How Baltimore's Mayor Is Fighting the City's Vacant Housing Crisis

May 4, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott grew up amid the city's longstanding vacant housing problem, which traces back to redlining—whose first U.S. law was signed in Baltimore—deindustrialization, white flight to suburbs, population decline from about 1 million to 600,000 residents, drugs, and crime. Vacants overlay the same "black butterfly" neighborhoods on 1937 redlining maps as today, with numbers stuck at around 16,000 properties from 2000 until Scott took office in late 2020. Most are privately owned, not city-held, and selling them for $1 (as past administrations tried) fails without capital to renovate, as $100,000–$150,000 per house is often needed.

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What you'll learn

1 (02:21) **Episode Intro** - Hosts introduce Baltimore's unique vacant housing crisis amid global city challenges
2 (04:40) **Mayor's Background** - Mayor Brandon Scott shares lifelong exposure to vacants in Park Heights
3 (06:48) **Historical Causes** - Redlining maps overlay exactly with current vacant hotspots
4 (07:49) **Prior Approaches** - Predecessors had strategies but lacked capital and long-term unity
5 (10:07) **Progress Update** - Vacants reduced from 16,000 to 11,806 via unified effort
6 (11:08) **How Houses Become Vacant** - Multiple paths: white flight, job losses, inheritance, speculators
7 (14:28) **Reclamation Process** - Citations, fines, court for receivership streamlined via in-rem docket

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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. In the last few years, the number of vacant homes in Baltimore has dropped from 16,000 to just over 11,800. On this episode — recorded in Madrid while we attended the Bloomberg CityLab conference — we speak to Mayor Scott about deindustrialization, redlining, and gun violence's historical effects on the current housing crisis, how his government identifies, block-by-block, redevelopment opportunities and matches projects with publicly-minded developers, and why Baltimore natives aren't huge fans of The Wire.

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