Baltimore has 13,000 vacant homes. The mayor wants to solve this with “equity, justice, and righting historical wrongs”.

Photo above - I'm a Baltimore Orioles fan. And a fan of the city itself. However . . .

“The Wire” is one of my favorite HBO series. And not just because the 20 year old show features a cornucopia of decaying Baltimore of abandoned neighborhoods. (sarcasm alert). The Wire highlights political corruption on a grand scale, fueled by drug money. But let’s stick with the housing $hit-show for now.

On paper, you’d think Baltimore would have all the ingredients for success. Waterfront location. Major port facilities. Strategically placed between Philadelphia and Washington DC. Major league football and baseball. (Their NBA team – the “bullets” – fled the city 50 years ago amidst epic gun violence.) Baltimore has an airport, subways, and even one surviving Polack Johnnies Kielbasa sausage restaurant, for now.

So why the 13,000 vacant rowhomes? The PREVIOUS mayor (Stephanie Blake-Rawlings), when faced with citywide riots after multiple incidents of police brutality, famously said “give them space to destroy”. The downward spiral picked up steam at that moment. Former Mayor Stephanie has now been charged with business and loan fraud because she’s refused to repay her business loan with $28,000 a month payments.

The current mayor – Brandon Scott – has largely delivered on his promise to curb gun violence. This would seem to be a good start if you want people to feel safe in their downtown neighborhoods. But can you put renters and owners into 13,000 vacant homes by promising equity and justice? Bizarrely, the mayor has ruled out anything that might lead to bulldozing and “gentrification”, which might annoy local community activists.

And you can’t bulldoze hundreds of blocks of rowhomes all at once anyway. There’s always one or two holdouts in their paid up homes who refuse to move. So the mayor’s plan is to spend about $3 billion to rehab individual rowhomes, one by one. At about $200,000 each.

That seems like a realistic number. And people might actually buy a $250,000 Bal'more rowhouse if the neighborhood was safe, there was a grocery store nearby, and drugs were gone along with the guns.

That’s an ambitious sequence of events however. And having 13,000 homes rehabbed at a trickle pace allows a lot of opportunity for continuing decay and abandonment. Baltimore will also need a consortium of banks willing to offer 13,000 new mortgages at affordable rates.

This is America. Anything is possible, and I don’t want to be a nay-sayer. I’m already an Orioles fan so I've got that base covered. The birds last won a world series 40 years ago and finished at the bottom of the AL east again last year. But I’m still a fan. And I want the city to survive and thrive too. Even if the last Polack Johnnies is an endangered species itself.

I’m just sayin’ . . .


'Help us out.' An East Coast city wants to reclaim its 13,000 vacant homes.