Baltimore is getting rid of vacant homes. But what about all the empty lots?

As Baltimore leaders work to eliminate vacant homes by 2038, another city problem has reared its head: empty lots.

In the past decade, the tally of vacant land parcels has increased by 17% as the city has demolished uninhabitable buildings, according to Baltimore’s housing department. The 21,000 empty lots often fill with trash, attract criminal activity and lower neighboring property values.

Frustrated neighborhood groups and some local leaders say the city has no effective strategy for tackling the surge in vacant lots. It also doesn’t track them over time, according to the housing department, making it hard to develop a data-based approach.

“I’ve been hoping for serious action on this subject for a very long time,” City Councilman Mark Parker said at a council hearing in May. “It’s particularly grating for community members who are doing the work to maintain their properties.”

Other post-industrial cities have grappled with repurposing the empty land that results from population loss and efforts to combat blight by razing buildings.

In Detroit, arborists are repurposing some of the city’s more than 100,000 empty lots to plant a giant sequoia forest. Cleveland, where some 33,000 lots sit empty, is turning several hundred city-owned parcels into green spaces.

In Baltimore, neighborhood groups and nonprofits have transformed some plots into community gardens and event spaces, but those efforts often have trouble fundraising for upkeep and aren’t designed for scale.

Reducing vacant homes

In 2023, Mayor Brandon Scott joined with local partners to turn a spotlight on the generations-long problem of vacant homes across Baltimore, outlining a 15-year plan that calls for $3 billion in public funding and $5 billion in private investment. Gov. Wes Moore signed on to the initiative in 2024.

Since Scott took office, the city’s count of uninhabitable vacant buildings has declined from 16,000 to fewer than 12,000 — progress the mayor has celebrated on podcasts, in national newspapers and at international conferences.

City officials routinely factor empty lots into their block-by-block approach to neighborhood redevelopment, said Bryan Doherty, a spokesperson for the mayor’s office. Under Scott, Baltimore has slowed demolitions and encouraged revitalization of buildings when possible.

Still, the administration acknowledges that it needs to step up its planning on making use of the land.

One program, Adopt-a-Lot, allows city residents to lease vacant land for free, giving them extra yard space. But the land can be reclaimed by the city at any time, and only about 835 tracts are licensed.

Neighbors can also purchase vacant lots outright from the city — which owns about 8,000 of them — through the Side Yard Program. Only 108 parcels have changed hands since 2010.

Acting Housing Commissioner Tim Keane, who stepped into the role earlier this year, said discussions about empty land ought to connect to the city’s vision for its future — but that hasn’t been happening.

“The missing ingredient has not been another dashboard or another set of data,” he said. “The question is: What are we trying to do?”

To bulldoze, or not to bulldoze

Republican Gov. Larry Hogan dedicated state money to tearing down empty Baltimore homes, and demolitions peaked during his two terms in office, from 2015 to 2023.

Scott and Moore, Democrats, revamped Hogan’s program to add funding for home renovation and stabilization.

Research shows that vacant land, like abandoned homes, can drag neighborhoods down and correlates with high rates of depression.

Kristin Mmari, Bloomberg Professor of American Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, has spent years researching the link between adolescent health and the quality of their neighborhoods. In a 2025 paper, Mmari and a team of researchers found that teens aged 14 to 19 who lived near well-maintained, greened lots in Baltimore reported feeling happier than those who lived next to blighted land.

One question the study does not answer, Mmari noted, is who should be tasked with caring for the land — and where the money should come from to support these endeavors.

“If you start greening,” Mmari said, “you have to think about how it will be maintained over time.”

Empty lots also cause a “perception problem” that casts a neighborhood as deserted and forgotten, said Amanda Phillips de Lucas, director of the Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance-Jacob France Institute at the University of Baltimore.

Across the city, individual stewards, organizations and city agencies have done commendable work to maintain and beautify pockets of vacant land, she said. Yet those are one-off efforts with no central push to scale up.

Baltimore Green Space, a nonprofit that works with individuals to acquire and preserve empty lots, acts as the city’s de facto resource hub for land stewards.

Kindle Samuel, the group’s interim executive director, said the work is sometimes complicated by a series of “human limitations,” including with data collection.

Volunteers care for dozens of lots around the city, Samuel said, sometimes in casual and “fluid” capacities that make it difficult to assess whether a plot qualifies as vacant or has a caretaker. And often, Samuel said, land flips in and out of stewardship — making it difficult to assess who is even responsible for it.

No simple solution

At a tense City Council hearing in May, Odette Ramos, who represents Charles Village and Waverly, among other neighborhoods, said a long-awaited vacant land inventory had not yet been done. That impedes the city’s ability to determine what land is taxable and exactly how much of it there is, she said.

City leaders have delayed implementation of a long-anticipated tax hike for vacant houses and lots until at least July 2028, saying they need more time to sort through the inventory and work with state lawmakers to tweak legislation that would allow for some exemptions from the tax increase.

Some Baltimore residents have taken it upon themselves to reclaim and beautify the land around them. It’s not easy.

Atiya Wells, a nurse, stumbled upon a massive undeveloped field in her Northeast Baltimore neighborhood one day in 2017. She envisioned it as a sprawling urban campus.

She started a nonprofit called Backyard Basecamp and turned that plot and a once-vacant farmhouse next to it into a community gathering space called BLISS Meadows. The nonprofit owns and manages the site, which includes a community garden, stormwater management and space for events and summer camps. An outdoor pre-K is set to open there in September.

“Each neighborhood and each community in Baltimore is so different,” Wells said, and each has their own ideas for their land.

They could all benefit from a full-time point of contact in government who could answer questions or troubleshoot problems as they arise, she said, but that person doesn’t exist.

That’s made the response to vacant land feel more ad hoc.

Starting 15 years ago as the newly elected Gwynns Falls Community Association president, Chris Schulze uncovered two clear priorities in his neglected corner of Southwest Baltimore: finding a safe place for children to play and facilitating greater access to fresh food.

With $60,000 in crowdsourced donations, he set out to acquire six vacant parcels next to his house, where six burned-out rowhouses once stood. He eventually raised close to $1 million — a mix of individual donations and grants — to build Mighty Park, which includes playground equipment, garden beds and picnic benches.

“We couldn’t wait forever, so we did it ourselves,” he said, walking around the space one sunny afternoon this spring. “It’s one of the most rewarding endeavors of my life.”

But sustained funding is the specter that haunts all these projects.

“What we need is financial support,” said Arica Gonzalez, who led the conversion of a vacant lot in West Baltimore into The Urban Oasis, an outdoor event space.

Bon Secours Community Works, a major landowner and developer in West Baltimore associated with the former Bon Secours Hospital, has converted empty lots within its footprint into community gardens, splash pads and playgrounds.

Without those kinds of amenities, Baltimore’s renovated homes will stay empty, said Ruben Chandrasekar, Bon Secours’ executive director.

He said he worries about how to raise the money needed to sustain those land improvements. “It’s easier to build than sustain,” he said. “Foundations don’t want to pay the water bill.”

Baltimore Banner reporter Sahana Jayaraman contributed to this article.