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

Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio News.

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Adlots podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.

And I'm Joe Wisenthal.

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

Tough Tough assignment.

I know, a real hardship post a.

Real hardship posting, but willing to do it. 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 loots.

Oo. Let's say, well, one of the things that comes up all the time, obviously i'm odd logs over the years is housing, right, And one of the things that we've discovered, I would say, is Okay, every 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.

You know, we go to we were in you know, mount Airy, North Carolina and.

It's very sparse and rural. Even there, there's a housing shortage, et cetera.

Everywhere there are these common themes, but every location has its own distinct challenges.

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. And I gotta 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 wouldn't want to judge any city based on the Greyhound terminal, but I definitely saw a lot of vacant houses around the area.

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. You know, there were times when you see these websites advertising houses for a dollar.

Et cetera.

Is 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 the valuable? How do you fix them up?

So many I guess interesting technical questions, I would say to solving these problems 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 all thoughts.

Thank you for having me. Great to be here. So in Madrid, Madrid.

I know, second best city in the world.

I take it second gradest outside of Baltimore.

That's right.

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?

Well, for me, it showed up on my radar the day I was born, right, So I was born and raised in Baltimore's born in nineteen eighty four. So the fortune or misfortune of growing up in the eighties, nineties, and two thousand, 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 talerance 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 red lining 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 of this 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. And when you think about it like this, when I was a junior in high school in the year two thousand. December of two thousand, Baltimore had sixteen thousand vacant properties. Now that's a lot less than the thirty or forty thousand it had years prior to that. But when I became mayor in December eighth of twenty twenty, Baltimore had sixteen thousand vacant properties. The number essentially had not moved. So we knew that we needed a different strategy to dealing

with this long standing challenge. That is, you can directly I showed this at City Lab. I'm a map and a data guy. Right when you look at the nineteen thirty seven racial red lining map in Baltimore, and then you look at the vacant smap in twenty twenty, or even the vacant smap today, it's the same neighborhoods, literally the same neighborhoods. And Baltimore they call it the black butterfly and the white el. So you got this white l that goes down the city and out and then you have these two heartbeats, so to speak, of the black butterfly, the wings. And you can see that the vacants in Baltimore are a direct correlation to that direct correlation to purposeful disinvestment into those neighborhoods, and all the

other things, d N specialization, all of those things that happened.

How would you describe?

Okay, everyone can recognize that having lots of vacant housing is a very serious problem for a city. You recognize it from, as you said, at the moment you were born, growing up prior to your administration. What was the sort of status quo thinking about it? What was the way that prior administrations had thought about the challenge or the problem?

Well, listen, I have to say that my predecessors, with the tools and knowledge and understanding that they had, they didn't do a bad job. Right. The only thing that I'd say that they did that I do differently and thinking about it differently, is that for and this is just this is mayors, this is politicians. Right, Folks like to tell folks that I'm going to handle this issue in my time in office. There's no way in holy hell that any mayor was going to eliminate a vacant housing in Baltimore in four years, let alone eight and a lot some of them, many of them before me, got a lot less than even four years. Right, So when you think about that. The approach for us, it has never been about the approach Baltimore between our city

government partnership with the state government, without private community, with the folks in philanthropic and CDCs and developers. They've always had the strategy. They also had to know how and the do how of taking vacants and even demoliging them, turning them to park space, getting them renovated, building a lot of housing, all of those things. It's been about the capital. That's what they did not have. They didn't have the capital, and they did not have a unified strategy that was about something greater than one mayor old term.

And I think that's where we have struck goals, so to speak, is that we came out and I stood with the Community and Build, which is a community organization that has relationships with churches and communities and mosque and everything all over the city of Baltimore and represents a lot of residents and neighborhood leaders in our business community and the greater Baltimore community, and myself stood up and said we are coming up with this strategy that we as in Baltimore as a community, not just city government, not just private not just philanthropic, not just the residents.

We are going to end this crisis for good over the next fifteen years. And this strategy is our strategy, so that everyone is bought in. That's the difference. And now that we're all working together. And then we got a blessing. A few months later, we got a governor elected, and now the governor of Maryland is also a member of that right, the state of government has given us fifty million dollars a year. So now we've been able to just think about that. I told you it was sixteen thousand for twenty years, right, So we went from sixteen thousand when I took office now down to eleven than eight hundred and six as of early this morning.

Do you get a daily report? You have it down to.

The dashboard, said website you can go look is reframe Baltimore will tell you how many right, and the number sometimes fluctuates because we take some off, some go up. But it's that collective way that we've done it, because it's a very very tough issue for even people to understand. You mentioned like dollar houses. People are like, well, if you sell all the vacants for a dollar, they'll go away, No, Because one, the overwhelming majority of the vacants in the city of Baltimore are not owned by the City of Baltimore.

They're owned by private folks who are sitting on them, folks that we have to track down, and many, I hate to say this, a good bit of them were ones that back in the day one of my predecessors sold four dollars. But if I sell you a house for a dollar and you don't have the one one hundred and fifty thousand dollars needed to actually get it up to living standards, is still going to remain vagable.

Well, So on this note, I want to back up for a second and ask what is potentially a very basic question, but how do the houses actually become vacant? Like, what is the typical process by which a house becomes vacant. We've heard the population decline story in Baltimore, but like, it's hard for me to believe people just leave and don't do anything with their houses.

So it's a couple of things. One, the thing I can tell you about Baltimore that is probably so much different than any other city is that we're a city of neighborhoods, right, And I literally tell people this that those neighborhoods can literally be a city of countries. Not two blocks are the same. Everything is different. That's why our strategy is blocked by block. But just to give you the historical context, we know that we got a lot of vacans when suburbs were built, right like we had suburbs being built, white Flight. All of those things happened that happened in cities around the country. We had that.

Then we had den Jusization, we had Bethlehem still and General Motors. General Motors is actually the reason why I am here because my mom's parents moved to Baltimore. My granddad, when they were down to the last one hundred dollars, was thinking about moving back to rural Virginia, got a job at General Motors, and boom, they bought the house where my mom grew up in and my dad, who was following my uncles, his older brothers and older cousins to Baltimore, visiting in the summertime. My uncles were working at Bethlehem Steel, him and my mom met and the rest is history. But those went away, those jobs went away, right, and then some people did leave. And then when you add onto that. A lot of folks that left left

those houses, and they left their houses and people died, right, Older folks died. They left from the people who didn't care for them. You had a lot of folks coming and buy up property that were vacant when people did move out and just sitting on them.

They're just waiting for prices, waiting for.

Or waiting for the city or someone to come along and give them more than what they paid for. Right. But then you have we have a lot of folks who pass away and their kids are gone and they don't want the property. It runs the gamut. There is not one sole reason why you have so many. But when you think about we were a city of basically a million people and now we're a city of six hundred thousand, right, you think about the amount of people that law that left the city of Baltimore for a multitude of reasons. And then when you add on to that red lining dmzstualization, you know, crime and violence and drugs that just showed up out of nowhere all of a sudden. You add all of those things together, you

have really a recipe for the disaster, so to speak.

You said something that you know it must be a tricky issue because okay, let's say, and I want to talk more about this, but you get this infusion of capital, or you get this coordination of capital, and suddenly the governor is willing to work with you and allocate money from the budget.

But presumably, yeah.

I imagine you don't want you want private capital, but you don't want entities who are just gonna take the public money to see their properties inflate. So how do you think about coordinating that so that you get that private capital, you get the investment capital, but it's not just essentially a free lunch of Okay.

You get to do whatever you want, right, yeah, yeah, So that's where the how do you get that skin in the game. That's where the block by block comes. Okay, really, so we do block level planning for these, but it's also about strategic We have Strategic Investment Zone seven of them where mostly the vacants are, and we're what we're telling folks is is that we have a plan for each block. And we don't just do big developers. We'll work with small developers. We work with community development corporations.

And the great thing about the City of Baltimore versus Detroit, where folks are like, oh, you guys should create a landbank like Detroit. Well we visited Detroit and they're like, well, you guys don't need to do that because your housing department has the authorities that our landbank haves. Now we didn't have that within the city of government. And now what we've been able to do because also, it's not that easy to get to the point of getting a vacant back to renovation. So I'll step back and walk you guys how this works. You own a house is vacant, and then our housing department, our inspectors come out. Someone complains there's a vacant house to me though it's not taking care of it. We give them a citation. They

have thirty days to remedy that citation. We literally legally can't do anything for that time, and then we come back again and we have to do it now. After that one then we maybe cut the grass, lean it, et cetera. We have raised the fines up. We can find them up to one thousand dollars. Then they get a vacant building notice right, and if we want to take that property through receivership and all these other things in room. We have to go to court. They know how long that takes. That could take. You know, it used to take two to three years. Right now we've worked with the court. We have a special inrim docket, right and we're getting that time down a lot faster.

But we're doing that thousands of times right over and over again. And when you're talking about that takes the time to assemble blocks. Right now, think about this block, forty eight hundred block of Park Hest Avenue, right. So, the Park Heights master Plans, the neighborhood I grew up in, is one of the largest redevelopment issues in the country.

Think about it like this. They started talking about the plan when I was in middle school. Right. The city finally was able to have all of the properties acquired when I was a staffer in city government and on the board of their CDC in two thousand and eight and two thousand and nine. We finally had them all demolished around eleven or twelve. The first new housing units didn't get built until I was mayor. Right. When you talk about those large amounts of vacant properties, it just takes a long time. Single ones you can and re replenish them a little quicker, and it takes a lot of block by block level planning, identifying a developer, making sure the developer fits with the neighborhood, making sure that

we have the partnership with the state because they also have their sway and control over the money that they're pumping into Everyone has to be a line and making sure that we are not just giving it to people who just want to make a buck, but they understand that, yes, we want them to make money, we believe in capitalism, but we have they have to understand how this is going to work to improve those neighborhoos. And we've seen so many neighborhoods take great, great, great change, like Johnson Square and East Baltimore, Oliver and East Baltimore where you know they used to film the wire and now they're selling houses over there. Like I was wondering, thousand dollars, how.

Long until we reference the wire?

You know it's going to happen eventually, Yeah, it had to happen. So same mainly accurs for us, but yes, mainly a curse for us. We don't like this show at all.

Oh really, wait, we.

Just changed the entire subject let's just talk about.

The Wire off. I guess it's for us is we understand it and we appreciate it for the storytelling. But people don't look at NYPD Blue and think like, oh, this is all New York, right, That's what I'm saying, right, And for us, we've only had those shows. So we had the Wire, we had the Corner, we had homicide Life on the Street. Now when they maybe do a complete Baltimore story on a show HBO, hint, hint, Like.

Because if York we have Seinfeld and Friends.

We got all that, we only have we only have the Bag, And you know, people just like, oh, yeah, I saw the show, this is what the whole city is all right?

Fair enough. I was going to ask, how do you decide what to do with the vacant houses that you end up you know, taking back and taking control of so you can work with private developers as you mentioned, I guess they can choose to renovate them. They can choose to demolish them, Like how do those conversations that's.

A decision about demolish to renovate is made by us beforehand. If the houses are going to be demolished, we do that we do that in partnership with the state. The renovation will when we award an RFP to someone, we're awarding it for housing like to renovate, to do that. So that's we do that. But that again goes back to the block level planning right and making sure that we're like, okay, in this neighborhood, we need this right this block is these houses are too far gone, We're just gonna knock that down, make it parks based or RFP the land right these this block, this small developer can handle. This block only has three vacants and it's a block of ten. They can handle just doing these particular one or we have scattered sites. So we do

that identification through our block by block strategies, through our neighborhood strategic investment areas, identifying those things before we get over to the developers or the CDC or individuals because we're also one of the most innovative things that we're doing. Folks typically use TIFF tax increment financing for like new developments right for us think about like Harvard Ease or Harbor Point, all the fancy areas well, we're actually doing it on TIFF and this is the first time.

You gotta what is test word cut in and yeah, explain how TIP.

Work tech instrument financing where essentially like that you would put all this money up front and you would get it back on the back end, which is they used to incentivize development all around the country. This is the first time that that tool is being used for something that's not a non contiguous area. So what we're doing is we're using the VbN, the vacant building notice all across the city and identifying like we're going to put a TIFF on that. So we offered out and people were going crazy, like it's not going to work. No one's going to apply for this. You have to have it in one area. That's the way that TIFF works. Well, we put out in our first round twenty eight million dollars worth of TIFF financing. We got three hundred and

eighty million dollars worth of applications. So the man is there and this is affordable housing TIFF in neighborhoods. And you can see if you look at our map right, you can see that it's going right in those red line neighborhoods, right in those disinvesting neighbors and in fact as a part of my stateya to see. We unveil the investments map data map where you can see since I've been in office where the investment has gone right, And we did a heat map Baltimore's purple. So the darker, the more purple, the more investment, and you can see that we are strategically investing in the neighborhoods that have been disinvested in in the butterfly or the red line neighborhoods.

And that's how we're going to build upon what we're doing.

Wait, why do people think that TIFF only works for contiguous areas.

I guess because no one tried it before. I had no idea. But it's probably also a little bit of hidden racism. And people that were saying that, they were also saying like, you can't do TIFF in the area that is this kind of area, right, But yeah, they were wrong. We knew they were wrong. The numbers speak for themselves.

How much do you think about like the specific types of house. Let's say you raise a tract of land or whatever and you think, okay, reimagining what this.

Space can be.

How much are you planning the specific type of housing that you want in an area, whether it's multifamily, rental condos, home readerships, freestanding solo home. Like, how do you think about like envisioning what the neighborhood should or could be.

Again, I'm gonna go back to the neighborhood block level planning, and so this is this is Baltimore, right, So those neighborhoods love their neighborhood aesthetic and they want to keep them as much as possible. Right. So even for example, and that Black of Park hecet that I talked about where we knock down which where we have row homes, connected row homes for the most part, in both single family too. I live in one but connected row homes.

Even though we built a multi unit senior apartment building for senior living there, it actually looks on the outside like the ro homes that were there before. So we have to make sure that we're meeting the aesthetic of the neighborhood and what the neighborhood actually needs. So that neighborhood needed that, right, It needed places for older adults to actually who want to remain in the community to do that. The next phase that we're doing there that will break ground on before the years out. Hopefully is the first home ownership opportunities built there since my grandmother and grandfather moved to the neighborhood. Right. So that's the way that we're doing it, and it just depends on where you are, because we want to mix it. For example,

we had a housing project Perkins Somerset in Old Town. Now we have the new one where we have the mixture, right, we have mixed income. We have to make sure that we're providing multitude of opportunities because it's not It can't just be all high end. It can't just be all affordable. We need working class all of those things.

So one of the other things you're doing is taxing vacant land. And we've done you know, we are vacant houses. I should say, we've done episodes on all blots about a land tax. Walk us through like the pushback that you got to that plan. Why do people seem opposed to taxing empty buildings or empty lane.

Well, we actually didn't get any public pushback. Right. The reality was is that the way Maryland is set up, we had to get the state to say, yes, you can tax them at a higher rate. Now, it took a little while for them to do that. But now we got the blessing, we got the bill pass, and now we're able to do that at the local level.

And I think that it's just that there's been this theme, right, so we're independency. There's no county government for us, Amen, hallelujah. It's just us in state in the federal government. But there's been this sentiment that, like, the city doesn't know what it's doing, et cetera, et cetera. But you can't really argue with the data, right, whether it's you know, we've reduced basically eliminated one in four vacant houses in my time in office, right, we've reduced violence in the city to the lowest levels on recorded record. You can't really argue with the numbers. So now folks are more ready to give us more of that the authority to deal with the issues, because it's also a drain on them, right,

And that's what we're saying to them, is that this takes money out of the state's pocket. Right, The inability for us to do stuff with these owners hurts the state of Maryland just as much as it hurts the city of Baltimore.

I was just about to ask you. You mentioned the big drop in violence. How much is that a key pillar of any sort of development success, because ultimately, I imagine you can have the right tax incentives and the right codes and the right planning, but people don't want to live around a lot of crime. How much has that declined been a sort of, I guess, a tail end to the entire project.

I think that it is the number one reason why Baltimore is so hot right now, because after all those years, I'll just say it like this, If this were twenty twenty one and we're at city Lab, the only thing people want to talk to me about is how am I going to reduce gun violence in Baltimore? Now? The only thing people wanted to talk to me about how did I reduce gun violence in Baltimore? And I think it's not just that we did it, it's how we did it, because listen, we're talking about a place that when I was growing up, we had breathing while black policing. Right, seven times in my lifetime I was sat down on the curb and putting the handcuffs, including in the rain, simply because I was outside and looked the way I

look accused of committing crimes that I couldn't have possibly committed because I was two hours away at college when it happened. So when you think about that and think about that, I'm forty two now, but eighteen out of the forty two years that I've been alive, Baltimore had over three hundred murders and we went from in the last six years, right, violence has dropped over almost sixty percent in the city of Baltimore. Were going from three hundred plus to now one hundred and thirty three, which is still one hundred and thirty three too many for me.

But the fact that we've been able to do that, and that we've done it in a smart way is important for us.

Yeah.

So if it's not the sort of hyper aggressive police work the type you described, what has it been?

How would you describe it?

Well, let me just start to say that doesn't work. Right, So if you think about those years of a zero tolerance, so I'll give you a za. For example, two thousand and four, the city had two hundred and seventy eight homicides. Right, they arrested ninety one thousand people in a city of six hundred thousand. Last year we had one hundred and thirty three. We arrested seventeen thousand people, significantly less homicides with significantly less arrests because it's never been about how many people you arrest. It's always been about who and for what. And the way that we've done it is we by law a lot of it. I passed as the City Council president in twenty nineteen, the Mayor of Baltimore has to present a comprehensive violence prevention plan at

least every two years, and that is what we did. In twenty twenty one, I unveiled our first conference and violence prevention plan. I said that we reduce homicides in the city by fifteen percent from one year to the next, and people literally laughed because they laughed because one they thought that was ridiculous, and two they said, it's not going to work the way you say, because we're going to be smart on crime. Right, Being smart on crime is how you really get tough on it. We're going to throw away the idea that you just go out and arrest everybody for everything and grime will go down, because it didn't. But what we've been able to do is one we use our focus de turns model what we call gvr REST, the Group Violence Reduction Strategy, which

we actually use data which is something also funded partially by the folks good folks at Bloomberg to identify who are the most likely to be the victim or perpetrator of gun violence, and we actually go to them, many of them and say they get a letter directly from me that says I know who you are, I know what you do. This is your one chance to change your life. We will help you in any way that we can. If you need housing, job training, education, if you want to be relocated, we'll do that. But if you don't stop doing what you're doing, I am going to bring the hammer down on you, and we're going to remove you. Out. Of the folks who have taken us up on on that, over ninety percent of them have not been rictivized or recidipated. When you think about that.

And then at the same time, we put fifty million dollars into our community VOCE intervention ecosystem where we pay people who used to be involved in that life to prevent conflict to go out there through safe streets, and we are us and these other organizations to do that. Great work because there are things that our police officers could never get in between, because no one's going to tell them that, right. But at the same time, we also focus on the flow of guns. We're going after gun stores. Gun We won the largest settlement against a gun store in this country's history. We want a settlement against the ghost gun company. We're going after gun traffickers.

We're doing all of that and investing into youth and education and historic waste. That's the way that we've been able to do it.

There's a professor John Jay College, Peter Moscows, who do you know.

Who that is is?

Yeah, he wrote this.

He spent a few years within the Baltimore Police Department. And you wrote a great book about basically the terrible incentives that happen when you start incentivizing just a cure number of arrests, yes, and why that completely fails as a crime prevention. I can't remember the name of the book right now, but is really enlightening. And he makes it very clear why if the incentive is to just maximize the number of rests or whatever, that will never work.

In terms of who would have thought that incentives matter? Crazy crazy stuff.

And you can see it look that in this building. That is actually documented on a PBS documentary called The Body Politics. So my entire first two and a half years in office building, that is something people can see.

Can I ask, how how does safety play into actually attracting capital back into the city, Because I get that. You know, if you're a business or a developer and you're thinking of putting money into Baltimore, you want to see the crime rate go down. But like, do people get really specific about it? Do they have like targets like, Okay, once homicides are under like one hundred per year, we'll go in.

So yes, and though right, I will tell you that. For example, if we're at the In and Out of Shopping Centers conference in Vegas every May a few years ago, let's say twenty one and twenty two, folks will be saying to mister mayor, I love Baltimore, but I tell you, guys, you know, reduce homicides and shootings, we can't invest there.

But then you would get folks that would say, like, until you guys get under three hundred homicides, right, it's they don't depends on the person. But you know, it was the big elephant in the room. Do you guys have a plan? What's your plan? Is the plan working? How are you going to do it? A lot of folks would some folks would still invest if you show them the plan. Even before we actually were able to implement the plan, but it was the big elephant in the room. And we've been able to really show fee that we have it, and now folks are like, oh, you guys are right, We're ready to come right and now we have to continue that. And I tell the team all the time, folks, whenever we're at a big event,

like the other day, I was speaking and people started clapping when we when I mentioned the one thirty three numb I say, don't claim we haven't done anything yet. That's one hundred and thirty three too many. And I don't want my team to feel like it's time to celebrate. I'd say, this is not celebratory. We're acknowledging this historic progress because now that we know that we can do better, the best is out there for us to go.

In a tea, let's talk about, you know, because this is odd lags financial podcasts, Let's talk a little bit more about the capital structure and how that works. You mentioned okay, like money from the state, but what are some of these finance vehicles, how are they structured, Who's balance.

Sheets do they sit on? What is the city fronting? How's that? How's yeah fit together?

The city is fronting the tift money. Obviously, the city money is a tift money for us. The state is fronting their fifty million dollar investment each and every year. And then we have the private investment, and we have philanthropic investment into the vacant strategy. So it's really everybody coalescing together. And then obviously the operational portions of it is on the city as well. For the most part, the state has some of the operational portions of it.

When you think about the Housing Department, all of those things on the city, on the city's books, and even some of the capital investment in our own capital budget is also on the city the city's books as well.

Do you get push back from people in the community who worry that, Okay, it's great housing is going to be built, it's going to be higher quality, et cetera, but oh, it's totally going to go to wealthy people. And how do you think about balancing the need for sheer volume versus guaranteeing that some of it is affordable or cheaper, the below market rate, whatever it is.

That's a very important thing to me. Right. I love the city of DC, my brother lives there. But I know that if you talk to specifically to old time black Washingtonians, they will say that we're no longer chocolate city. We're a latte city, right, Like they feel like they've lost a bit of their culture with a lot of folks coming in from all over and feeling like some of the original Washingtonians have just been pushed out right.

And we're very intentional about understanding that we do want people to come from all over, but we also and we have this very unique opportunity with all the vacants to make sure that the folks that have stayed in Baltimore and lived through all of this can benefit it from as well. And we do that through things like my buy back to Block program, where we're taking people who are renters in fact paying more in rent than they would in mortgage and making them homewarners.

And this very familiar in New York City problem.

Well, yeah, and it's also why we work with different kind of developers, right who smaller developers who were taking these other things, and we can partner them with folks that get these people there. We have to be thinking about all of that because people are going to say that anytime you make that investment.

So I have a very technical question going back to the vacant homes issue. But one of the things I saw on the Baltimore subreadhead was someone was saying like, we would get more buyers of vacant homes or more action on vacant homes if the water bills were not.

Such an issue.

So what's the deal with the water bills?

So I think that what I would say is that I would thought it could be a real technical question. So I think that a few things right. Yes, water rates have increased, They're increasing everywhere. But I would say that our increases up until last year were the lowest that we've had pretty much in my lifetime. But I would no developer has said to me that like, oh, I'm not going to come and renovate houses in Baltimore because of the Waterville. We know that colls arising across the board, and we're going through a process now even and what this conversation really normally leads to it's like, oh, well, the county plays less for their water than we do and they don't have to pay all these fees. And

then you have to spend this long explanation saying, well, they actually do play those fees, except for the county just hires the fees and other bills that they don't see. Right, And we're working with fout county partners through a bill that me and the county executive put into state about how the water system is going to look moving forward.

Because the city does the water for the surrounding county as well. We pay every month, they pay every four months. All of these kind of things the issue but water rates and listen, the thing about water utilities is that taxpayer dollars for for property taxes and other money doesn't go into that water utility systems. Only come from the systems themselves. And when you think about the world and the craziness that we're living in today and the cost of the equipment and the materials that needed to make sure that water that's going up, so there's no other way essentially to deal with it. But I think that for us, it's really about setting the structure in a more simplify understandable way for the residents and making sure

that our partners around are playing a more critical role when it comes to the resources. And that's what we're going to do.

So we're here at the City Lab conference, and I'm sure you know every different city all around the world, for the most part, different issues, different challenges that they're facing. But a common theme in much of the world is what you said at the beginning of the industrialization, and this is all across the United States, all across Europe, et cetera, a major source of anxiety at the city, state, national level, you name it.

How do you think of maybe this is just a very.

Conceptual question, but okay, presuming that there's not going to be a big revival of steel mills in the vicinity of Baltimore anytime soon, how do you think about the businesses of the future and what the new industries that could thrive in a city like Baltimore and any other cities that have suffered the same.

No, just in Baltimore, but I think for us, listen, we're blessed we still have some industry. We're always going to be a port city. The world found that out a few years ago when the Key Bridge collapsed and found out how important the Port of Baltimore is to the world. Right, I thought we were going to talk.

About the wire the Key Bridge. How's that going.

It's going, it's going. It's going. That the bridge has been demolished, and it's moving pretty fast for an infrastructure project of that size. People like, oh, the bridge not being rebuilt, like this is the bridge, you guys, This doesn't happen that quickly. But we're still a port city. We're obviously a big hub for tourism and culture and sports.

We're also adds in med city right with Hopkins and University in Maryland. We're a big arts and culture city, and we're growing tech city, which is where we think the growth is for us. We had like six hundred million of capital investment into those kind of firms over the last few years, and we want to continue to see that grow because they're growing out of Hopkins, they're growing out of you indeed, and we want to make sure that they stay in the city because the port's always going to be there, right, The hospitals are always going to be there, Tourism is always going to be there, and we're revitalizing now through the process of revitalizing the Inner Harbor as well. But we think that and like

manufacturing will continue to be a growth area for US.

Well, say more about the competitive advantage for Baltimore when it comes to attracting tech businesses and AI in particular, because it feels like at the moment, every city in the US certainly is kind of trying to do the same thing.

Right Yeah, I think for US, one, you get to be that close to your twenty nine minute training ride away from DC, and you don't have to pay DC prices, right Like, we're just going to keep And when you think about especially for defense and other tech companies, Fort Mead is there. You know, all of these things are in say, all these things are really close to the city of Baltimore, and you're in a perfect spot. You can get to DC and train in thirty minutes, you can get Philly by training forty five, you can get to New York in two hours and thirty minutes, and you're in this in where the location of Baltimore physically is an advantage over basically in my opinion, any of a city in the country. But when you add on

the infrastructure of the universities, Like, you're just not going to get a Johns Hopkins and the University of Maryland in the same place, in the same city anywhere else. You're just not going to get that kind of and the opportunities that Baltimore provides to folks.

I guess you're really close to the data centers in Virginia as well, technically.

Right, technically, yeah, we're close to them.

You know.

Again, like I said in the beginning, there's a different version of the housing crisis, the housing problem everywhere in New York. A lot of the discourse is just about zoning rules or people finding it it takes too long to get a permit, et cetera. What is the Baltimore version of that story?

And that's it. Listen, everywhere you go, you're going to hear the same thing. Whether it's me and me and mont Dommi talking about or Mayor Van Johnson from Savannah, we'll all talk about making sure that our systems are working better. Right. We were going through that now when I took office, they were still doing times by hand in city government. Wow. Right, so modern think about that right now, that like we can modernize those systems and we're modernizing our permit systems. Different agencies had systems that didn't talk to each other.

Times like in terms of okay, someone submits an application, or someone submits an application to make a change to a building or something like that. Other times that you track and you could say, okay, this has substantively gotten shorter or faster.

There some things have gotten shorter. And now we got to a point where a lot of our stuff is waiting for the applicant. Right, But it was about simple stuff, right, Well, there wasn't the applicant put something in, We put it back. The system didn't automatically notified applicant. Now they were made it waiting on them, right. Those kind of simple things when talking about operating a city government, are important to have from a systemic point of infrastructure point of view, making sure that those things are there, making sure that you have the staffing necessary to go through all of the things that are necessary. And that's where we've been really focusing building that infrastructure up both from the data

side and the technical side, but from the human capital as well, because you need both of them.

Do you have a favorite KPI when it comes to like local government efficiency, like a number that you watch to try to judge the progress you're making.

Well, see, for me, I like to say this, but that one is always going to be the violence number for me, Like, that's that's the one. Where are we every day? When I wake up, That's the first thing. Well, now it's in the afternoon while I'm here, but every day when I wake up at home, it's the first thing that I look at. And then it's also the vacance number, right like, where are we today? How many this?

Has it gone up? Has it gone down? We're going to make sure that we're hitting our goals, right like, all we had our fifteen percent goal for violence this year, right, Like, that's what I want to see continuously to do that. But I have a lot of things that that I follow. I'm a dashboard a data person, so I have dashboards.

We have a housing dashboard, public safety dashboard. We track a lot of things on dashboards.

I hate to even ask this question because it's so trite and so cliche to ask, but I'm just gonna ask it anyway. AI in terms of its actual application within city government, are there things yet at this point?

And what is it?

Late April twenty twenty six where you could say we are employing AI in some way that is making something better or is it an experimental stage. Do you have a lot of vendors promising magic or gon adout there?

So there you know that would never happen, No one, No one promises that.

What is the role of contemporary artificial intelligence models within city government?

So for us it could you know, we're our fire departments using house departments using it like even with vacance, to help identify the structures and whether like if we need to look at combination in those kind of things. And there'll be other things that we can push to use it, but we just have to be smart about it.

How many conversations here a lot of mayors trading tips of the story.

Oh that's that's that's the beauty of it, right that we're all listen, we I'm a part of the best Bloomberg Harvard class. That's the fifth class. So don't let any of the other mayors tell you that they're not from my class. They're not part of the best. But like, we all talk to each other pretty much every day, right, Like there's a whole bunch of mayors in the group chat there's group chats with a S with a S.

So we talk to mayors every day. I'm the president of the African American Mayors Association. We talk to each other every day. We're always sharing things. If you're a mayor, one of the best things that you have to be. In order to be a great mayor, you have to be a great thief. You have to steal from mayors across the country and steal ideas that make them better for your that because if you're not learning from your counterparts, who you're learning from.

I have just one more question, and it's entirely out of personal interest. But if I want to explore ball to more outside of the Greyhound bus station and the casino that's to it, where should I go?

Well, it depends what time. Now I have to ask questions. What time of year you're coming.

Let's say summer, That's when I'm next going to visit my dad.

And what do you what do you? What do you innswer? What are your interest?

Oh?

Culture?

Are gardening? Animals?

Yes? All right? Great food? If you're food, you're not a sports person nor.

I didn't want to say everything except sports, but that's.

Pretty much I need to know, those are kind of things I need. So if you're coming in the summertime, you love food, so you come to Baltimore, So you can't come to Baltimore not eat crabs. So would you prefer crabs or crab cakes?

Oh, that's really hard quest that.

Yeah, I feel it.

Crab cakes probably all right.

So if you're going to get crab cakes, you have to go and get the best crab cake in the world from Cocost Pub. You'll never eat another crab cake after having that. We're not start you there, but since you're into art and culture, you should then right now up and through August, we actually have at the Walters Art Gallery, which is free to the public, we actually have a Dorian Fletcher exhibit that is an exhibit that has the jewelry and the costumes from Black Panther or Waconda Forever. It's in display in Baltimore at the museum because we found out that some of the art at our museum inspired her to do her jewelry art. So that's a great way to spend your time there. But if you happen to come Memorial Day weekend, you can

do that and enjoy the art scape festival, our free Arts festival that is Memorial Day weekend, that has art vendors selling art, including at our Scout Art Fair, which is really great. You have musicians there, the roots will be there this summer. You have food galore, everything goal and it's there. The art you have to pay for, but everything else is there food and you have to pay for it, but the music is free.

Ninety nine you've sold me crabcakes and costumes. I am their mayor, Brandon Scott. Thank you so much for coming on all thoughts really increating.

For having me. Thank you.

That was fantastic. Thank you so much.

So, Joe. That was obviously very interesting. I never expected to interview the mayor of Baltimore in Madrid, but you know, one of those nice occasions that happens.

Life is interesting. No, I thought it was a really interesting episode. I mean, we could have gone for like an hour of tsking to go off on the wire. Obviously, but I get that I haven't really thought about that. This is the cultural depiction of a city in a way that does not Yeah, the richness of the depictions of New York City totally different, totally totally unfair.

I also thought it was.

Like interesting this thought, and I sort of had it before, but it makes sense, like crime has to be the number one thing. And sometimes I think that there are certain questions that economics itself is a plan is sort of ill equipped. Yeah, and look, you can have all the sort of right zoning and tax structures and capital structures in the world, but if people don't want to live in the vicinity of high crime rates, it's going to mean nothing. But data is going to be sort of a limit to what you can do on paper or with money or anything like that.

Yeah, and I thought it was really interesting to hear. How I guess developers slash businesses are actually thinking about it, because like, yes, it's at the forefront of everyone's mind, but it's kind of interesting to hear. Maybe a specific business will be like, we're interested once the homicide rate is below this particular number. I guess you have to have like a numerical target in your mind as well.

Yeah, that makes sense. Everyone should read the Peter Moscow's book. It's about he spent a year within the Baltimore Police Department. It's a really good you know, it's this cliche that we talk about in many fields which is that you know, once something becomes a measure, once you start targeting a measures, it stops being useful.

Right.

Yeah, so maybe in theory, at one point there might have been some relationship between the number of arrests that you make and the size of the crime mark. Suddenly then you're like, Okay, let's prioritize making arrests. And then once the measure becomes a target and its own right, it completely falls apart.

And it's sort of intuitive.

But he really like walks through exactly how and why that fails from a policing perspective.

It's really one of the more interesting books that I've read.

Yeah, that was like a stunning figure. This idea that the number of arrests has gone down so much along with the homicide. Right, I had no idea how many arrests there actually were before. That was crazy.

I think we should go to Baltimore soon. No, seriously, it sounded.

Like, you know, he made a very good case.

Pitsh to you at the end, you know, start to thinking about the crab, the food, the music, the arts.

Yeah we should.

I mean, you're I guess you're going to be there regardless, But now I want to take another Baltimore.

I'll be at the bus station and then moving onwards. But I think this time I am gonna I'm gonna try to stay for a time. There have some crabcakes, all right, shall we leave it there?

Let's leave it there.

This has been another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.

And I'm Joe Wisenthal. You can follow me at the Stalwart. Follow our producers Kerman Rodriez at Kerman armand Dashel Bennett at Dashbot, Kelbrooks at Kelbrooks and Kevin Lozano at Kevin Lloyd Lozano.

And from more odlocks content.

Go to Bloomberg dot com slash odd Lots for the daily newsletter and all of our episodes, and you can shout about all of these topics twenty four to seven in our discord Discord dot gg slash odlines.

And if you enjoy odd Lots, if you want us to go to Baltimore and eat crabcake, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes. Absolutely ad free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening

In in

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

Kapitelklicken springt direkt hin

Shownotes

Transkriptvom Podcast bereitgestellt · Zeitmarken springen hin