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Sunday, February 26, 2012

Baltimore Decides Some Neighborhoods Just Aren’t Worth Saving

In Baltimore the wrecks stretch for blocks in every direction. Shattered windows, buckling walls, sometimes just a façade, propped up by the houses on either side.

The vacant streets are punctuated by the odd meticulously-kept home; a living city slowly turning into a ghost town.

Baltimore has tried to deal with the tens of thousands of abandoned houses that mar the city. They’ve been refurbished. They’ve been raffled for $1. They’ve been demolished. But the number of vacant houses keeps growing.

There were radical efforts to seize abandoned homes and sell off city-owned property. In the nineties, $100 million was poured into some of the most troubled areas. Now the city is trying another approach: jump-starting the housing markets in healthier neighborhoods.

As Baltimore faces a $52 million budget shortfall, there is a more urgent need than ever to deal with the vacant homes, which still require public services like fire and police patrol.

47,000 vacant properties.

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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

The whole city of Baltimore is not worth saving.

Anonymous said...

A lot of DC developers/builders have been buying up entire blocks of old rowhouses. We get them for about 1-2K a piece, but only willing to buy entire blocks. Plan is to turn 2-to-1, and eventually gentrify. I know guys who've got deep pockets, and we've been talking about this(and doing it) for the past 5 years. It'll come.

Anonymous said...

about time someone decided