Vacant To Vibrant: Baltimore’s $6B Housing Play To Revitalize

Once a thriving industrial hive and the sixth-largest city in the United States, Baltimore and its Baltimoreans have endured a prolonged period of urban decay that includes population loss, crime, economic decline, and widespread vacant properties.

Mayor Brandon Scott, elected to a second term last year, has made building more housing a central part of his effort to continue the success of his first term in turning around the city's fortunes.

We're beginning our 15-year plan to eliminate vacant housing in Baltimore," Scott recently said on former Minnesota Sen. Al Franken's podcast.

Taking a page from cities like Raleigh, Charlotte, Salt Lake City, and Minneapolis, Baltimore is pursuing zoning reforms to encourage "missing middle" housing. City planners and officials are pairing that with new, aggressive tactics to cull and transform the city's vacant property inventory.

Unlike many cities that face a housing shortage due to underbuilding, Baltimore's housing crisis involves the thousands of vacant and abandoned properties left behind after decades of population loss.

This week, Baltimore launched a multi-billion-dollar housing redevelopment initiative, securing an initial $1.2 billion in public funds to address widespread vacancy and revitalize neighborhoods block by block.

The program aims to leverage $5 billion in private-sector financing. It is projected to generate over $7.3 billion in economic value through increased tax revenue, job creation, and rising property values over the next 30 years.

Over the next 15 years, the strategy is to revitalize more than 37,000 vacant or at-risk properties. The expectation is that this will create market momentum, stimulating private development across an additional 33,000 houses and lots.

The combined strategy's goal is to create a broader range of housing options and price points, addressing a city-wide affordability crunch while tackling the pervasive issue of neighborhood blight.

Decades of Problems

In the second season of the hit HBO series "The Wire," show creator David Simon, a former Baltimore Sun police reporter, presented a social commentary on Baltimore's shift to a post-industrial economy through fiction.

Simon used the decline of the city's dockworkers to illustrate how deindustrialization and the fall of unions forced working-class individuals into economic desperation and crime.

If it wasn't for the car ships, we'd be starving," fictional dockworkers union chief Frank Sobotka explained to his nephew in one show.

In the first half of the 20th century, Baltimore was a prominent industrial and shipping center with a diverse manufacturing economy driven by steel production, food canning, and textiles.

By 1950, the population had peaked at about 950,000 and declined in the following decades. Its population now sits at about 568,000, according to Census estimates.

The city hollowed out, with blocks of abandoned and dilapidated rowhouses left behind. Its plight mirrored Rust Belt cities like St. Louis and Detroit.

Various redevelopments along the waterfront showed promise of injecting new life into the city. However, it didn’t spread into the inner-city neighborhoods.

There has been some neighborhood revitalization over the past several years. When Scott entered office in 2020, the city had 20,000 vacant properties. He told Franken that the number has been reduced to 12,000.

A Housing Push

The push for "missing middle" housing—a term referring to multi-unit or clustered residential building types, such as duplexes, fourplexes, and townhomes, which are compatible in scale with single-family houses—is central to a package of bills known as the Housing Options and Opportunity Act, introduced earlier this year. Encountering some opposition, the bills have been proceeding through the city council.

Championed by Scott, the legislation seeks to undo the legacy of exclusionary zoning laws that have long prohibited such housing types in many neighborhoods.

A key component, City Council Bill 25-0066, introduces a "low-density, multi-family housing" category, making it legal to build duplexes and fourplexes in areas previously restricted to single-family homes. Proponents argue this will not only increase the overall housing stock but also create smaller, more affordable homes for first-time buyers and older residents looking to downsize.

The package also includes measures to allow for denser construction by reducing yard requirements and eliminating parking minimums for new developments—changes intended to make building more flexible and less expensive. While some residents worry that these changes could alter the character of neighborhoods, supporters see them as a critical step toward creating more equitable and affordable communities.

Complementing this effort to spur new construction is a renewed focus on the city’s vast inventory of more than 12,400 vacant homes, which often serve as a source of crime and blight. For years, Baltimore has used receivership, where a court appoints a nonprofit, One House at a Time, to take control of vacant and neglected properties from their owners. The nonprofit then auctions these properties to qualified buyers who commit to renovating them within a year.

However, a persistent problem arises when these properties fail to sell at auction, leaving them languishing in limbo. A new piece of legislation addresses this gap directly. Sponsored by Councilman Paris Gray, the bill gives the city the option to purchase vacant properties that go unsold in receivership auctions. The purchase price would cover the receiver’s costs, ensuring the properties don’t languish and fall into further disrepair.

We're putting the responsibility where it should lie, with the city," Councilman Gray told a local television news station, emphasizing the goal of getting properties out of the hands of neglectful owners and into the hands of people who will care for them.

The bill is seen as another vital tool in Baltimore’s multifaceted approach to its vacant housing crisis, building on other recent legislation that lowered the threshold for the city to foreclose on vacant properties.

Together, these efforts represent a comprehensive strategy: while zoning reforms open the door for new types of housing, the receivership bill provides a direct mechanism to reclaim and prepare the land needed for revitalization, one vacant house at a time.