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

23:41Tracy Alloway: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, re-imagining 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 solo home? I'm 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. So this is Baltimore, right? So those neighborhoods love their neighborhood aesthetic and they want to keep them as much as possible, right?

24:18So even, for example, in that block of Park Island I talked about where we knocked down, which were, we have row homes, connected row homes for the most part in Baltimore. We have single family too. I live in one. But connected real homes, even though we built a multi-unit senior apartment building for senior living there, it actually looks on the outside like the real 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 want to remain in the community to do that.

24:52The next phase that we're doing there that we'll break ground on before the year's 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 a multitude of opportunities because it's not, it can't just be all high end. It can't just be all affordable.

25:25We 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 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 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 passed, and now we're able to do that at the local level.

26:05And 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 and 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 authority to deal with the issues because it's also a drain on them.

26:43And that's what we're saying to them is that this takes money out of the state's pocket. 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.

26:56Tracy Alloway: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?

27:36Now, the only thing people want 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 put in 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 42 now, but 18 out of the 42 years that I've been alive, Baltimore had over 300 murders.

28:16And we went from in the last six years, right, violence has dropped over almost 60 percent in the city of Baltimore. We're 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.

28:36Tracy Alloway: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 zero tolerance, so I'll give you a year, for example, 2004, the city had 278 homicides, right? They arrested 91 ,000 people in a city of 600 ,000. 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 law that I passed as the city council president in 2019, the mayor of Baltimore has to present a comprehensive violence prevention plan at least every two years.

29:27And that is what we did in 2021. I unveiled our first comprehensive violence prevention plan. I said that we 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, 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 crime will go down because it didn't. But what we've been able to do is one, we use our focus deterrence model, what we call GVR arrest, 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.

30:17And 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 rectified or recidivated. 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 their life to prevent conflict, to go out there through safe streets.

31:01and We Are Us and these other organizations to do that great work because they're 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. 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 and historic ways. That's the way that we've been able to do it.

31:31Tracy Alloway:There's a professor at John Jay College, Peter Moscos, who do you know who that is? I know he is. 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 a pure 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 it's really enlightening. 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 a crisis. Who would have thought that incentives matter?

32:05Crazy, crazy stuff. And you can see, look, 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 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, OK, once homicides are under like 100 per year, we'll go in.

32:40So yes and no. Right. I will tell you that, for example, if we're at the In-N-Out Shopping Centers conference in Vegas every May a few years ago, let's say 21 and 22. Folks will be saying to Mr. Mayor, I love Baltimore, but until 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 300 homicides, right? It's they don't depends on the person. But, you know, it was the 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 with some folks would still invest if you show them the plan, even before we actually were able to implement the plan.

33:21But it was the big elephant in the room. And we've been able to really show people that we have it. And now folks are like, oh, you guys are right. We're ready to come. 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 I mentioned the 133. And I said, don't clap. We haven't done anything yet. That's 133 too many. And I don't want my team to feel like it's time to celebrate. I said, 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 into.

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36:46Tracy Alloway:Let's talk about, you know, because this is Odd Lots Finance Podcast. Let's talk a little bit more about the capital structure and how that works. You mentioned, okay, money from the state, but what are some of these financing vehicles? How are they structured? Whose balance sheets do they sit on? What is the city fronting? How does that fit together? The city is fronting the TIF money, obviously. The city money is the TIF money for us. The state is fronting their$50 million investment each and every year. And then we have the private investment and we have philanthropic investment into the vacant strategy.

37:19So 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's books. And even some of the capital investment in our own capital budget is also on the city's books as well.

37:42Tracy Alloway:Do you get pushback 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 only 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, below market rate, whatever it is? That's a very important thing to me, right? I love the city of D.C. 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.

38:17Right. Like they they feel like they've lost a bit of their culture with a lot of folks coming in from all over and feel 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 this can benefit from it as well. And we do that through things like my buyback 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 homeowners.

38:50Very familiar New York City problem as well. Yeah. And it's also why we work with different kinds of developers, right? Who, smaller developers who are taking these other things and we can partner them with folks to 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 subreddit 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.

39:25Yeah. So what's the deal with the water bills? So I think that what I would say is that I thought it was going to 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 no developer has said to me that like, oh, I'm not going to come and renovate houses in Baltimore because of the water bill. We know that costs are rising across the board. And we're going through a process now even. And where this conversation really normally leads to is like, oh, well, the county pays less for their water than we do, and they don't have to pay all these fees.

40:07And then you have to spend this long explanation saying, well, they actually do pay those fees, except for the county just hides the fees and other bills that they don't see. And we're working with five 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. So we pay every month. They pay every four months. All of these kind of things convolute the issue. But water rates, and listen, the thing about water utilities is that taxpayer dollars for like property taxes and other money doesn't go into that.

40:42Water 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 simplified, 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.

41:15Tracy Alloway:So we're here at the CityLab conference, and I'm sure every different city all around the world, for the most part, different issues, different challenges they're facing. But a common theme in much of the world is what you said at the beginning, deindustrialization. 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, I don't know, maybe this is just a very conceptual question. But, OK, 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?

42:02Tracy Alloway:No, just in Baltimore. 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. I thought we were going to talk about the wire again. The key bridge. How's that going? It's going. It's going. It's going. The bridge has been demolished and is moving pretty fast for an infrastructure project of that size. People are like, oh, the bridge is 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 ed's and med city right with hopkins and university of maryland we're a big arts and culture city and we're a growing tech city which is where we think the growth is for us we had like 600 million in 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.

43:02They're growing out of UND. 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. The 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 light 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 U.S. certainly is kind of trying to do the same thing, right?

43:33Yeah, I think for us, one, you get to be that close to a 29-minute train ride away from D.C. and you don't have to pay D.C. prices, right? We're just going to keep it. And when you think about, especially for defense and other tech companies, Fort Meade is there. All of these things are, and I say all these things are really close to the city of Baltimore, and you're in a perfect spot. You can get to D.C. on train in 30 minutes. You can get to Philly by train in 45. You can get to New York in two hours and 30 minutes. And you're in this where the location of Baltimore physically is an advantage over basically, in my opinion, any other city in the country.

44:12But 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.

44:34Tracy Alloway: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 takes too long to get a permit, et cetera. What is the Baltimore version of that story? That's it. Listen, everywhere you go, you're going to hear the same thing. Whether it's me and Mayor Mondami talking about it or Mayor Van Johnson from Savannah, we all talk about making sure that our systems are working better. We're going through that now. When I took office, they were still doing time sheets by hand in city government.

45:11So think about that. 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 the like in terms of okay someone submits an

45:24Tracy Alloway: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 notify the applicant now they were waiting on them, right? Those kind of simple things when you talk 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.

46:08And 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 local government efficiency, like a number that you watch to try to judge the progress you're making? Well, see, for me, I hate to say this, but that one is always going to be the violence number for me. 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.

46:41And then it's also the vacancy number, right? Like, where are we today? How many? Has it gone up? Has it gone down? We want to make sure that we're hitting our goals, right? Like, are we at our 15 % 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 I follow. I'm a dashboard data person. So I have dashboards. We have a housing dashboard, public safety dashboard. We track a lot of things on dashboards.

47:07Tracy Alloway:I hate to even ask this question because it's so trite and so cliche to ask, but I'm just going to ask it anyway. AI, in terms of its actual application within city government, are there things yet at this point, what is it, late April, 2026, 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 if you adopt their solution? No, that would never happen. No one promises that their thing is going to solve the problem. What is the role of contemporary artificial intelligence models within city government?

47:46So for us, our fire department is using it, the housing department is using it, even with vacants to help identify the structures and whether if we need to look at condemnation and those kind of things. And there will be other things that we can push to use it. We just have to be smart about it.

48:02Tracy Alloway:How many conversations here at CityLab? Have I had? A lot. People are just hit mayors trading, tips and stories. Oh, that's the beauty of it, right? Listen, 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. They're not from my class. They're not part of the best. But we all talk to each other pretty much every day, right? There's a whole bunch of mayors. There's a group chat. There's group chats with an S. So we talk to mayors every day. I'm the president of the African American Mayors Association. Jason, we talk to each other every day.

48:35We'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 and make them better for you. Because if you're not learning from your counterparts, who are you learning from? I have just one more question, and it's entirely out of personal interest. But if I want to explore Baltimore outside of the Greyhound bus station and the casino I know that's next to it. Where should I go? Well, it depends. What time? Now I have to ask a question. What time of year are you coming?

49:08Let's say summer. That's when I'm next going to visit my dad in Annapolis. And what are your interests? Oh, culture, art, parks, gardening, animals. Yes. All right, great. Food. If you're food and you're not a sports person. No. All right, great. I didn't want to say everything except sports, but that's pretty much it. I need to know. Those are the kind of things I need to know. So if you're coming in the summertime, you love food. So you're coming to Baltimore, so you can't come to Baltimore and not eat crabs. So would you prefer crabs or crab cakes? Oh, that's a really hard question. Look at that.

49:40Yeah. 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 Coco's Pub. You'll never eat another crab cake after having that one. Oh, that sounds good. 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 has the jewelry and the costumes from Black Panther or Wakanda Forever. is 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.

50:24So 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 Artscape 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 galore. And it's there. The art you have to pay for, but everything else is there. Food you have to pay for, but the music is$3.99. You've sold me crab cakes and costumes. I am there. Mayor Brandon Scott, thank you so much for coming on All Thoughts.

51:00Thank you for having me. Thank you.

51:01Tracy Alloway:That was fantastic. Thank you so much.

51:15So, 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.

51:25Tracy Alloway:Life is interesting. No, I thought there was a really interesting episode. I mean, we could have gone for like an hour just asking him to go off on the wire, obviously. But I get that. I hadn'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 really makes sense. Like crime has to be the number one thing. And sometimes I think that there are certain questions that economics itself as a discipline is sort of ill-equipped to deal with.

52:00Tracy Alloway: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 that 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.

52:35I guess you have to have like a numerical target in your mind as well.

52:39Tracy Alloway:Yeah, that makes sense. Everyone should read the Peter Moscos 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 measure, it stops being useful. Right. 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 rate. Suddenly then you're like, OK, let's prioritize making arrests. And then once the measure becomes a target in its own right, it completely falls apart.

53:15Tracy Alloway: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 rate. I had no idea like 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. I pitched to you at the end, you know, started thinking about the crab, the food, the music, the art.

53:47Tracy Alloway:I was like, yeah, we should have. I mean, I guess you're going to be there regardless. But now I want to take another Baltimore trip. I'll be at the bus station and then moving onwards. But I think this time I am going to try to stay for a day or two. Yeah, spend a little time there. Have some crab cakes. 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 Weisenthal. You can follow me at The Stalwart. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at CarmenArmand, Dashel Bennett at Dashbot, Kel Brooks at Kel Brooks, and Kevin Lozano at Kevin Lloyd Lozano.

54:19Tracy Alloway:And for more OddLots content, go to Bloomberg.com slash OddLots where we have a daily newsletter on all of our episodes. And you can chat about all these topics 24-7 in our Discord, discord.gg slash OddLots. And if you enjoy OddLots, if you want us to go to Baltimore and eat crab cake, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, or 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.

55:22We'll see you next time.

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