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

Corrections & Clarifications: An earlier version of this story misstated the number of years Odette Ramos has been a member of the Baltimore City Council. She has been a councilmember for five years.  

On a blustery November morning, Brandon Scott’s small entourage stood on the sidewalk outside The Terraces at Park Heights, a brand-new senior living facility in West Baltimore.

Scott, 42, is in his second term as mayor of Baltimore. He grew up just blocks away and remembers the string of abandoned row houses now replaced by the shiny new building.

“It's always emotional just walking around here because these are blocks where I lost friends,” he mused.

The new senior living facility, which has been open since May, proudly displays art commemorating the area’s Black heritage and the Preakness thoroughbred horse races that take place every year just a few blocks away. A new library is now in the works for a neighborhood that’s been without one for decades.

People stopped to give the mayor a fist bump or take a selfie with him. One woman with a grocery cart got a hug from one of Scott’s security guards: He had grown up in the neighborhood with her son.

Barely 3 miles away, in a neighborhood called Sandtown-Winchester, the mood is more somber.

Curlena Paige has lived in her tidy rowhome on North Pulaski Street for 17 years. She’s surrounded by abandoned houses. Squatters drift in and out. Last Christmas, houses across the street caught on fire, she said. “Personal stuff,” from delivery packages to backyard furniture, gets stolen, she says.

Paige said she has heard about the mayor’s efforts.

“That’s good, but I don’t see it,'' Paige told USA TODAY. "If he was doing anything about it, we wouldn’t have this problem. Tell him I said get busy. Help us out. We need it.”

Piecemeal progress

As Scott hitches his legacy to trying to eradicate the thousands of vacant homes that have blighted the city for decades, the contrast between the two neighborhoods may be the biggest hurdle.

Ambitious leaders armed with new resources aren’t new to Baltimore. In recent history, there have been plenty of memories of some progress being made.

But the public response has never been enough. Success comes for one neighborhood, a few buildings, one block here, a handful of urban homesteaders there. A place like Park Heights gets some attention, while Sandtown and others stagnate.

“What people have seen from Baltimore has been dollar houses or very small efforts that are nowhere near the scale of what's needed,” said Mark Anthony Thomas, CEO of Greater Baltimore Committee, or GBC, a regional economic development group. “There hasn’t been an intentional focus that builds from strength.”

The magnitude of the problem – roughly 13,000 vacant homes at last count – makes it tough to launch an all-out assault. Baltimore’s strength is in its tight-knit neighborhood groups and independent developers, not big construction firms razing city blocks, housing advocates believe. And no one here wants the kind of gentrification that’s made Brooklyn, Boston and other cities unaffordable.

Still, that means some areas will be seen first, and others will need to wait. After decades of promises, it’s hard to hear that message. And it may be even harder for the mayor and other leaders to stay the course when resources are slower to arrive than expected, when a project doesn’t go the way someone wanted, or when left-behind areas complain.

“That is the inevitable call that has to be made,” Thomas said.

How did Baltimore get here?

Blessed by a strategic location on the East Coast, Baltimore in the mid-20^th century was a hub of manufacturing. But as factory jobs were shed – over 100,000 between 1950 and 1995 – the city shrank and became poorer.

“While Baltimore has been drawing immigrants and millennials, the number of people leaving the city is much larger; if not for the growth in the Latino population, Baltimore would have lost 100,000 people since 2000. More importantly, it is losing its middle class, and above all, its Black middle class,” explained a 2023 report commissioned by a group called ReBUILD Metro.

The report counted 15,000 vacant homes and 20,000 vacant lots, of which 90% are “stubbornly rooted in areas with high concentrations of both vacancy and poverty.”

Baltimore has also long been plagued by violent crime. The homicide count peaked at 353 during 1993, when the population was only about 723,000. It drifted slowly lower through the 1990s and early 2000s – even though the population was also falling.

In 2002, the brutal murder of an entire family who had complained to police about drug dealing shocked the city. Some progress was made. But in 2015, Freddie Gray was arrested by Baltimore police just a few blocks from where Paige lives. He died several days later of injuries sustained during the arrest. The tragedy sparked violent protests, the deployment of the National Guard, and a consent decree for the Baltimore police. And violence spiked again.

In 2020. Scott ran for mayor on a platform of tackling crime. “We need a mayor who will treat gun violence as a disease and throw the full force of government, not just the police, into addressing this epidemic,” he said at the time.

As mayor, Scott identified a community-led approach that he believed would be more effective, calling the zero-tolerance, heavy-handed policing of the past counterproductive. Instead, he emphasized a program called Safe Streets, which uses outreach professionals to mediate conflicts that could result in gun violence. "Safe Streets workers focus on community outreach, public education, conflict mediation, and violence interruption within a specific geographic area," the program website explains.

Critically, the Scott administration also gave the strategy time to work, refusing to abandon ship when gun violence didn’t immediately decline.

In 2023, murders fell to 261 from 333. In 2024, they fell even lower. So far in 2025, the city has documented only 129 homicides – less than half the level that marked Scott's first years in office.

Previous efforts to address 'vacants'

In his second term, Scott says that he’s using a similar strategy to turn the ambition that was aimed at lowering crime toward addressing the “vacants.” He's going big, relying on partnerships with GBC, the state, and others, while continuing to work with community groups and small developers.

"Our plan is rooted in equity, justice, and righting historical wrongs," the mayor's office says. For this work, the city is drawing on values like minimizing displacement, supporting existing homeowners and residents, creating jobs and entrepreneurial opportunities and prioritizing affordable housing.

The success in fighting crime gives Scott political capital with many constituents, but outsiders aren’t as optimistic.

“It’s not like this hasn’t been tried before,” said one long-time housing advocate when USA TODAY reached out to talk about the efforts. They didn't want to be named to avoid alienating the city's administration. Others echoed the same idea, though no one wanted to be on the record expressing doubt.

The city’s architecture, dominated by attached row houses, makes it a bit harder to knock down individual properties than if they were detached. And no one wants to knock down entire blocks, particularly since so many still have a few long-time holdouts, like Paige.

Yet the alternative – going tentatively and carefully – hasn’t moved the needle. Every year, for every handful of homes that get patched up and put back into productive use, a few more fall vacant. For years, the city says, the overall number has remained basically stagnant.  

Those involved say this time is different, and leadership is one of the reasons.

The GBC is one of the city’s closest allies in these efforts. Thomas took the helm of the group in 2023 after running economic development initiatives in New York City and Los Angeles, as well as in Pittsburgh, another post-industrial city scarred by blight. Unusually, Thomas started his career as a journalist and a writer.

In a November interview, Thomas told USA TODAY that he thought his creative background was “ready-made” for Baltimore.

“There are very few cities that have a tarnished narrative that [they are not] taking control of,'' he said. "I've jokingly said Baltimore doesn’t need another politician, it needs a poet to help it understand how to tell its own story so that it doesn't get defined by others.”

In a city that's about 60% Black, Thomas is the group’s first Black CEO, replacing an incumbent who held the role for over two decades.

Scott and Thomas have become friends, and everyone interviewed by USA TODAY agrees they work well as partners. They also benefit from a helping hand at the state level. In 2022, Wes Moore, a former army officer and investment banker, became Maryland’s first Black governor. In 2024, Moore pledged to help Baltimore eliminate 5,000 vacant homes over the following five years.

Odette Ramos, who has served as a Baltimore city councilmember for five years, calls Baltimore's thousands of abandoned homes "The crisis of the city.”

“It's tough to say that you need to be intentional, but also be speedy. But the numbers are saying it,” Ramos told USA TODAY. She points to the mayor’s success in reducing crime as evidence that it can be done with housing. "His vision is... amazing. That is what a phenomenal leader does: you set the vision, you get the partners together and you get the resources together. It was done to reduce homicides and needs to be done to reduce vacants. We have made progress, but we need more and to do it better."

What's involved this time?

Funding for real estate development – particularly for more affordable properties – is sometimes compared to a patchwork quilt. The plan for Baltimore is the same, writ large. The GBC is aiming to raise $3 billion, a back-of-the-envelope calculation that mirrors a 2023 estimate from Mayor Scott, calculating the number of vacant homes at 15,000 and the amount to rehab each at $200,000.

Of that amount, public sources have already committed $1.2 billion. The state has pledged $900 million, of which $750 million is directed to a partnership called theBaltimore Vacants Reinvestment Initiative. The city has pledged the proceeds of a $150 million affordable housing municipal bond issuance and $150 million from another issuance still in the works.

Funding for the remainder, or more than half, still needs to be identified. GBC wants private philanthropists to kick in $300 million. There’s a lot of chatter about getting the billionaire David Rubenstein, a Baltimore native known for his patriotic bent, to contribute. An inquiry from USA TODAY to the Rubenstein family office was not returned.

The final $1.5 billion is identified as coming from “additional public/private support,” the GBC said via a publicist. “In addition, this $3 billion will need to leverage several billion more in private sector funds [for, e.g., construction loans, mortgages, etc.],” the publicist wrote in an email.

The tipping point and the appraisal gap

Baltimore’s leaders like to think about a “tipping point” in the local housing market: A moment at which the reward of investing in a city on the upswing becomes so apparent and close at hand that private players rush in and the amount of necessary public money, sometimes referred to as a “subsidy,” dwindles.

It may sound like magical thinking, but it’s actually far more prosaic. In development finance, it’s called an appraisal (or value) gap, which may be familiar terminology to some homeowners who offer to pay more to buy a home than a mortgage lender thinks it’s worth.

UPLIFT, a Maryland state agency tasked with addressing the appraisal gap defines it as “the difference between: The total eligible cost to develop a property, and the price the property can sell for on the market. This gap is common in neighborhoods affected by redlining and disinvestment, where the cost to build or renovate often exceeds what buyers can afford, or what homes appraise for.”

It’s important to pinpoint what the gap is because developers need to know what kinds of funds – debt, equity – and from what sources, whether public or private – are needed to finance their projects. It’s even more useful to understand whether the gap is shrinking or growing over time, to better understand the market.

But no one involved in Baltimore revitalization agrees on the numbers.

Michael Braverman, who ran housing efforts in the city for many years, points to what he calls "an explosion" of private capital coming into the city since 2020 or so, as well as enormous fresh demand for housing: "In other words, people willing to buy in the city of Baltimore."

“We started to see the number of vacant and abandoned buildings dramatically, precipitously and continuously declining since 2020" ‒ that is, well before Scott's efforts were announced, let alone implemented, Braverman said.

Braverman insists he isn’t criticizing the efforts currently underway. He says he simply wants to ensure that the public funds are deployed strategically, and that the key role being played by private participants isn’t overlooked.  

Yet others in the development community take the opposite view, saying that private capital alone can’t address the magnitude of the problem and that more public subsidy might be needed than even the mayor and the GBC have estimated.

On Dec. 10, the same day that the $150 million bond issuance was set to price, a local news outlet ran a story outlining the implosion of a portfolio of hundreds of Baltimore properties owned by a “New York investor” earlier in 2025. “Today, 70% of those homes are in foreclosure, records show,” according to the Baltimore Banner article, which was headlined “Baltimore is striking fear into the hearts of private lenders across the country.”

What could go wrong?

If there’s no consensus on where the market sits now, the question of what could come next draws equally polarized responses. Development will either go too fast or too slow, most participants agree.

“What could go wrong is just that the city and the state don't act fast enough and a bunch of [private equity]-funded investment comes in,” said David Lidz, a small developer whose company is called WaterBottle Cooperative. “One is using the vacants for speculation, so they just stay empty and the neighborhoods get screwed over again. Or they fuel gentrification so (current residents) get pushed out, and we don't solve for affordable housing. That's probably the thing we worry most about.”

Sean Closkey, president of ReBUILD Metro, one of the private mission-oriented groups instrumental in helping city development efforts, is more optimistic. Closkey founded the group after spending his early career working on revitalization efforts in the deeply distressed small city of Camden, New Jersey, and says his faith background motivates his work.

"We're always looking for win or lose, and nothing in life really looks that way," Closkey said in November. "We're always in a process of becoming something as opposed to being a final thing."

Yet Closkey, more than most people who spoke with USA TODA,Y was willing to talk about the sometimes tragic backdrop that underpins the revitalization efforts. One project, in the Johnston Square neighborhood, hit an early snag when a spate of drug-related violence scared a construction crew from starting a job as promised.

"Johnston Square is like many other communities used to people coming in saying they're going to help and then actually not helping," Closkey said.

It took “months and months,” and some hard work repairing trust between the community leaders and the developers before everyone was comfortable enough to move forward, Closkey said. “When we talk about setbacks, it's not like, oh, I couldn't get a grant. It's like, people have left because it was too violent.”

Fire

The essayist Ta-Nehisi Coates, who grew up in the same Park Heights neighborhood as Scott, devotes a good chunk of his acclaimed book “Between the World and Me” to Baltimore.

“North and Pulaski was not an intersection but a hurricane, leaving only splinters and shards in its wake,” he wrote of the main crossing just one block from Paige’s home.

Not even 2 miles south sits 205 South Stricker Street. On Jan. 24, 2022, firefighters responded to a fire in an abandoned home there. Three died when the floor gave way. Scott calls it the moment he “snapped” and decided the vacant homes could no longer wait.

A report prepared by the fire department noted that from January 2017 to March 2022, over 445 building fires were reported among vacant city homes. Ten neighborhoods in west and southwest Baltimore accounted for over half of them.

Councilwoman Ramos agrees that the correlation between fires – often set by people trying simply to stay warm, she said – and vacancies is tragic. Nearly one-third of fires in the third quarter of 2025 were in vacant properties, fire department data show. That motivates Ramos to describe another section of the city, Carrollton Ridge, as the neediest because it has had a higher number of both vacant homes and fires.

It’s also a reminder that what Thomas refers to as “the inevitable call” means more than just waiting for one’s turn amongst limited resources. In Baltimore, it may come down to life or death.

Scott insists he’s up for the challenge.

“I can handle it,” he said that morning in Park Heights. “I'll say this very simply. When you've grown up walking these streets in the ’80s and ’90s and early 2000s, there is no load that's too heavy for you to carry.”

This story has been updated to correct a typo and add new information.