Perhaps it’s because higher education has been so much in the news lately, but Mayor Brandon Scott’s newly unveiled plan to combat vacant housing has the feel of a hastily written undergraduate term paper. It’s overly complicated, insanely ambitious and depends on funding that simply isn’t there. The cynical among us might assume the incumbent is more focused on the Democratic primary five months from now than on offering a realistic proposal to redevelop Baltimore’s scourge of abandoned properties. It isn’t that he’s identified the wrong problem, it’s more like he’s more than a day and a dollar short with a possible solution. Why wasn’t this on the table a year ago when Wes Moore was elected governor and the state wasn’t facing so much of a fiscal crisis?
What a difference that one year makes. State lawmakers are just weeks away from returning to Annapolis, where the cupboard is more than a little bare. Governor Moore is already talking about major spending cuts to reduce billions of dollars in state spending over the next several years. And what is the city’s mayor expecting from him? Nothing less than $900 million more over the next 15 years. Scott sees this as a relatively modest request given how the state doesn’t share a portion of sales tax revenue with the city. What he neglects to mention, however, is the reasoning behind that quirk in the tax code: Maryland allows local governments, Baltimore included, to “piggyback” on the income tax instead, sparing low-income households the regressive sales tax in favor of a more progressive one. The challenge for Baltimore (and why it’s maxed out its tax rate) is the abundance of low-income households that pay relatively little in income tax.
Again, Scott has the correct target. Baltimore’s chief malady is concentrated poverty and neighborhoods victimized by decades of redlining and racial discrimination. Those thousands of vacant properties are deadly fire traps, and expecting owners — even relatively deep-pocketed developers — to renovate them like small gardens in the middle of barren deserts is more than a bit unrealistic. Providing help with financing (public and private), with demolition and construction, with upgraded public infrastructure, all are welcome. But it’s going to take a lot more than the wave of a magic TIF (tax increment financing) wand and the issuance of special bonds to pay for all that design and construction.
The mayor had a golden opportunity to have a much greater impact on this front with its $641 million American Rescue Plan Act grant. He says he’s used $146 million of that federal money for neighborhood improvements over the last two years, reducing vacant properties by 14%. But he’s also used portions of that to keep the city’s struggling Hilton Baltimore Inner Harbor afloat, to upgrade public libraries, to modernize certain conference rooms to better accommodate telework by city employees during the peak of the pandemic — just to name a few curiosities. In March of last year, we asked the question: “Baltimore’s new mayor has a new plan to deal with vacant housing, but is it bold enough?” The answer is no, it wasn’t then, and it probably can’t be now.
If the mayor is serious about finding a new revenue source, he should probably join the longstanding effort in Annapolis to have the sales tax apply to services and not just goods. At least nine states do this, but it’s proven a tough sell in the State House. A simpler solution might be for Baltimore to directly receive a portion of the state’s lottery and gaming revenues. Given how gambling adversely impacts low-income households, the argument could certainly be made that the city should be first in line. But then there’s that growing state budget deficit and the worry that a long-awaited boost in public education spending may be delayed or deferred. Messing with the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future is probably a non-starter with Democrats and rightly so.
That leaves the continued slog of tearing down those vacant homes while rebuilding whole neighborhoods where possible with whatever combination of public and private monies might actually be available. This slow and methodical approach doesn’t make much of a campaign pitch, but at least it’s achievable — with support from allies like the Greater Baltimore Committee, Baltimoreans United In Leadership Development and the philanthropic community — and a solid commitment that extends long past a college semester or political campaign.
Baltimore Sun editorial writers offer opinions and analysis on news and issues relevant to readers. They operate separately from the newsroom.
