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

Brandon Scott (0:02)

Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio, News.

Tracy Alloway (0:18)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:21)

And I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:23)

So Joe, we are here in Madrid as part of Bloomberg CityLab.

Joe Weisenthal (0:27)

Tough, tough assignment for us coming to us.

Tracy Alloway (0:30)

A real hardship posting.

Joe Weisenthal (0:31)

Yeah, a real hardship posting, but willing to do it.

Tracy Alloway (0:34)

Yeah, so there are mayors from all over the world here all talking about the challenges and opportunities facing cities, and we're about to speak to one of them in particular. And it's actually a really interesting test case of, I think, a lot of themes that kind of touch on the Odd Lots oove, let's say.

Joe Weisenthal (0:53)

Well, one of the things that comes up all the time, obviously, on Odd Lots over the years is housing, right? And one of the things that we've discovered, I would say, is, okay, it's easy to say housing is a stress everywhere, housing is a challenge, there's a housing crisis and so forth. And it's kind of true, but as we've discovered, there's a different fingerprint of it everywhere, right? That's right, that's right. We were in Mount Airy, North Carolina, and it's very sparse and rural, even there, there's a housing shortage, etc. Everywhere, there are these common themes, but every location has its own distinct challenges.

Tracy Alloway (1:28)

Right, so the city we're going to be talking about today is Baltimore. And in Baltimore, one of the issues with housing is this vacant housing problem.

Joe Weisenthal (1:37)

Yeah.

Tracy Alloway (1:37)

And I got to say, I actually feel really bad about this. My dad was a pilot, as you know, and he flew out of BWI for many, many years. But he lives in Annapolis, so I never actually spent that much time in Baltimore, except to get the Greyhound bus and go to the Baltimore bus terminal. And I would not want to judge any city based on the Greyhound terminal, but I definitely saw a lot of vacant houses around the area.

Joe Weisenthal (2:01)

Yeah. I haven't spent a ton of time in Baltimore either. You know, I was born in Detroit. I have a lot of family there. Also a city that sort of famously for a long time had a lot of vacant houses. In other words, time is when you see these websites advertising houses for a dollar, etc. It's like there's clearly so much potential in a place with such, you know, at least nominally affordable homes. So like, how do you actually get people to move in? How do you make them valuable? How do you fix them up? So many, I guess, interesting technical questions, I would say to solving these problems.

Tracy Alloway (2:33)

Exactly. So we do in fact have the perfect guest. We're going to be speaking with Mayor Brandon Scott, who is of course the mayor of Baltimore. So Mayor Scott, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots.

Brandon Scott (2:44)

Thank you all for having me. Great to be here. In Madrid, no less.

Tracy Alloway (2:47)

In Madrid.

Brandon Scott (2:48)

Tough assignment for all of us.

Joe Weisenthal (2:49)

Second best city in the world, I take it.

Brandon Scott (2:51)

Second greatest outside of Baltimore.

Joe Weisenthal (2:53)

That's right.

Tracy Alloway (2:54)

So when you became mayor of Baltimore, I'm really curious, how did the vacant housing problem actually show up on your radar? And why did it become a priority for you?

Brandon Scott (3:04)

Well, for me, it showed up on my radar the day I was born. So I was born and raised in Baltimore.

I was born in 1984 So I had the fortune or misfortune of growing up in the 80s, 90s, and 2000 When you think about all of the crazy things that happened in the United States at that time, of course, we're talking about drugs showing up into neighborhoods, the war on drugs, failed war on drugs, and zero-tolerance policing. But I also lived in the city that is the birthplace of racial redlining. It was signed at the very desk that I sit in. The first redlining law was signed in Baltimore City. I grew up on a block with a vacant house that my dad made. Me and my brothers cut the grass at every single time because he said, by the time the city gets around to cutting it for the owner, it's going to be a foot high. So for me, this wasn't something that I discovered when I became the mayor of Baltimore. It had been very prominent in my neighborhood that I grew up in, in Park Heights and all over the city of Baltimore for a long time. But I knew it had to be a priority because you cannot, and we will not be the best version of Baltimore if we are not a whole version of Baltimore. When you think about it like this, when I was a junior in high school in the year 2000, December of 2000, Baltimore had 16,000 vacant properties. Wow. That's a lot less than the 30 or 40,000 it had years prior to that. But when I became mayor on December 8th of 2020, Baltimore had 16,000 vacant properties. The number essentially had not moved.