Global Courant 2023-05-03 13:30:38
BALTIMORE – Red reflective diamonds dot the exteriors of crumbling, burnt and boarded-up row houses in Charm City, marking them as unsafe. The thousands of abandoned properties cost the city more than $100 million a year and endanger lives.
“This is a crisis of truly epic proportions that we need to address in our city,” Councilwoman Odette Ramos told Fox News.
More than 14,000 buildings stand empty in Baltimore, costing the city more than $100 million each year in emergency services and maintenance. (Megan Myers, Hannah Ray Lambert/Fox News Digital)
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Ramos is at the forefront of efforts to clean up the city by turning over lots to developers and homeowners. It’s been a focus for her for years, but the investigation into the matter intensified last year when three firefighters died in a vacant building fire.
Ramos said the event “emphasized for the entire city the importance of tackling” vacant buildings.
According to a recent report by Johns Hopkins University initiative. Baltimore had one of the highest vacancy rates in the country in 2019 at 8.1%.
“The investigation shows that our violent crime takes place in areas where the most vacant properties are,” Ramos said as he stood in front of a house sandwiched between two abandoned houses.
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“We have residents here living between two different vacant and abandoned properties,” she said. “That affects the value of their property and getting mold and other things into their property. But they don’t want to leave because this is their home. So it’s unfair for them to have to live in that situation.”
Ramos said numerous factors contribute to the blight, which dates back to 1911, when Baltimore adopted the nation’s first racially segregated housing ordinance.
“The segregation was real and deliberate, and it led to decades of disinvestment in traditionally black communities,” said Ramos. “As well as flights from other parts of the city.”
A century later, some houses remain unclaimed after the death of their owners. Some are abandoned when families cannot keep up with the large numbers mortgage or taxes, and others are owned by foreign investors or landlords who have yet to develop the property, Ramos said.
Baltimore City Councilwoman Odette Ramos walks past abandoned row houses on April 25, 2023. Its proposed land bank would allow the city to buy and sell certain vacant properties to developers or prospective homeowners. (Megan Myers/Fox News Digital)
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Private developers demolished or renovated about 1,300 vacant properties last year, Ramos said, but another 1,100 ended up vacant. Baltimore’s population has also declined by 7% over the past decade experts suggest crimelackluster schools and high property taxes could be to blame.
“But we know that more people want to move here,” Ramos said. “So having the inventory is going to be critical.”
The city currently owns about 1,000 of them, less than 8% of the total. But a plan by Ramos and Councilman James Torrence seeks to dramatically increase that number by creating Maryland’s first land bank.
If their legislation If approved, the quasi-governmental Land Bank Authority (LBA) would acquire abandoned properties through in rem foreclosure, when liens on a property exceed appraised value. The LBA would then post its inventory online using a fixed-price model, aiming to reduce auctions and red tape.
According to Ramos, developers will have demolished or renovated about 1,300 vacant properties by 2022, but about 1,100 more will become vacant in the same period. (Hannah Ray Lambert/Fox News Digital)
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“If we do this right and we have money in the street and the houses are fixed up and more people move in, it will eventually pay for itself,” said Ramos. “So it’s very exciting.”
An 11-member board would run the LBA as required by law, and the land bank would last 15 years.
“We want the work done and then it goes away,” said Ramos.
Hannah Ray Lambert is an associate producer/writer at Fox News Digital Originals.
