Baltimore has more than 13,000 vacant and abandoned houses and buildings, a number that officials say has barely budged in decades. On Tuesday, state and local leaders announced a new initiative to redevelop those buildings.
Through the new project, dubbed the Reinvest Baltimore Program, 5,000 vacant properties will be redeveloped in five years, Gov. Wes Moore promised just before signing an executive order establishing the program.
Moore’s order also renames Project CORE, an initiative created by former Gov. Larry Hogan to demolish vacant buildings, as the “Baltimore Vacants Reinvestment Initiative.” That effort will be enveloped in the new Reinvest Baltimore Program. The whole program will be guided in part by a new “Baltimore Vacants Reinvestment Council.”
“Some properties may be turned into livable homes,” Moore said. “Others may be demolished to make space for other projects within the community, but everything will be done with not just local input and local feedback, but with local push.”
Moore and other officials said that collaboration among state and local governments, as well as private organizations and businesses, is one of the big differences between this new effort and past ones.
Another major difference, said Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott, is funding. Legislation passed by the General Assembly this past spring requires the governor to allocate $50 million annually toward the redevelopment effort beginning July 1, 2025.
A new “Baltimore Vacant Reinvestment Council,” also established in Moore’s executive order, plans to meet monthly to direct the funding. The group will go “property by property … to decide what dollar addresses what issue,” said state Housing and Community Development Secretary Jake Day.
Scott called the new state funding “an historic turning point.”
“When I first took office, Mr. Governor, there were 16,000 vacant properties in Baltimore. It had been that way for 20 years, and what that means is that I was a sophomore at Mervo High School, and we had 16,000 vacant properties,” Scott said.
In the last few years, efforts to remove vacant properties have yielded slow progress. There are now 13,168 vacant buildings, according to city officials. But Scott said that progress is too slow.
“At the rate that we were collectively investing into the vacant problem, even with that steep decline, it would have taken us 300 years to solve the issue, and we don't have 300 years to solve this issue,” Scott said.
Scott said he envisions eliminating vacant and abandoned structures in the next 15 years, with a $300 million investment from the city that was announced last year in addition to the new state support.