If this were 2021, and we're at CityLab, 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 want to talk to me about is, how did I reduce gun violence in Baltimore? And I think, it's not just that we did. It is how we did it. Folks are very... 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 put in the handcuffs, including in the rain, simply because I was outside and look 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 42 now, but 18 out of the 42 years that I've been alive, Baltimore had over 300 murders. And we went from, in the last six years, right, violence has dropped over almost 60% in the city of Baltimore, going from 300 plus to now, 133, which is still 133 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.
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast, I'm Tracy Alloway.
So Joe, we are here in Madrid as part of Bloomberg's CityLab. Tough, tough assignment.
I know. I know, it's a real hardship posting, a 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 Lots oeuvre.
Let's say, 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. If there's a housing crisis and so forth. And it's kind of true, but as we've discovered it, like there's a different fingerprint of it everywhere, right?
That's right, that's right. You know, we've got it. We were in, you know, Mount Airy, North Carolina, and there's hardly any... 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. 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 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 don'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 know, you see these websites advertising houses for a dollar, etc. I was 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.
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.
Thank you all for having me. Great to be here.
In Madrid no less. Tough assignment for all of us.
Second-best city in the world, I take it?
Second-greatest, outside of Baltimore. 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. I was born in 1984. So I had the fortune or misfortune of growing up in the 80s, 90s and 2000s. When you think about all of the crazy things that happen 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 live in the city that is the birthplace of racial redlining. It was signed at the very desk that I sit in. The first version of redlining the 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, the grass is going to be a foot high, right? 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. And 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. Now 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. So we knew that we needed a different strategy to dealing with this long-standing challenge. That is, you can directly... I show this at CityLab format. I'm a map and a data guy, right. When you look at it, the 1937 racial redlining map in Baltimore, and then you look at the vacancy map in 2020, or even the vacancy map today. It's the same neighborhoods, literally the same neighborhoods in Baltimore. They call it the black butterfly and the white L. 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 vacancies in Baltimore are a direct correlation to that, direct correlation to purposeful disinvestment into those neighborhoods and all the other things, the deindustrialization, all of those things that happen.
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, the moment you were born, growing up. What was the 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 in thinking about it differently is that... 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 vacant housing in Baltimore in four years, let alone eight. And a lot 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, with private community, with the folks in philanthropic and CDC and developers, they've always had the strategy. They also had the know-how and the ability of taking vacancy and even demolition and turn it into 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 mayoral term. And I think that's where we have struck gold, 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 mosques and everything all over the city of Baltimore and represents a lot of residents and neighborhood leaders, in our business community, in 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 15 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 government has given us $50 million a year. So now we've been able to... I'll just think about that. I told you it was 16,000 for 20 years, right? So we went from 16,000 when I took office, now down to 11,806 as of early, early this morning.
Do you get a daily report on there? You have it down in some kind of a dashboard, a website you can go look?
It's reframe.baltimore.gov, will tell you how many, right. And the number sometimes fluctuates because some go up. But it is 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 vacant for a dollar, they'll go away. Yeah. No. Yeah. Because one, the overwhelming majority of the vacancies in the city of Baltimore are not owned by the city of Baltimore. They're owned by private folks who are sitting on them, old 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 for a dollar. But if I sell you a house for a dollar and you don't have the $100, $150,000 needed to actually get it up to living standards, it's still going to remain vacant.
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. A country's not two blocks are the same, right? Everything is different. That's why our strategy is block by block. But just to give you the historical context, we know that we got a lot of vacant lots 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. So we had that. Then we had deindustrialization. We had Bethlehem Steel 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 $100, 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, 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 on to that, that a lot of folks that left, left their houses, and people die, right? Older folks die. They left them to people who didn't care for them. You had a lot of folks come in and buy up property that were vacant when people did move out, and just sitting on there, they're just waiting for prices to recover, waiting for the city or someone to come along and give them more than what they paid for. Right. But then we have a lot of folks who pass away and their kids who 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 600,000, right? You think about the amount of people that left the city of Baltimore for a multitude of reasons. And then when you add on to that redlining, deindustrialization, 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 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 going to take the public money to see their properties and 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, what are you going 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 in. Okay. Really. So we do block-level planning for these, which is also about strategic. We have strategic investments on seven of them where most of the vacancies are and where what we're telling folks is that we have a plan for each block. And we don't just do big developers, we 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 land bank like Detroit. Well, we visited Detroit and they're like, well, you guys don't need to do that because your housing and your housing department has the authorities there that our land bank has. Now, we didn't have that within the city 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 through how the heck this works. You own a house? Or you own a house that's vacant, and then our housing department and inspectors come out. Someone complains there's a vacant house to me. The owner's not taking care of it. We give them a citation. They have 30 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, clean it, etc. We have raised the fines up. We can fine them up to $1,000. Then they get a vacant building notice. Right. And if we want to take that property through receivership and all these other things, we have to go to court. And they know how long that takes. That could take, you know, it used to take 2 to 3 years. Right now we work with the court. We have a special interim docket, right, when 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, it takes time to assemble blocks. Right now, think about this block, 4800 block of Park Avenue, right, to the Park Heights master plan. 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 2008 and 2009. We finally had them all demolished around 11 or 12. The first new housing units didn't get built until I was mayor. Right. That's when you talk about those large amounts of vacant properties. It takes a long time when it's a lot of them. The single ones you can replenish 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 in. Everyone has to be aligned and making sure that we are not just giving it to people who just want to make a buck. Yeah, they understand that. Yes, we want them to make money. We believe in capitalism, but they have to understand how this is going to work to improve those neighborhoods. And we've seen so many neighborhoods take great, great, great change, like Johnson Square in East Baltimore, Oliver in East Baltimore, where, you know, they used to film 'The Wire', and now they're selling houses over there.
Like, I was wondering how long until we reference 'The Wire?'
You know, it's going to happen eventually. Yeah. It had to happen.
A blessing and a curse, I imagine.
Mainly a curse for us. Mainly a curse for us. We don't like the show at all.
Oh, really? Wait, we just changed the entire subject. Let's just talk about 'The Wire.' You wouldn't have... you go off on 'The Wire.'
I guess it's for us. 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 Yorkers, right?
I see what you're saying.
That's what I'm saying, right? Yeah, yeah. And for us, we've only had those shows. Right? Right. 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, we're on a show. HBO, hint, hint, because in New York we have 'Seinfeld' and 'Friends.' All these, we've got all that. We only have the bad. And, you know, people just like, oh, yeah, I saw this show. This is what the whole city is. Yeah.
All right, fair enough. I was going to ask, so when you're... 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 actually go?
Demolish or renovate is made by us beforehand. Okay. If the houses are going to be demolished, we do that. We do that in partnership with the state. The renovation, when we award an RFP to someone, we're awarding it for housing, like to renovate that. So that's what we do, but that again goes back to the block-level planning. Right. And making sure that we like, okay, in this neighborhood, we need this. Right. And this block, these houses are too far gone. We're just going to knock that down, make it park space or RFP the land. Right. This block, this small developer can handle. This block only has three vacancies and it's a block of ten. They can handle just doing these particular ones. We have scattered sites. So we do that identification through our block-by-block stages, 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 a TIF, tax increment financing, for like new developments right now for us. Think about like Harbor East or Harbor Point, all the fancy areas. Well, we're actually doing it on TIF. And this is the first time... you got... what is TIF again? Where I cut in and said, okay, well, explain how TIF works. Tax increment financing. We're essentially like that. You will put all this money upfront and you will get it back on the back end, which is what they use to incentivize development all around the country. This is the first time that tool is being used for something that is not a contiguous area. So what we're doing is we're using the VRV and the vacant building notice all across the city and identifying like, we're going to put a TIF on that. So we offered it out and people were going crazy like, it's not going to work, no one's going to apply for this, and you have to have it in one area. That's the way the TIF works. Well, we put it out in our first round, $28 million worth of TIF financing. We got $380 million worth of applications. So the demand is there. And this is affordable housing TIF in neighborhoods. And you can see if you look at our map, right, you can see that it's going right in those redlined neighborhoods, right in those disinvested neighborhoods. In fact, as a part of my State of the City, we unveiled the investment 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 and Baltimore was purple. So the darker the purple, the more investment. And you can see that we are strategically investing in the neighborhoods that have been disinvested in, in the by the five or the redlined neighborhoods. And that's how we're going to build upon what we're doing.
Wait, why do people think that TIF only works for contiguous areas? I guess because no one tried it before. I hadn't looked at it.
But it's probably also a little bit of hidden racism in people that were saying that. They were also saying, like, you can't do TIF. That is dicey. Yeah. 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 housing? Let's say you raise a tract of land or whatever, and you're thinking, 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, freestanding single home? Like, how do you think about envisioning what the neighborhood should or could be?
Again, I'm going to go back to the neighborhood block-level planning. Okay, so 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, in that block of Park that I talked about where we knocked down, which were... we have row homes, connected row homes for the most part. Yeah, we are 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 row 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 who want to remain in the community to do that. The next phase that we're doing there, they will break ground on before the year's out, hopefully, is the first homeownership 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 a multitude of opportunities because 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. Or vacant houses, I should say. We've done episodes on Odd Lots 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 land?
Well, we actually didn't get any public pushback, right? The reality was 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 passed, 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 an independent city. There's no county government for us. Amen. Hallelujah. It's just us and the state and the federal government. But there's been this sentiment that like the city doesn't know what it's doing, etc., etc., but you can't really argue with the data, right? Whether it's, you know, we've basically eliminated one in four vacant houses in my time in office. Right? We reduced violence in the city to the lowest levels on record. You can't really argue with the numbers. So now folks are more ready to give us more of that 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 decline been a sort of, I guess, a tailwind 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 2021 and we're at CityLab, 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 want to talk to me about is how did I reduce gun violence in Baltimore? And I think it's not just that we did. It is how we did it. Folks are very... 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 put in handcuffs, including in the rain, simply because I was outside and look 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, I'm 42 now, but 18 out of the 42 years that I've been alive, Baltimore had over 300 murders. And we went from, in the last six years, right, violence has dropped over almost 60% in the city of Baltimore, going from 300 plus to now, 133, which is still 133 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 by saying that doesn't work. Right. So if you think about those years of zero tolerance. So I'll give you the year, for example, 2004, the city had 278 homicides, right? They arrested 91,000 people in a city of 600,000. Oh, my gosh. Last year we had 133. We arrested 17,000 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 our past as a city council president in 2019, the mayor of Baltimore has to present a comprehensive violence prevention plan at least every two years. And that is what we did. In 2021, I unveiled our first comprehensive violence prevention plan. I said that we will reduce homicides in the city by 15% from one year to the next, and people literally laughed because they laughed because one, they thought that was ridiculous. And two, this is not going to work the way you say, because we're going to be smart on crime. Being smart on crime is how you really get tough on it. Yeah, we're going to throw away the idea that you just go out and arrest everybody for everything, and crime will go down because it didn't. But what we've been able to do is one, we use our focused deterrence model, what we call GVRS, the Group Violence Reduction Strategy, which we actually use data, which is something also funded partially by the 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 that, over 90% of them have not been a recidivist or recidivism, when you think about that. And then at the same time, we put $50 million into our community violence intervention ecosystem, where we pay people who used to be involved in it, like 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 this room 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. We won the largest settlement against a gun store in this country's history. We won 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 in historic ways. That's the way that we've been able to do it.
There's a professor at John Jay College, Peter Moskos. Do you know who that is?
I know he, yeah, he wrote this. He spent a few years within the Baltimore Police Department, and he wrote a great book about basically the terrible incentives that happen when you start incentivizing just like pure numbers, right? Yes. And why that completely fails as a crime prevention.
I can't remember the name of the book right now, but it's really enlightening. And he makes it very clear why, if the incentive is to just maximize the number of arrests or whatever, that will never work. In terms of who would have thought that incentives matter? Crazy, crazy stuff.
