On September 18, Baltimore issued permits for two new buildings on Wyman Park Drive, on the edge of the Johns Hopkins Homewood campus. The permits call them the "DSAI South Building" and the "DSAI North Building": instructional buildings with offices for graduate students and faculty, classrooms, lab spaces and support space.
The reported values are large. The south building, at 3100 Wyman Park Dr, carries $285.3 million. The north building, at 200 Wyman Park Dr, carries $187.8 million. These are the valuations reported on the permits, not contract amounts or the university's budget.
The permit is the news
Hopkins has been preparing this site for a while. In January 2026, Baltimore Fishbowl reported that one block of Wyman Park Drive, between Remington Avenue and Carnegie Way, would close to cars for four years. That made room for the Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (DSAI) Institute: two buildings joined by a skybridge, with completion planned for 2029. The same article noted that Hopkins had not disclosed what the project would cost to build.
Get today’s Baltimore report for your trade, free →
The building permits now put reported values on both buildings. A permit value is an estimate used for permits and fees, so treat it as a sense of scale rather than a price tag.
Both permits also say a future fit-out permit package will be submitted for the offices, laboratories and control areas, and the south building's package also covers a cleanroom. In other words, the permits issued in September cover the buildings themselves. The lab and office interiors are a later, separate round of permitting.
Hospitals fill out the rest of the list
After the two Hopkins buildings, Baltimore's largest permits in the period were mostly healthcare renovations:
- 22 S Greene St: $32 million. Renovation of the 10th and 11th floors of an existing hospital building, including a new fire alarm system. The address is the downtown University of Maryland Medical Center.
- 900 S Caton Ave: $29 million. Renovation of a hospital's third-floor maternity and child health inpatient unit, including mechanical and structural work.
- 111 W Melrose Ave: $15.3 million. A three-story addition to an existing building of about 18,000 gross square feet, with a new lobby and a suite of offices for student services.
- 5100 Eastern Ave: $11.6 million. Replacement of the domestic water loop around the Bayview Medical Center campus, with site restoration.
Put together, Baltimore's biggest construction money this fall is going to campuses: universities and hospitals.
Baltimore by the numbers
Baltimore issued 760 building permits from September 10 to October 9, 2026, counted by issue date, with a combined reported value of $606.0 million. The two Hopkins buildings account for most of that value.
By kind of work:
| Type of work | Permits issued |
|---|---|
| Home renovations and additions | 667 |
| Commercial renovations and build-outs | 57 |
| New homes | 25 |
| Pools, garages and other residential structures | 6 |
| New commercial and apartment buildings | 5 |
Baltimore is a renovation city: home renovations and additions made up 667 of the 760 permits. New homes are scarce. Baltimore had 25 new home permits over the same 30 days, compared with 39 in Washington, DC, which issued a similar number of permits overall (790). Philadelphia issued 1,199 permits, 141 of them for new homes.
How we count
Building permits issued by the City of Baltimore from September 10 to October 9, 2026, counted by issue date. Each permit is counted once, and a project filed as several permits is valued once. Values are the valuations reported on the permits, not contract amounts. Trade permits (electrical, plumbing, mechanical) are not included. Project descriptions come from each permit's own text. The building and project names in this post come from the permits and from the news coverage linked below.
See the latest numbers on our Baltimore city page, updated weekly.
Sources
- Baltimore Fishbowl, "Section of Wyman Park Drive to close for four years starting Jan. 7 as Hopkins prepares to begin construction of its DSAI Institute complex" (January 6, 2026): baltimorefishbowl.com
- University of Maryland Medical System, Stoler Center for Advanced Medicine (gives the medical center's Greene Street address): umms.org
- Photo: chris.rycroft, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons: commons.wikimedia.org
More from Morningline Research
More numbers: Baltimore, MD building permit activity, updated weekly.
- UMB North Quad: Baltimore Approves 25-Year Tax Deal for 15-Story, 404-Unit West Lexington Street Tower
- State Center and Harborplace Get the Headlines. Baltimore's Rowhouses Are Getting the Work.
- Google's Lincoln Data Center Files for a Third Building's Power and Cooling Plant
- Gasworx's First Office Building in Ybor City Files a $12.5 million Interior Build-Out