Baltimore has reduced its count of vacant homes from 16,000 to fewer than 12,000 during Mayor Brandon Scott’s five years in office — a major feat in a generations-long effort to curb blight.
The second-term Democrat has celebrated the success on podcasts, in national newspapers and as a speaker at a Bloomberg-sponsored conference in Madrid.
But it’s only part of the story.
For every three vacant homes that are eliminated, two new ones appear, an internal city review shows, in part due to insufficient vacancy prevention efforts. And city officials have acknowledged difficulties with raising the $8 billion needed to fund the effort.
There are also questions about the city’s vacancy count.
The tally includes only homes so noticeably vacant — think broken windows and trees growing through roofs — that they’ve been labeled as unlivable and slapped with a vacant building notice. That notice opens more legal pathways to hold deadbeat owners accountable.
Left out of the count are homes that, to neighbors, are just as vacant and problematic as the ones on the list.
Take one house on 31st Street just west of Greenmount Avenue. Neighbors said the rowhouse, dark and shrouded by overgrown hedges, has been empty for years. But it’s not included in the city’s roster. No one knows how many abandoned homes without vacant notices there are, though Johns Hopkins University researchers are working on a tally.
Baltimore also has some 20,000 empty lots, and the city’s new housing director recently pointed out there’s no clear plan for them.
Jonas Poggi, a spokesperson for the Scott administration, said the city is focused on a long-term solution and that its progress since announcing the plan in 2023 has been historic and ahead of schedule. The city is seeing success “at every metric,” he said, and is confident it will meet all its benchmarks by 2039. There are fewer vacant buildings, increased neighborhood revitalization and more coordination with city partners.
The stakes are high.
What happens with vacants could become a hallmark of Scott’s legacy, as well as that of Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, a Democrat with national ambitions. Researchers at the Urban Institute, which studies vacant housing, have acknowledged that Baltimore is heading in the right direction. To others, any victory tour is premature.
Baltimore City Councilwoman Odette Ramos has been calling on the city to expand its definition of “vacant” for years.
In letters addressed to Jake Day, Maryland’s housing secretary and chairperson of a city-state council dedicated to vacant housing, Ramos cautions the true number of vacant houses has long been underestimated.
“Increasing the VBN count initially to capture the full depth and breadth of the challenge is going to be critical to understanding the work to be done,” Ramos said in a December 2024 letter.
Poggi said the city works to ensure the accuracy of the count of buildings with vacant notices.
Ramos successfully spearheaded an initiative to levy a higher tax on vacant structures and lots. It was expected to go into effect July 1, but she said she learned in April it won’t be collected until at least 2028.
At a City Council hearing this month, she accused the housing department of misleading her on the timeline, including promising an inventory of vacant land was underway.
The assessment never happened, she icily pointed out, the bill language needed tweaking in Annapolis and city leaders wanted more time.
“It’s absolutely unacceptable,” Ramos said, her voice rising. “There needs to be some serious changes internally to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”
The mayor brought in new Housing Commissioner Tim Keane in February to course correct.
He replaced Alice Kennedy, who stepped down after a disastrous e-permitting rollout last year and a public rebuke of the mayor’s administration at a church event.
“The whole reason I, for one, am in the Department of Housing and Community Development at this point is to address these frustrations you are expressing,” Keane said to Ramos, “and other frustrations you didn’t.”
City officials aren’t having much success in Annapolis, either. The Scott administration says it needs $3 billion in public funding. City leaders have pushed for a big chunk of that to come from the state sales tax collected in Baltimore.
The effort has stalled as the governor tries to close a budget deficit without raising taxes.
The Scott administration will continue to lobby for the sales tax proposal.
“Is there a plan if that doesn’t happen?” asked City Councilman Jermaine Jones, an East Side Democrat, at an April oversight hearing at City Hall. “A Plan B or a long-term vision?”
“I don’t want to sugarcoat how big of an item the sales tax is,” said Michael Mocksten, the city’s budget director, adding that, though there are backup plans, none compares.
“It’s a tough item to talk about, but it’s the one thing in our toolkit that would get us there overnight,” Mocksten said. “So we want to keep talking about it.”
Major legislation typically takes years to pass, Poggi said in a statement.
The city is using what it calls a “whole-block” strategy to address vacants. What money is available has mostly been funneled into small areas in East and West Baltimore.
Under the strategy, neighborhoods such as Coldstream-Homestead-Montebello, Johnston Square and Broadway East have seen more vacancy reduction than the citywide average.
But that approach has left some residents and business owners elsewhere frustrated.
“It drains your mental energy,” said Jason Brannock, a South Baltimore homeowner who lives next door to a city-designated vacant house.
Brannock bought his Brooklyn home for $66,000 in 2006 because it was affordable and near work and family. Around 10 years ago, he said, his next-door neighbors moved into a nursing home and left the home for family to care for.
The relatives stopped coming by, Brannock said, and eventually stopped answering the phone.
Brannock has felt unsettled as trespassers occasionally break into the home for shelter, and he said his own house has suffered water damage. It’s hard to get help from the city, he said, and he has watched in exasperation as other areas of Baltimore receive more attention.
His brother lived on nearby Annabel Avenue until a fire at a vacant house on the block destroyed it, Brannock said, and he fears a similar fate.
“There’s no sense of urgency, no sense of security,” he said. “It’s just been a nightmare, and a living nightmare.”
Pressure to reduce Baltimore’s vacant housing problem ramped up considerably in 2022 after three city firefighters died battling a blaze inside a derelict home that collapsed. As Scott unveiled a campaign for reelection in late 2023, he committed to prioritizing vacants with more money, increased focus and more partners.
Vacant housing takes longer than one, two or three terms to fix, he said.
“There’s no way in holy hell that any mayor was going to eliminate vacant housing in Baltimore in four years, let alone eight years, and some of them — many of them before me — got a lot less than even four years," Scott said in a May episode of Bloomberg’s “Odd Lots” podcast. “They didn’t have the capital, and they didn’t have a unified strategy that was about something greater than one mayoral term.”
Flanked by a coalition of faith and business leaders, Scott announced his commitment to the $8 billion plan in a crowded West Baltimore church.
Almost a year later, the Moore administration signed on to the plan, too.
In one of Moore’s first acts, he appointed Day chairman of the Baltimore Vacants Reinvestment Council, which meets regularly to discuss the strategy and review the data. Its roughly 17 members include representatives of city and state agencies and philanthropic, civic and grassroots circles.
Those meetings sometimes turn uncomfortable.
In April, members questioned why the number of vacant lots turned over during the past year remained stubbornly low, at just 32.
“Is that lack of demand, or is it not a focus?” asked Nick Henninger-Ayoub, representing the Maryland Economic Development Corp.
Keane, still new to the job, didn’t have an answer. He said it warranted enough concern to “go back and critique our strategy.”
Then there are curveballs largely outside the city’s control, such as the $5 billion in private funding outlined in Scott’s plan. It’s not clear how much of that has been committed, but private investment is making its way into city neighborhoods.
The relatively low cost of Baltimore’s real estate has helped drive a surge of private credit.
The new infusion of “hard-money” lending into some of the city’s trickiest neighborhoods at first seemed to be a promising workaround to the reluctance of traditional banks.
Now, amid hundreds of foreclosures stemming from one especially large investment portfolio, the city risks seeing increased vacancy and blight as high-interest loans go bad and the homes sit in ownership “limbo.”
“We have some bad actors,” Keane acknowledged during an April appearance at a meeting of the Baltimore vacants council, a body he now co-chairs.
Other aspects of the city’s plan have gone better.
In December, Baltimore offered nearly $30 million worth of affordable housing bonds to help finance rehabilitation work in neighborhoods long ignored by lenders. Officials said they received 13 times the demand for the bonds than they had supply, indicating strong interest from investors.
At a Rockefeller Foundation conference in Baltimore last month, the Greater Baltimore Committee said it would work with Columbia-based Enterprise Community Partners to launch a fund for additional neighborhood-level investment, a sign of the private market’s belief in the city’s vision.
And a sustained state investment of $50 million a year from the Moore administration has helped more organizations fund development projects.
That includes work in Johnston Square, where vacancy rates have plummeted and glossy apartment buildings have risen in the same part of town that once served as a set piece for “The Wire.”
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