Odd Lots
How Baltimore's Mayor Is Fighting the City's Vacant Housing Crisis
May 4, 202649 min · 10,985 words
Show notes
Since Mayor Brandon Scott took office in 2020, he's fixated on a very visible problem in Baltimore: the tens of thousands of vacant homes that dot the city. It's hard to build new houses when there are so many that sit empty and unused. And the process of tracking down owners, convincing them to sell their vacant properties, and then converting those homes into usable housing supply is a tall task.
Highlighted moments
when I was a junior in high school in the year 2000, December of 2000, Baltimore had 16,000 vacant properties, right? Wow. And that's a lot less than the 30 or 40,000 it had years prior to that. But when I became mayor on December 8th of 2020, Baltimore had 16,000 vacant properties. The number essentially had not moved.
“When you look at the 1937 racial redlining map in Baltimore, and then you look at the vacancy map in 2020 or even the vacancy map today, it's the same neighborhoods, literally the same neighborhoods.”
“the overwhelming majority of the vacants in the city of Baltimore are not owned by the city of Baltimore. They're owned by private folks who are sitting on the mold, folks that we have to track down. And many, I hate to say this, a good bit of them were ones that back in the day, one of my predecessors sold for a dollar. But if I sell you a house for a dollar and you don't have the $100,000, $150,000 needed to actually get it up to living standards, it's still going to remain vacant.”
Transcript
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