Maryland is pledging north of $75 million per year as the city gets to work on its latest attempt to rehabilitate thousands of vacant homes through state funding as well as bonds from a new tax increment financing zone.
The city has around 13,000 vacant homes, and last week, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore set a goal of transitioning at least 5,000 vacant properties into homeownership or other positive outcomes over the next five years. Legislation passed in April pledges $50 million per year to the initiative, while state housing Secretary Jacob Day said Sunday that the state will fund an additional $27 million per year through a Baltimore regional neighborhoods initiative.
“Ignoring all the other state resources that flow through my department alone, setting that aside, we’re talking about $1 billion in state money alone over the 15 years of this plan,” Day said as the major players in the effort met in a West Baltimore church Sunday afternoon. “We scale up to speed up.”
The packed pews of Macedonia Baptist Church in the Upton neighborhood flickered with tension over the size of the task at hand and newfound optimism.
“Especially on this acquisition issue, especially on community-led development, we’re going to be coming to you to have conversations about tensions, and if departments need to get in shape as it were, we’re going to be putting the tension on you,” the Rev. Andrew Foster Connors told Mayor Brandon Scott. “So how do you feel about that?”
“I’m fine with that,” Scott responded. “That’s what I signed up for.”
Moore issued an executive order Oct. 1 establishing the “Reinvest Baltimore Program,” including a Baltimore Vacants Reinvestment Council chaired by the state department of housing secretary with the city housing commissioner serving as vice chair. The council also includes five members appointed by the governor, two appointees by the mayor, and a local state delegate and senator.
That executive order reshapes Project CORE, an initiative spearheaded by former Gov. Larry Hogan to demolish or stabilize thousands of vacant properties, into a new program called the Baltimore Vacants Reinvestment Initiative.
Pastors and community organizers spoke before Scott and Day about the negative impact of vacant homes on neighborhoods across the city.
Brent Brown, pastor at Greater Harvest in West Baltimore Franklin Square neighborhood, said the city acquires vacant homes at a rate close to 30 or 40 properties a month.
“We’re going to have to increase that speed a little more, but guess what? I believe we can,” Brown said.
The city would have to more than double that rate to meet Moore’s goal of 5,000 homes in five years. Scott, dressed in a custom Ravens jersey, said he shared Brown’s urgency.
“The work needs to be happening now and at a break-neck, back-breaking speed, and I am so encouraged by what we’ve already accomplished together,” Scott said.
In December, Scott laid out a plan for $3 billion in investment over 15 years to tackle the vacant housing problem. The mayor stressed Sunday that his long-term plan differs from short-term fixes attempted by previous administrations.
Around $300 million would come directly from the city — half from borrowing via a revived industrial development authority and the rest from the sale of tax increment financing, or TIF, bonds, Scott said in December. The TIF structure would allow the city to borrow millions of dollars to help fund the acquisition, remediation and sale of vacant properties. The debt would be paid off with new tax revenue expected to be generated by the improved properties.
A bill to establish a TIF district with around 8,000 city properties is in the City Council’s committee of the whole. Currently, the city relies on a slower in rem foreclosure, process, which allows it to foreclose on tax liens.
The city has used TIFs in the past for high-profile investment areas within compact boundaries; the proposed TIF for vacant houses would cover a noncontiguous zone spread across the city’s vacant-prone communities. The pending legislation says the city aims to issue up to $150 million in bonds across 15 years, though the bill would only cover the first half of that process.
District 1 Councilman Zeke Cohen said Monday that he supports using TIF bonds to address vacant housing.
Cohen, who won the Democratic primary race for council president in May, said city officials should use “every tool available to aggressively go after” vacancy and blight, which he said are “a major deterrent” to investment in the city.
The Scott administration’s proposal also calls on state lawmakers to grant Baltimore a local share of sales tax collected in the city limits to pay debt service on other bonds. That did not happen during the last session of the Maryland General Assembly, when legislators grappled with a growing shortfall in state revenue.
The Rev. George Hopkins, co-chair of Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development, which hosted the Sunday town hall, said mass acquisition is the major challenge.
“If you can figure out acquisition, you have developers on the ground, you have community leaders with plans for these spaces, but we have to get acquisition to scale, that is the challenge ahead of us, Hopkins said. “If you look at all the pieces around it, let’s figure out acquisition; that’s the most difficult part we have.”
City housing data shows that the number of buildings registered as vacant has steadily declined, with over 1,000 getting a use-and-occupancy permit each year on average. About that many buildings are added to the city’s vacant registry each year, too. Hundreds of others are demolished each year, according to the data.
Lisa Hodges-Hiken, executive director of the Westport Community Economic Development Coordination, said that in her South Baltimore neighborhood, one landlord owns over 70 houses and is still buying up more.
“The industrial jobs left, and people could no longer walk to work, and so like with other neighborhoods in Baltimore that were centered around factories the people left, and the volume of vacant homes grew. Now, over a third of homes in the commercial quarter are vacant,” Hodges-Hiken said. “We’re going to need partners in the public sector to hold these absentee property owners accountable to pressure them to sell instead of dragging our community down.”
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