Stacey Womble
TOPIC
Born Into Blight: Reclaiming Power One Lot at a Time
This talk focuses on Baltimore’s young adults, born into blight, who are rethinking power by transforming urban decay into opportunity. By empowering them with construction skills, they move from overlooked to architects of change. When people feel safe and capable, they dream and act differently—reclaiming power not just over structures but over their own future. This idea reframes blight, not as a dead end, but as a catalyst—where each neighborhood rebuilt becomes a testament to collective strength and belonging.
ABOUT
Stacey Womble is a licensed Maryland general contractor, real estate developer, and acute
rehabilitation nurse — a combination nobody quite believes until they see her swing a hammer between hospital shifts. She holds bachelor’s degrees in nursing and criminal justice: two disciplines that trained her to do the same thing — look past the symptom and name the root cause, whether she’s reading a patient, a building, or a block.
Through her company, New Ground Development, she acquires vacant lots across Baltimore and builds for-sale homes for the people already living on those blocks. Through her nonprofit, Building Up Baltimore, she cultivates the next generation of builders — connecting young people to careers in construction, architecture, engineering, and real estate. She calls herself a community architect: someone designing spaces of belonging, one block at a time.
Raised on the Jersey Shore, she learned to build from her grandfather, who put tools in her
hands long before she understood what he was really teaching her. Nursing brought her to Baltimore, and the diagnostic habit it demanded is still how she reads a building, a block, and a budget. Building her first duplex convinced her that the real product of construction isn’t the house. It’s the person who built it. She documents the work — the wins, the change orders, the parts nobody posts — on her web series Beauty and the Build TV, because the next generation of developers can’t become what they’ve never seen.
She is the proud mother of 19-year-old twins living and building between Silver Spring and Baltimore.