After spending some time to comment out some code I found what was happening. There was a line of code that was erroring out when run by Blend. Blend was executing a line of code that was returnig null and erroring out. As soon as I changed that line of code (commented it out or fixed it so it does not throw an error on accessing it in design mode), all the properties bind and show in Blend.
If you are seeing this pull up your ViewModel code and look at whatcode is running in the constructor. Easiest thing to do is just comment out all the code, save and then build the project in blend (this will force Blend to reload the view). See if things start showing agian.