Baltimore has thousands of vacant, dilapidated and abandoned houses that create serious health, safety and quality-of-life hazards for city residents. The buildings are eyesores that raise the risk of fires and structural collapses, encourage criminal activity, reduce the attractiveness of neighborhoods to potential buyers and lower property values. They're also the greatest source of urban blight, sucking the life out of communities and making every other social and economic reconstruction task there more difficult.
For decades, as Baltimore saw more than a third of its peak population of the 1950s migrate to the suburbs, newcomers failed to replace aging homeowners in once-thriving city neighborhoods. As real estate markets there collapsed and absentee owners allowed properties to decline through neglect, the number of empty and dilapidated structures grew steadily. In 1990, for example, there were some 6,000 vacant or abandoned buildings in the city; by 2010 that number had more than doubled to 16,000, according to the Baltimore City Housing Department.
The U.S. Census, which uses a broader definition of vacant and abandoned dwellings than the city, puts the number of vacant or abandoned properties at 42,000, though that number also includes vacant lots and habitable homes and apartment buildings awaiting rental or sale. But even accepting the city's lower figure, the number of derelict structures has been growing by at least 500 a year for the last 20 years. At that rate, nearly a fifth of Baltimore's housing stock could be uninhabitable within a generation, even if the city continues its current policy of demolishing some 300 structures a year.
Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake promised her administration would make vacant and abandoned houses a priority, and this week she is set to announce a new initiative by city housing department Deputy Commissioner Michael Braverman that may help alleviate the worst effects of the problem. The fact that Ms. Rawlings-Blake is focusing on the issue is encouraging given the lack of progress previous administrations made in this area. But no one should expect a quick fix; this problem took decades to develop, and it's not going away overnight.
What should the outlines of such a plan include? First, the city needs to target for demolition those structures that clearly cannot be rehabilitated and sold, and which, moreover, pose an imminent danger to residents and nearby buildings from fire or collapse.
Coupled with that, the city needs to work to save houses in those areas where it makes economic sense to fix them up and put them on the market. There are many city neighborhoods — Belair-Edison, Waverly, Oliver, Mondawmin and the area north of Patterson Park, among others — where such an approach would pay dividends.
On the demolition side, experts estimate that of the city's current 16,000 vacant and abandoned buildings, roughly 10,000 need to come down. That's easier said than done, however, since the city has nowhere near the resources to do the job on its own: Even if a house could be torn down for $10,000 (a low estimate), it would cost $100 million to demolish all 10,000 properties. Absent some huge infusion of federal or private dollars, the likelihood is that those houses will just sit there and continue to deteriorate until they either catch fire or collapse from structural weakness.
As for the 6,000 houses that could be saved, the City Council is considering a housing department initiative that would allow officials to expedite the seizure of vacant properties by issuing citations to absentee landlords. Historically, many of these property owners have been notoriously difficult to identify and track down, and even when they do appear in housing court to answer a notice for code violations, the penalty is usually only a small fine rather than forfeiture of the property.
The new citations, which would be issued by the housing department rather than the city housing court, would give absentee landlords 90 days to either make needed repairs or give up their claim to the property. After that, the city would be free to auction off the house to any private developer or individual who agreed to fix it up without a public subsidy.
It's clear that Baltimore can't demolish all the vacant and abandoned buildings that blight its landscape. In broad outline, Ms. Rawlings-Blake's initiative would attempt to separate the wheat from the chaff by focusing on the houses mostly likely to be rehabbed and sold if they were taken out of the hands of absentee or negligent owners.
But that's only half what needs to be done to keep vacant, abandoned houses from choking off communities. Coupled with targeted demolition and the rehabilitation of selected housing stock, there also needs to be a strong effort to revitalize neighborhoods as a whole so they can begin to attract new generations of residents, including families with children, childless couples, empty-nesters and singles. There is no way the city can muster the resources to redevelop on its own. It needs thousands of families to move to the city and invest in neighborhoods, like they did generations ago. It has already happened in neighborhoods like Canton, and through targeted efforts, the city can help these islands of renewal spread across the city in the same way that blight once did.
To remain healthy and stable, communities need a continual influx of new people, businesses and activities. Knocking down a few dilapidated houses won't accomplish that by itself, but coupled with aggressive revitalization efforts, it may create an opportunity for some communities to reinvent themselves in ways that benefit both their residents and the city as a whole.