight enough to achieve what he describes as super energy-efficient standards, and rooftop net-positive solar panels push each house past the 200% power-generation threshold.

That energy arithmetic matters financially. The surplus creates a sustained revenue stream designated specifically for long-term home maintenance and building resident wealth, turning each house into an income-producing asset rather than a depreciating cost center.

The second pillar of the program targets labor. Bmore Build Forward links workforce development directly to community wealth creation through partnerships with the Associated Builders and Contractors (ABC) Craft Laborer Apprenticeship and Project JumpStart. The pipeline serves a dual purpose: filling skilled-labor shortages and ensuring the economic gains stay local. "We believe the people shaping Baltimore's future should be the people who call it home," McCluskey wrote. Residents who perform finishing work on the homes will receive support to eventually own their own home, and the initiative prioritizes local developers from the affected communities so families can build equity where they live.

To coordinate the effort, McCluskey established the BMore CoOp, a real estate developer's cooperative that brings small, community-based developers, organizations and residents under one shared mission. "We realize that no single organization can solve the vacancy issue alone," he wrote. By pooling resources and sharing expertise rather than competing, the cooperative keeps development control in community hands. McCluskey argues the aggregation also has a financial function: aggregating knowledge reduces the risk profile of a high-performance project for the developers, the builders and even the lending institutions — a critical point if the model is to attract conventional financing.

The most ambitious component involves artificial intelligence. Bmore Build Forward is partnering with Johns Hopkins to integrate AI into its operations, with the goal of streamlining the development process and managing logistics so the cooperative model can scale. McCluskey does not plan to keep the technology proprietary. Rather than building a tool only for its own use, Trident Builders intends to release it on the marketplace, allowing other builders to adopt advanced construction methods with tools that ease their learning curve.

The stakes extend past Baltimore. McCluskey positions the initiative as a replicable answer to the affordable housing crisis. "We aren't just looking to build houses; we're looking to build a national model for urban renewal that solves the affordable housing crisis from the inside out," he wrote. His stated goal: prove that a city can solve its own housing crisis without displacing its people.

For McCluskey, the project is also personal. He left Baltimore in his mid-twenties, felt the pull back on every return visit, and now runs a company whose laborers, in his words, are "quite literally constructing what Baltimore will look like long after I am gone." Construction on modular homes under the BMore CoOp is already underway, giving the model its first live test. If the AI partnership and cooperative financing structures hold up, Baltimore's vacant lots could become the template other cities copy.