The first house, in some ways, took almost 15 years to rehab. The second could be done in just a few months.

Longer term, a Baltimore nonprofit that teaches vocational high school students home-building and trades skills has a goal of overhauling one vacant house a year.

The idea for Requity Foundation Inc. dates to 2012, when a student at Carver Vocational-Technical High School lamented the lack of job opportunities available to new graduates. Sterling Hardy, then a senior, asked his varsity baseball coach why he couldn’t walk across the street and start renovating the blighted homes facing the West Baltimore school.

“We’ve gotta figure out how to say yes to that,” his former coach, Michael Rosenband, remembered thinking.

Rosenband and Hardy co-founded Requity in 2020. It’s a work-based training program that first formed a partnership with Carver and later with nine other Baltimore City Public Schools.

Requity’s first project came together slowly, as the team learned nonprofit management and vacant housing stewardship. The group acquired its first home, on Presstman Street, and got to work officially in 2023. As many as 57 kids — a mix of students from Carver and other high schools, along with YouthWorks summer interns — had a hand in the gut renovation.

They affectionately named the project Carver House and put the finishing touches on it last month. Requity hopes to sell it to someone in the community, ideally an aspiring homeowner with a low or moderate income.

Maryland Housing Secretary Jake Day, who attended the finished home’s ribbon-cutting, commended the group for boldly taking on one of the city’s most intractable problems: its roughly 12,000 vacant homes.

“Look at the beautiful work that has been accomplished by young hands, by expert hands, how powerful a symbol that is,” Day said. “There’s got to be more and more of that all across this city.”

Baltimore has grappled with its vacant housing count for more than a generation, though the numbers have trended down over the last few years.

In 2024, Gov. Wes Moore and Mayor Brandon Scott joined philanthropic and faith institutions, community groups and civic leaders pledging to address the epidemic with more money and greater urgency.

Requity interns are learning the city’s “whole-block approach,” which emphasizes sticking with one area before moving on to the next. That’s why Requity’s second home is a few doors down from Carver House. They expect to finish the renovation by July.

Rosenband left corporate New York City to focus on youth development and relocated to Baltimore in 2010. He signed on as Carver’s varsity baseball coach by the 2012 season, when Hardy first talked to him about vacant homes.

He coached baseball until the end of the 2025 season and now focuses full time on Requity.

As the organization grew from an idea to a business, Rosenband realized putting students to work in vacant houses was more complicated than it sounded.

Requity learned as it went, adjusting student-teacher ratios, adding instructor certifications, budgeting for liability insurance and aligning the work to better match students’ curriculum.

Rosenband said he tries to be open with students about Requity’s successes and failures so that the kids can learn along with him. As Rosenband likes to tell them, there’s always room to get 1% better.

On a sunny March afternoon, with just a few days to go before the Carver House ribbon-cutting, Damien “Dame” Spears, Requity’s carpentry instructor, showed off a garage next to Requity’s Presstman Street headquarters that students had transformed into a workshop.

“We showed them, we was close to them,” Spears said, “but they took the lead.”

The group’s family-like atmosphere sets it apart from other work-based learning programs, said Craig Rivers, Carver’s principal. Requity, he said, feels almost like an extension of the school.

“For our young people who have these career pathways,” Rivers said, “it makes it real.”

Requity’s leaders have added a culinary program to help feed the construction crews, and business and media internships that help promote and brand the works of their peers.

The program accepts around 15 construction students each semester. Next year, Requity could host as many as 70-80 students at a time across all of its programs.

The nonprofit organization is funded primarily by state and local grants, along with donations and gifts. It also generates some of its own revenue. The culinary students cater events, for example, and the business students sell their own merch — they hope to develop their own line of fashionable work pants with a built-in tool belt.

On that March afternoon, with Carver House construction underway upstairs, Jashua Tibbs, 19, took a break inside the finished basement with a soft smile and a sense of awe.

The Carver graduate and Requity participant has stayed on as a driver, transporting vocational students from schools to internships as he works toward his commercial driver’s license certification.

The renovation required hard, physical labor, early mornings and “a lot of motivation” to see it through, Tibbs said. As the weeks went by and the house came alive, Tibbs said, he felt his confidence grow, too.

Justin Bellamy has also stayed on with Requity as a site manager while working toward a degree in construction supervision and management at Baltimore City Community College.

Bellamy, 18, sees his trade as not just a job, he said, but a way to “make the community better.”

“I feel like I’m doing something meaningful,” Bellamy, a 2025 Carver graduate, said.

Jaden Hughes, a Carver senior and construction intern, said he appreciates Requity’s “doing” mindset, which motivates him.

The experience, he said, has made him look differently at other vacant homes across the city — as opportunities, rather than eyesores.

Now he thinks: “I could fix that up.”