Whole-blocks approach powers gains near anchors, leaves others behind
The bidding wars that have arrived at Baltimore’s vacant-property auctions mark a turn for a city where, for decades, the math of renovation made whole neighborhoods uninvestable. The Wall Street Journal reported that the surge in demand has helped Baltimore cut its vacancy rate by nearly a third over the past decade, with the number of vacant homes falling below 12,000 from a long-stagnant 16,000.
The drivers are several: city and state funding has reached unprecedented levels, nonprofit developers have shifted to rehabilitating entire blocks at once, and violent crime has plummeted. But the Journal identifies one increasingly decisive factor — the housing affordability crisis in higher-cost markets on the East Coast and beyond.
Baltimore’s median home price is $235,333, compared with $381,333 nationally, according to Zillow data cited by the Journal. That gap has drawn buyers from Washington, D.C., and surrounding suburbs, and from cities farther afield. Alex Queen, a former Los Angeles resident, moved back to her native Baltimore after losing bidding war after bidding war for homes in California, the paper reported. She and her family bought and moved into a vacant home rehabilitated by the nonprofit developer Parity Homes.
City and state leaders have built the response into a formal plan. Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott, in an interview with the Journal, said vacant housing is a problem of perception as well as economics. “When people see a bunch of vacants, no one wants to live there. No one wants to invest there,” Scott said. The plan commits $3 billion toward eliminating vacancy entirely by 2038, with subsidies for nonprofit developers and home buyers, and repair grants for homeowners.
The “whole-blocks” approach has done its heaviest lifting in neighborhoods with anchor institutions to support demand. In Johnston Square in East Baltimore, the nonprofit ReBUILD Metro has halved the number of vacant homes in recent years, the Journal reported. The neighborhood sits close to Johns Hopkins Hospital and to subway, light-rail, and train stations — assets that bring buyers and stabilize renovated values. “Johnston Square is at the perfect location,” buyer Alex Kovach told the paper. Longtime resident Regina Hammond, who has lived in the neighborhood for more than four decades, described the transformation in stark terms. “There was nothing but rows and rows of boarded-up houses,” Hammond said. “Now it’s a whole different story.”
The strategy has not lifted every neighborhood. Carrollton Ridge in southwest Baltimore, historically among the city’s highest-homicide areas, still has about 750 vacant homes — 40 more than 10 years ago, according to the Journal. Community leader Derwin Hannah described the area to the paper as receiving little vacancy investment. “It’s not getting any investment when it comes to vacant housing,” Hannah said. “You’re looking at a community with nothing.” On a recent afternoon, the Journal found blocks of crumbling, fire-scarred shells — some with trees growing through collapsed roofs, others marked with red diamonds signaling risk of collapse — alongside an open-air drug market.
Other risks have begun to surface. Bree Jones, founder of Parity Homes, told the Journal that speculators are now “swooping in” to buy shells cheaply and wait for values to rise. The paper cited concern that the recovery could be undercut by investor behavior: last year, New York real-estate investors were alleged to have committed fraud in receiving loans to acquire hundreds of Baltimore vacant properties. Many of the mortgages defaulted, and the resulting foreclosure wave threatened to drag whole blocks back down.
The experience of other postindustrial cities — Detroit and St. Louis among them — has shown that vacancy reductions of this scale are unusual, the Journal reported, though Baltimore’s recent progress stands out. The post-pandemic surge in residential demand, fed by low interest rates, initially helped rehabilitation projects become financially viable. Even after borrowing costs rose, demand continued as prices elsewhere climbed.
For the investors and developers now operating in Baltimore, the economics still turn on what comes next. Waldron, the plumber-turned-investor who won the $45,000 auction bid, plans to spend $130,000 and five months rehabilitating the property and sell it for over $300,000, the Journal reported. His immediate reaction on entering the building — littered with kitchen equipment, furniture, clothes, bottles, a family picture, and wooden planks with nails pointing upward — was the self-assessment: “What did I get myself into?”