What was left of the boarded-up two-story rowhouse on 20th Street seemed like it was finally collapsing.
Red bricks rained down from its exterior, smashing onto the sidewalk below.
City emergency workers swarmed the block that afternoon in late May. They repaired loose bricks on the building to prevent further damage, and pasted an emergency condemnation sign on the board covering its gaping front window.
Finally, neighbors thought, maybe this house will be torn down. It has been empty for at least 43 years.
Sandwiched between two recently renovated homes in East Baltimore, the rowhouse built in 1915 has deteriorated to little more than a facade. A towering tree now lives inside, its branches stretching through holes that were once windows. The skeletal edifice creaks ominously each time the wind blows.
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This is Baltimore’s oldest continuously city-certified vacant property, a Banner analysis of housing data found. The building has been considered uninhabitable since September 1982, according to the city’s Department of Housing and Community Development.
The property has passed between investors, logged dozens of complaints and racked up thousands of dollars in unpaid property taxes, all while eluding significant government intervention. Plagued by absentee owners and inconsistently enforced property regulations, its plight highlights the intractability of the vacant building problem in Baltimore, where a lack of funding, political will and effective solutions across generations of city leaders have left the issue unsolved.
Mayor Brandon Scott earmarked $3 billion to tackle the city’s vacant housing crisis by 2038, and long-term vacants make up a large chunk of the problem. The 20th Street house is one of roughly 3,400 buildings across Baltimore that have been considered uninhabitable for two decades or longer — almost a third of the city’s vacant inventory.
By law, the city could have fined the owners of Baltimore’s oldest vacant home more than $200,000 this year alone and sought control of the property.
In response to complaints about the slow process of levying penalties at a June hearing in City Hall, Deputy Housing Commissioner Eric Booker said his inspectors close a majority of requests “on time” despite staffing shortfalls.
The city’s oldest vacant sits in Midway, one of East Baltimore’s first Black neighborhoods. Midway enjoyed a period of relative wealth and stability before white flight, the HIV epidemic and other crises decimated its population, according to a 2018 report from Morgan State University’s Institute of Urban Research.
Today, Midway has more uninhabitable buildings than almost any other Baltimore neighborhood. Roughly one in five of its structures have been marked vacant by the city, a Banner analysis found.
Malcolm Marks, who has lived in a rowhouse across the street for more than a decade, said he has lodged complaints and made numerous requests for the city to service the vacant buildings around his home. He’s seen no response.
“They don’t care, and I’m tired. I’m so tired,” said Marks, 55.
He’s done what he can to care for his neighborhood: cleaned up nearby alleyways, placed a trash can outside his home for passersby to use and even paid for someone to mow the unkempt grass of the vacant lots on either side of his block. He recently bought a riding lawn mower to cut them himself.
Some officials and community stakeholders say they’re encouraged by a declining number of vacant buildings in parts of the Midway neighborhood. But neighbors say that after years of reporting abandoned structures to the city and tackling maintenance themselves, they’re tired of waiting for politicians to care about their block.
“They act like it’s abandoned,” Marks said. “But people live here.”
How does a home become vacant?
The house on 20th Street had already been empty for about 28 years when Baltimore-area couple Naomi and Joseph Chavis bought it for $1,100 in 2010. They are its third owners since the city declared the home vacant.
But Richard Harrison remembers the home in better times.
He lived on the block in the 1960s and remembers when the city’s oldest vacant was occupied and full of life. A girl he was courting used to live there, he said, gazing at the branches that now poke through its roof. He’s since moved to a different part of the city.
It’s unclear why the Chavises bought the home, or what — if anything — they had planned for it. They haven’t applied for any permits to make improvements, city records show. And information on the couple’s whereabouts is scant.
Joseph Chavis died in December after overdosing on fentanyl and other drugs, according to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. Naomi Chavis’ most recent known address is a rental home in Dundalk, where her landlord filed a case against her in March for failing to pay rent for two months, court records show. When reporters knocked on the door, there was no response.
She did not respond to requests for comment via phone, email or text message.
At least one developer has been interested in buying Baltimore’s oldest vacant. Willian Ordonez, who owns the company that recently rehabbed properties on either side of the Chavises’ vacant, said he was interested in fixing it up, too.
But, like The Banner, he couldn’t find the Chavises.
“I hate to see houses like that — vacant and hanging there for years,” Ordonez said. “The city needs more help, because a lot of people don’t want to fix houses in those areas.”
Inconsistent enforcement
When city regulations deem a structure unfit to live in, housing inspectors alert owners with a vacant building notice. If the owners don’t take action to make their buildings livable or tear them down, the city can fine them.
City code allows the Department of Housing and Community Development to levy $1,000-per-day penalties against a property owner, but officials have been clear: The department doesn’t do that.
Instead, inspectors use their discretion to apply the fines on a case-by-case basis.
Jason Hessler, the housing department’s deputy commissioner for permits and litigation, said the city ideally cites a property once every 30 days, giving homeowners time to address a citation before receiving another.
But in practice, the citations come less frequently. Most of the longest-tenured vacant buildings go months between citations. For those that have been vacant for two decades or longer, the city has fined owners less than once per year on average since 2022, a Banner analysis of citation records found.
While the city could automatically issue new fines more frequently, Hessler said it chooses to send inspectors to reassess the buildings’ condition and check for improvements each time — a slower process, but one that ensures the citation is deserved.
“If we were just automating based off of data on these citations, they won’t stand up in front of a hearing officer or in front of a judge,” Hessler said.
Some housing experts disagree.
Shana Roth-Gormley, an attorney for the Community Law Center, said the city could use permits as a guide for automating fines. It would be clear from permitting records if property owners had begun to make improvements, she said.
Most housing officials agree that penalizing owners who are taking steps toward fixing up their properties could discourage them. But fines can be essential in getting homes out of absentee owners’ hands, Roth-Gormley said.
Once a property’s fines and other bills exceed its assessed value, the city can file a court case to take ownership. From there, it’s easier to demolish it or sell to new owners.
The Chavis family owes the city $9,500 in fines for failing to address their vacant building notice, and has racked up over $11,000 more in unpaid property taxes and other bills, according to the city’s finance department.
But the city could have penalized them even more, at least $224,000 in 2026 alone. Given the Chavis house is assessed at $29,000, that financial obligation is enough for the city to begin seeking control of the property nine times over.
Despite attempting to contact the Chavises during “multiple investigations over the previous 15 years,” the city’s housing department hasn’t been able to get in touch, department spokeswoman Tammy Hawley wrote in an email.
When owners disappear, development stalls
Taking ownership of a vacant property isn’t the city’s only option to move it toward rehabilitation. City law allows authorities to attempt to place an uninhabitable property with a court-appointed receiver charged with auctioning it off.
The city took that step weeks after the 20th Street vacant’s near collapse. But receivers aren’t public officials and the process doesn’t always serve the city’s interests. Buildings that reach receivership might take years to sell at auction or end up mired in the same process if buyers cannot redevelop them fast enough.
While any vacant property is technically eligible for such a case, it works best in neighborhoods where there is already interest in purchasing and rehabilitating properties, Hessler said.
“I used to tell people I could file receivership on every single vacant building in the city — but do I have a buyer?” Hessler said. “If I don’t have somebody that is ready, willing and able to rehab that property, then all the enforcement in the world doesn’t matter.”
East Baltimore Midway, where the Chavis vacant stands, is in one of the city’s “Impact Investment Areas,” places tapped for major funding and development projects prioritizing vacancy reduction. Getting that designation was a win in and of itself, said Ashley Wallace, director of the Central Baltimore Partnership, a nonprofit community advocacy group.
Wallace said she’s seen a flood of interest in the neighborhood from developers and organizers since her organization began working there in 2018.
Still, there’s an opportunity for the city to expand its tool kit “to be more aggressive,” Wallace said.
“They’re trying with what they have, which are very effective tools,” she said. “They’re just slow.”
The city’s case to move the Chavis house into receivership is pending in court. Officials have struggled to serve the couple a notice of the action.
‘This is my neighborhood. This is all I have.’
In recent years, Marks — who can see Baltimore’s oldest vacant from his front windows — has gotten numerous calls from investors offering to buy his home for increasingly large sums of cash. He always turns them down.
It was his mother’s home, and she handed it down to him with just one mandate: Don’t sell it.
He’s stayed for more than a decade, remaining even after a fire broke out in one of the vacant homes next door.
“This is my neighborhood,” he said. “This is all I have.”
Standing in front of his home on an evening in late June, Marks greeted residents and passersby, most by name.
Marks said he has spent years making service requests to the city about the Chavises’ vacant. His complaints are among at least 44 related to the home since the couple purchased it, a Banner analysis found.
But nothing ever happened. At least, not until the day the bricks came down.
He was out at work when he got the call: a neighbor told Marks that the firefighters who had arrived to deal with the decaying house across the street were instead attempting to bust his door down.
Emergency personnel realized their mistake and made it to the right house, but only after they had broken his door frame. Replacing it will cost Marks about $8,000, he said. He sent the city a letter asking for reimbursement weeks ago, he said. He’s received no reply.
No city workers cleaned up the brick shards littering the sidewalk, Marks said. So the neighbors did it themselves, tossing chunks of brick into the trash or through the vacant’s missing windows.
In the days after the near collapse, neighbors speculated that the city might, at last, knock the crumbling structure down.
It has been 84 days since the city posted its emergency condemnation notice on the home’s boarded front.
But today it still sits, empty.
Banner reporter Hallie Miller contributed to this story.
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