I have examined the relationship between historic district designation and neighborhood change in two very different cities, Baltimore (chapter 2) and central Brooklyn (chapter 3). I emphasized how much the relationship can vary from city to city, even neighborhood to neighborhood, but I also examined historic designation’s varying role as a mechanism for urban policy making or community intervention. One purpose for examining Baltimore and Brooklyn was to complicate the presumed relationship between historic preservation and neighborhood change. Finer-grained data like mine reveal that it is not straightforwardly causal, and the direction envisioned by the conventional account may even be backward. But these distinctive cities deserve further investigation with regard to the qualities that make them so different. My task now is to consider preservation’s role in one city plagued by vacancy and abandonment (chapter 4) and another subject to intense development pressure (chapter 5).
Baltimore’s historic structures and their relationship to neighborhoods present problems specific to legacy cities that have lost a significant proportion of their population and employment base. Population has declined by approximately 36 percent from the middle of the twentieth century to the present day,1 and many of the homes and workplaces of those nearly 340,000 departed people have been left vacant. The preservation literature is filled with optimistic discourse about “rightsizing,”2 adjusting the built environment and infrastructure of legacy cities to their current population in the interest of encouraging revitalization. However, the scale of vacancy in Baltimore (and in a number of other cities) is such that the sheer numbers make optimism difficult. As one Baltimore preservationist told me, “trying to do preservation in this huge overwhelming problem is very difficult.”3
Baltimore has vast numbers of older buildings, historic by definition, that go unused or underused simply by virtue of there being fewer residents to use them. These buildings are effectively abandoned and are threatened by the forces of entropy. In some cases, the buildings have become the property of the city, although the resources necessary to seize them are often unavailable for the same reason the buildings are empty—the city’s decline. More often they remain technically the property of an individual or have been foreclosed upon by a bank. The buildings have often been ignored and uninhabited for decades and are subject to fines for their condition and tax arrears. Complications associated with their current ownership are the primary obstacles to the city’s ability to seize them. The incomprehension of neighborhood residents about this procedural complexity with regard to places they experience as home leads residents to believe city officials are incompetent and corrupt.
Comprehending the scale of this issue is key to both assessing its impact and addressing it, but the scale proves a challenge in itself. James Cohen explained that one of the key problems associated with unused housing is counting it. In 2001, according to Cohen, the “number of abandoned housing units in [Baltimore was] between 12,700 and 42,480,”4 an almost ludicrous degree of uncertainty. The measurement problem stems from legitimate concerns such as how long a housing unit must be empty to be considered abandoned, which is compounded by who should do the counting, but the huge range and difficulty of establishing a clear answer points to the scale of the problem and the difficulty in addressing it.
Cohen does four other things in this piece that are important to keep in mind while we dig deeper into these issues.5 Housing abandonment has often been treated as a symptom of urban decline, and Cohen explains that it also needs to be understood as a cause: “Abandoned homes are symptomatic of other problems, [but] they also contribute to neighborhood decline and frustrate revitalization efforts.”
Second, he explores the expense associated with rehabilitating abandoned housing, pointing to the necessity for significant subsidies to make rehabilitated housing affordable to existing residents. In the three neighborhood revitalization plans he examines, subsidies are required to produce affordable units (according to neighborhood median incomes) that range from $36,000 in Historic East Baltimore to $80,000 in Sandtown-Winchester.
Third, and related, Cohen argues that neighborhood housing plans must respond to the needs of existing residents because plans that rely on attracting new, relatively wealthier residents are unrealistic in the context of decades of disinvestment and decline. Beyond housing rehabilitation, this will require significant investment in “employment, economic development, health, public safety, and school-reform initiatives.”
This gets to the fourth contribution. All plans for dealing with abandonment need to balance neighborhood input with an overall sense of the city’s structure, resources, and trajectory—a standard problem with community planning—to succeed it can neither be exclusively bottom-up nor top-down. A critical comment by Culhane and Hillier, published with Cohen’s piece, reaffirms the difficulty of doing anything, pointing to local government fiscal constraint, private investors’ uncertainty, and the unlikelihood of significant new federal spending.6
Rates of vacancy and abandonment vary widely across Baltimore, and empty buildings are scattered throughout neighborhoods. The people who left the city after 1950 did so for systemic reasons (the postwar suburban boom, racism in lending, etc.), but they left in an unsystematic pattern. This may seem obvious, but the effect is important. Although entire neighborhood populations of residents left, they left gaps throughout existing neighborhoods rather than uniformly vacating areas of the city. The same could be said, of course, of those who have remained—they are distributed among blocks sometimes full of others, sometimes dominated by vacant buildings. Their location is substantially determined by the availability or absence of resources that afford choice in the real estate market. This uneven, inconsistent distribution of vacancy makes the ongoing delivery of city services more complicated and expensive and the consolidation of large tracts of land for new uses more difficult.
Project CORE: Systematic Demolition and Blight Removal
Demolition programs, initiated recently in many legacy cities, attempt to impose some logic on the uneven geography of abandonment. Detroit’s program has demolished 20,814 vacant buildings since 2014,7 completely altering the landscape of the city and dramatically constraining preservation efforts. Project CORE (Creating Opportunities for Renewal and Enterprise) was announced with great fanfare in January 2016 by Maryland Governor Larry Hogan. It was positioned as the state’s effort to support Baltimore by addressing the vacancy and abandonment crisis.
Project CORE originally proposed to demolish 4,000 units, or about one-fourth of the 16,000-plus reported abandoned by the city, in four years and support extensive revitalization. CORE intended to introduce new efficiencies into the demolition process by focusing on clearing entire blocks of buildings rather than scattered demolitions on still-inhabited blocks that then require expensive stabilization. This effort would be funded by almost $714 million from the state and implemented primarily through the Maryland Stadium Authority, a government organ with redevelopment experience on a large scale.8
Alan Mallach argued initially that legacy cities needed to be rightsized, removing abandoned buildings in a way that the remaining built environment is appropriate to serve the current population.9 Recent scholarship on demolition is substantially defined by the contrast between Mallach’s initial position, widely shared, and that of Jason Hackworth. Hackworth argues that ad hoc demolition in U.S. cities in decline (he does not use the term “legacy cities”) has removed more housing than the federally funded urban renewal of the late 1950s through the early 1970s, but that the neighborhoods affected were not improved by this work. Hackworth labels more than 260 neighborhoods in forty-nine U.S. cities as “extreme housing loss neighborhoods,” and he argues that they were further damaged by demolition, their marginalization exaggerated.10 Moreover, Hackworth suggests that race is a key component in the ad hoc process.11 Mallach’s position has shifted over time and become more skeptical, emphasizing the need for a comprehensive strategy that addresses structural factors when attempting to improve the landscape through mass demolition.12
Note that the ad hoc programs Hackworth criticizes and Mallach moves away from—roughly demolishing abandoned houses wherever they are found—are different from the purportedly systematic approach to demolition undertaken by CORE, although a systematic approach might still have unequal outcomes. A recent report by the Urban Institute illustrates what Morgan State University professor Lawrence Brown has aptly characterized as the two shapes that describe racialized inequality in Baltimore (figure 4.1): “the Black butterfly” and “the White L.”13
FIGURE 4.1 The Black butterfly and the White L (percent Black by neighborhood)
The Urban Institute report goes on to demonstrate that other measures of inequality such as poverty follow the same butterfly pattern, whereas most of the investment in Baltimore, particularly through real estate sales and lending, is concentrated in the L. Unfortunately, Project CORE uses an analysis of Baltimore housing markets that reflects this same pattern as its guiding mechanism for targeting demolition and rehabilitation funding to encourage revitalization, which likely reinforces this pattern.14
The Project CORE quarterly report for fiscal year 2017 explains that “Baltimore City has 297 distinct neighborhoods, of which 120 are in a Stressed Housing Market, based on Baltimore City’s 2014 Housing Market Typology. A stressed neighborhood is where 6 percent to 30 percent of the housing stock is vacant.”15 CORE demolition funds are primarily directed to stressed areas, parts of the city already suffering from decades of disinvestment, and most revitalization funds are channeled into middle market and choice areas, parts of the city that have held their value through ongoing investment or that have recently attracted new attention. There is a conspicuous economic efficiency logic here, but it reproduces historical inequality.
I rely on a range of sources to construct a profile and critique of Baltimore’s ongoing Project CORE. I begin by integrating press coverage, primarily from the Baltimore Sun, with the comparative investigation of CORE in a master’s thesis on historic preservation by Kacy Rohn.16 I use Rohn’s work primarily for the data she provides, which is hard to come by from Project CORE, but I also take her critique seriously. I put these sources into conversation with interviews with Johns Hopkins, executive director of Baltimore Heritage, and Eric Holcomb, executive director of the Commission on Historic and Architectural Preservation and Historic and Architecture Preservation Division Chief, City of Baltimore, on their role in and perceptions of the project and its underlying process from a preservationist perspective, both from inside the city bureaucracy and advocating from outside it. Finally, I analyze the quarterly reports on the progress of CORE published by the Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development, beginning with the period from April through June of 2017 and extending through the quarter concluding in June 2018.
Profile and Critique
How new and different is Project CORE? Close scrutiny by the press suggests that “just $61.5 million [of the announced $714 million] represents a clear, increased pledge of taxpayer funds that would not otherwise have been available to help rebuild Baltimore over the next four years.” These funds were not yet even budgeted at the time of Hogan’s announcement and the corresponding Baltimore Sun editorial.17 Rohn concurs, quoting a report by the Maryland Department of Legislative Services:
Roughly 90 percent of the project’s financing was “either already-planned DHCD funding, already-anticipated tax credits, or subsidized financing that is not appropriate for demolition work and is not direct State support.” This analysis also raised numerous questions about whether C.O.R.E. was in fact new programming, rather than a repackaging of existing DHCD efforts.18
Rohn also notes that calling the project “Creating Opportunities for Renewal and Enterprise” implies a long-term focus belied by the emphasis on rapid demolition as evidence of progress and the seemingly “haphazard” approach. Demolition clearly “creates opportunities” in clearing vacant properties, but renewal and enterprise are much more complex processes that require the integration of programs, patience, and time. More important, renewal efforts, if they yield anything, often do so over the span of multiple mayoral or gubernatorial terms, thus making them less attractive as investments of political capital because their yields might accrue primarily to one’s successor.
Rohn’s interviews with preservationists suggest that “opinions are mixed.” “They had agreed early on not to oppose the entire project,” but hoped that CORE might focus more and more broadly on preserving historic resources.19 The preservationists Rohn spoke with are affirmatively involved in the process of selecting properties for demolition, but
despite the veneer of a carefully deliberative process [they] report that the execution process is quite rushed…. Sites are selected for expediency, and not in coordination with a larger redevelopment plan. One stakeholder expressed the view that any attempt to match demolitions to a strategy for reuse of the site is “secondary to blight clearance.”20
My interviewees confirm some aspects of this account and dispute others.
CORE is supposed to involve a significant component of community input in the process of targeting resources, but Rohn reports that the associated outreach efforts are more for show than they are substantive. She refers, for example, to a public demolition meeting on June 29, 2016, soliciting resident input despite the fact that a list of properties to be demolished had been circulated among stakeholders in February and the decision-making process about demolition and stabilization was well underway. This “belies the claim that this is a process driven chiefly by the community’s ‘wish list’ of what should come down.” One might not expect residents to favor demolition, although the observation that the vacant properties contribute to crime is common. Rohn reports the sense that disinvestment has been so long-running and intense that “any investment is seen as a positive.” She quotes a preservationist who calls this “planning from a point of despair” and claims that the choice to support demolition in these circumstances may not really represent a choice at all.21
Nineteen months after Project CORE’s introduction, Ian Duncan reported that only $5 million of the state’s money had been spent and that the Maryland Stadium Authority had demolished 131 houses. Since the project’s initiation, the vast majority of demolitions in the city were funded and undertaken by the city itself, most of these because of safety issues associated with collapsing buildings (thus demolitions that would have happened regardless). By late 2017, the advertised goal of the program had shifted to “blight removal,” allowing its political boosters to include rehabilitated units as well as demolished ones in the total.22 The difficulty of claiming title to abandoned properties and relocating the few residents remaining in primarily abandoned blocks has slowed the process. To whatever degree this reflects the inefficiencies of Baltimore’s bureaucracy, it also reflects its diligence (not shortcutting complex procedures). Moreover, although I want to foster some skepticism about the city’s capacities, it should be noted that many scholars and local activists would prefer a program whose successes involve greater investment in rehabilitation than in demolition. Thus the shift to include that investment in CORE’s numbers might be seen as a positive sign, not just spin.
Rohn reports that “reactions to this shift in focus are mixed.” It has been generally positive among preservationists and community activists where renewal projects have been funded, but it “has caught off-guard some residents who expected to see the widespread clearance of blighted properties that was promised at Project C.O.R.E.’s outset.” Rohn quotes then Delegate Antonio Hayes, whose district incorporates much of west Baltimore: “At the community level when you lay out a vision, when you make that type of commitment … their expectation is that is going to happen. I wish when the announcement was made, some expectations were more clearly defined.”23
In announcing the fourth (and most recent) phase of CORE, Governor Hogan and now resigned Mayor Catherine Pugh reframed its immediate purpose. Crime fighting was mentioned in the original announcement in January 2016, but this idea becomes more prominent in late March 2018. According to a press release from the governor’s office, “As part of this new phase, over 500 properties that have been designated by Baltimore City as contributing factors to violent crime will be slated for priority demolition by the Maryland Stadium Authority.” Hogan refers in his remarks to a “violent crime crisis,” then invites Pugh’s comments:
Reducing violence and crime effectively requires addressing the root causes of hopelessness that then inevitably results in crime…. Through Project C.O.R.E. and our partnership with Governor Hogan and the State, we are able to expedite the demolition of 500 abandoned buildings which provide a haven for criminal activity in neighborhoods most at risk.24
Accordingly, CORE has become a crime control project first, revitalization second.
Preservationist Perspectives on CORE
My interviews with Johns Hopkins, of Baltimore Heritage, and Eric Holcomb, of the Commission on Historic and Architectural Preservation (CHAP), generally confirm and develop the account that emerges from press coverage and Rohn’s work. Unpacking Rohn’s suggestion that preservationists feel “mixed” about CORE, I found that Hopkins and Holcomb identified positive aspects of the project as stemming primarily from process and the limitations on resources, whereas elements that could be improved were primarily with regard to orientation or the distribution of funding between demolition and stabilization.
Holcomb, part of the city bureaucracy responsible for the project, might be expected to be more positive about the project than a nongovernmental advocate such as Hopkins, although they are both involved in targeting properties for demolition and stabilization (there may be more deference on the part of other stakeholders to Holcomb than to Hopkins). The process is the part that Holcomb is most positive about. He describes it as “arduous” and “painful” but also “thoughtful” and “pretty successful.” He suggests, moreover, that “CORE has been very positive” because it has established a kind of annual review: “Every year we come back with these lists and we review these things and we understand what’s been happening out there on the market and on the street—we sort of ground truth what’s happening.”25 Hopkins is present in these meetings but has little positive to say about them.
Where Hopkins and Holcomb seem to agree is that the best aspect of Project CORE, from a preservationist perspective, is its relatively minimal impact. Hopkins told me that “little of historic significance is being demolished.” Because big buildings cost too much to demolish, no “signature building” has yet been threatened by CORE. In fact, he thinks the impact, even on blight elimination, remains unclear, in part because what gets cleared is “low-hanging fruit” and tends to be “remote,” with little effect on the neighborhood around it.26 Holcomb frames this in the affirmative, recounting that in meetings where stakeholders select properties for demolition and identify those for stabilization, if preservationists request that particular properties be left alone, this request is frequently honored. Of course, Holcomb admits, “the fact is that everybody knows in that room that we have 16,000 vacant buildings and maybe enough money to tear down a thousand.”27
Both of these preservation-positive aspects derive directly from the limitation of resources and the complication of the process. A deliberate procedure is required to efficiently target funding that can, at best, only be expected to begin to address the vacancy and abandonment problem. Similarly, because the scale of the problem is so great, it is easy to implement the project without significantly interfering with the historic texture of the city. Hopkins warns that the decisions will get more difficult as the project continues—and they both expect the state to continue funding it—and the demolitions will get closer to the historic core of the city.28
Holcomb and Hopkins both agree with Rohn that the comparative ease of spending the stabilization money has made it popular. Holcomb would like CORE to be more “nimble” and for the orientation to shift more toward stabilization:
But there may come a time where we start to say, “well wait a minute, we want more stabilization because we’ve been tearing down the worst buildings and some of the other buildings may be closer to healthy real estate markets and we can stabilize and hopefully the real estate market will catch up in that neighborhood or expand to that neighborhood and then we got a redevelopment project.”
Holcomb admits, though, that accurate forecasting remains the key problem in the face of the toll time takes on buildings (“they’re going to start falling over on their own”) and a Baltimore population that continues to shrink overall. “Preservation in a shrinking city” is “less the preservation of the actual architecture [and] more preservation of the character of the neighborhood,” which means targeting resources carefully.“The last thing we want to do is stabilize a building and turn around five years from now and demolish it.”29 This is why the annual review is so important. There is a constant process of guessing where the real estate market will catch up, one that Holcomb describes as substantially unpredictable, even for experts on the city.
Lipstick on a Pig
Project CORE quarterly reports do not add much beyond a sense of the state’s and city’s efforts to frame CORE’s pace and results as successes in line with expectations. Again, much of this is about reframing a deliberate process rather than incompetence; the project encountered a difficult procedural reality that conflicted with the high hopes for rapid visible results. The adroit pivot from demolition to “blight removal”—thus counting all stabilized or rehabilitated properties as well as those torn down—in the face of the difficulty of actually demolishing vacant housing features prominently, as Ian Duncan and others have indicated.
The reports list numerous substantial awards made to a variety of entities, ranging from nonprofit developers and community development corporations to the Baltimore City Department of Housing and Community Development. In addition, the state’s reports repeatedly emphasize all of the additional state and city funding programs brought to bear on the vacancy problem, obscuring the differences between newly committed and repurposed or refocused money. The key concept here is “leveraging,” and there is extensive mention throughout of how much investment CORE’s intervention is bringing in, reported in large figures again and again. Early quarterly reports often use the word “projected,” betraying an optimistic positioning of the whole project.
The earliest quarterly report available (FY17 Q4) includes information that is provided in a processed version as an appendix in subsequent quarterly reports: scanned versions of “Notices to Proceed” (NTP) with the demolition of specific properties from Baltimore HCD to the Maryland Stadium Authority. Later quarterly reports include similar information but group the notices in phases rather than by neighborhood. This is significant because the original NTPs listed neighborhood in addition to street address, making it easy to observe the concentration of demolitions.
The four NTPs together list 148 demolitions in nineteen neighborhoods, but 84 of them are in just four neighborhoods: Broadway East, Druid Heights, Mondawmin, and Upton (and 94 in five if the ten in Sandtown-Winchester are included). These neighborhoods not only fall within the Black butterfly, northwest and northeast of downtown Baltimore, but many of them are contiguous with one another and with other neighborhoods in which fewer, but some, demolitions took place. Upton, Druid Heights, and Mondawmin radiate out along a northwest trajectory from downtown, and Sandtown-Winchester is just south of them. Broadway East is to the northeast, surrounded by Berea, Oliver, and Middle East in which demolitions also occurred. Including information about neighborhood makes clear just how geographically concentrated the demolitions are.
Tables like table 4.1 appear in the next two quarterly reports, placing a different kind of emphasis on geographic concentration, but they also disappear from later reports. It may be going too far to read much into this, but it reinforces the sense that the state is trying to de-emphasize the neighborhood connection. Notice, too, how few of these properties had actually been removed.
| NTP Number |
Date NTP issued to MSA |
Number of Properties on NTP |
Number of Locations on NTP |
Number of Properties Removed |
Adjusted Total Number of Properties |
Adjusted Total Number of Locations |
| FY16-01 |
6/30/16 |
27 |
5 |
0 |
27 |
5 |
| FY16-02 |
8/31/16 |
26 |
5 |
0 |
26 |
5 |
| FY16-03 |
9/22/16 |
42 |
10 |
3 |
39 |
9 |
| FY16-04 |
1/18/17 |
53 |
9 |
3 |
50 |
8 |
| FY16-05 |
9/26/17 |
20 |
2 |
0 |
20 |
2 |
| 53
|
|
168 |
31 |
6 |
162 |
29 |
Source: “Project C.O.R.E. FY18 Q2 Quarterly Report,” Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development, April 1, 2018, 4.
Project CORE has yet to significantly change the historic texture of Baltimore, and it has yet to show signs that it will ever do so. This is a result of two factors in particular: the scale of vacancy and the friction associated with the demolition process. As of February 11, 2019, the city estimates that it has approximately 16,800 vacant buildings,30 and there are reasons to believe that may be a significant underestimate.31 As abandonment continues in neighborhoods where it is already intense, even demolishing four thousand homes in the near future may only begin to address the problem—if demolition is in fact a solution, which remains unresolved.
The original projections clearly did not take process into account, nor did they acknowledge the difficulty of assessing the scope of abandonment in the city. Perversely, but to the surprised satisfaction of preservation advocates and others, the difficulty of demolition has encouraged the redirection of demolition funds toward rehabilitation and other kinds of neighborhood investment. Project CORE may ultimately support the kinds of neighborhood stabilization that demolition by itself would not, despite my skepticism about programs of systematic demolition.
Vacancy, Deterioration, and Demolition by Neglect in Union Square: CHAP Executive Session, August 1, 1990
The current state of the city of Baltimore that led to Project CORE requires further historical exploration, with a focus on neighborhoods and some broader contextualization. To focus on neighborhoods, I examined the 1990 record of a hearing regarding vacancy, deterioration, and demolition by neglect in the Union Square and adjacent Franklin Square neighborhoods. The Commission on Historic and Architectural Preservation (CHAP) invited concerned community members to give their account of the problems their neighborhoods confronted. CHAP also invited a number of city employees responsible for related areas of maintenance and management to listen and respond. The hearing reveals the various concerns and capabilities of neighborhood preservation activists and Baltimore city employees with regard to properties in decline. Then I contextualize both Project CORE and Union Square’s struggles using quantitative data on vacancy in historic districts and never-designated neighborhoods, looking for evidence of a relationship between vacancy rates and historic district designation.
Vacancies at the scale of those in Baltimore seem to lead inevitably to abandonment and demolition by neglect.32 The forces of entropy, if left unchecked, consume buildings over time, a self-evident observation with important consequences for historic designation. If the owners of old buildings in historic districts who would like to use their property for purposes that conflict with historic preservation regulations simply allow their buildings to decay, they can then claim that the buildings should be torn down because they are a safety hazard and too expensive to rehabilitate. This opens new options for redevelopment that would otherwise have been closed to them due to designation. Of course, this process of decay is equally true for buildings for which no one has grand plans, those just left alone because there is no immediate use for them. Intentional and otherwise, neglect threatens the integrity of historic Baltimore neighborhoods.
While reviewing the CHAP files for some of the more prominent historic districts in Baltimore and those recommended to me by CHAP staff as capturing interesting dynamics, I came across the transcript of the CHAP Executive Session from August 10, 1990. The conversation is fascinating, particularly for the way it reveals how residents and neighborhood activists understand abandonment and demolition by neglect and how their understanding conflicts with the way city authorities represent their ability to address these issues. The concerned residents of Union Square also introduce an issue that has not emerged in previous conversations—the possibility of corruption. As the transcript reveals, these residents allege that some of the action in the city around abandonment and redevelopment enriches players in the process in unintended ways. City authorities resist this characterization, but do so in terms of their departments or areas of expertise, not necessarily denying that corruption happens elsewhere in the city’s relationship with developers.33
Another thing to note, and I return to this constantly in this chapter, is that the CHAP chair, in particular, but others as well, speak in terms of Baltimore’s inevitable revival and the need to preserve historic neighborhoods for some hypothetical future in which large numbers of people return. There is at least one naysayer in this group, one “realist,” who questions this position. Finally, this hearing from thirty years ago demonstrates that vacancy, abandonment, and the problems for neighborhoods radiating out from them have been ongoing issues of significant concern in Baltimore for a long time.
The hearing includes eight CHAP commissioners, three Union Square residents and neighborhood leaders, CHAP staff, mayor’s office staff, and other city housing authorities—22 in all. After introductions, the first speaker is Jo Anne Whitely, the “legislative liaison” for the Union Square Association, who has been researching vacancy for Communities Organized to Improve Life, a Baltimore nonprofit. I first discuss the comments of Whitely, Maryellen Cahill (vice president, Union Square Association), and Ardabella Fox (president, Union Square Association), then I shift to the responses of John Huppert (director of Housing Inspection) and Ron Miles (neighborhood coordinator).
The Concerned Community Perspective
This hearing helps us integrate the complications of interpersonal interaction, the problem of information asymmetry, and the contrasting commitments of residents and governmental actors into the broader story of vacancy and abandonment considered elsewhere in this chapter, humanizing the processes those data reflect. The residents of Union Square are trying to inhabit and maintain the historic neighborhood they love, and they perceive the city’s inaction in the face of the intense abandonment going on around them to be corrupt, incompetent, or both. Their view, emotionally entangled with the love and defense of their homes and from the level of the street, obscures the broader trends of a city facing radical population decline and the accompanying reduction of resources from tax collection. Whether residents have evidence of corruption or not, they are struggling to explain a malign process that seems intentional because of its magnitude and immediacy. In their defense, the chair of CHAP has a view of Baltimore and its trajectory that seems no more realistic.
Joanne Whitely34 begins by arguing that the city’s involvement in state and federally supported redevelopment projects has left it responsible for much of the abandonment in her area, implying complicity or improper conduct with regard to these projects.
I do have documentation whereby Baltimore City is a participant in the major UDAG’s [sic] [Urban Development Action Grants] in our area to a degree, which are in default. When Baltimore City began participating as a co-entity, it created problems because government was, therefore, unable to do what it might have been able to do more effectively, had it remained apart.
Whitely argues that “the preservation movement has been taken,” meaning that it has been subverted or overwhelmed by the city’s redevelopment priorities. She states her belief that CHAP has been acting in good faith to the best of its limited ability. and she states that she is “here in good faith” too. However, Whitely believes it is necessary to have “very uncomfortable conversations” with CHAP about what can be done, including those buildings permitted for rehabilitation by CHAP but left to collapse.
She makes a complicated claim that the city has been stockpiling “tax sale certificates” (a certificate representing the value of taxes owed, the payment of which would purchase the abandoned property) in violation of the Baltimore City Code and that many of these properties, under the “ownership or control [of] the mayor and city council,” were allowed to deteriorate to the point of condemnation because CHAP felt “they simply could not take action on” them. Whitely is arguing that the city is acquiring large numbers of buildings illegally, or at least inappropriately, and letting them deteriorate. The implication is that city ownership of these historic buildings has prevented CHAP from pursuing enforcement action against the owner for violations that they would have pursued in other circumstances.
Whitely alleges, moreover, that the city has included properties for acquisition using “block grant funds” that they already own through the tax sale process, implying a kind of double-dealing, and that there “was just too much federal money available,” leading city authorities into temptation. Describing the problem with federal funding more generally, she says, “But you see what is happening … the federal government relies on the state, the state relies on the city, and then, when the city is a player in the project, everything goes out the window” through some combination of incompetence and corruption.
Later in the conversation, Whitely alleges that small-time owners of vacant housing are pressured to sell by the city, which they do, to unregistered corporations. When the property then is included in a federally funded redevelopment area, the new owner is bought out at a price much higher than was paid to the original, stressed owner (suggesting that the owners of the corporation had insider knowledge of the impending declaration and boundaries of the redevelopment area), the building is left to collapse, and the city is stuck with the bill for its demolition because the assets of the corporation that owned it have been distributed and the owners of the corporation are untraceable. Whitely concludes, “what I am trying to say to you is that the City of Baltimore, the Department of Housing and Community Development has no business getting involved in any transaction with anyone who does not have proper documents.”
When asked how she would address the problems she has identified, Whitely responds at length with an emotional appeal:
I don’t know what the answer is. All I know is, that the value of our homes has been impacted. The dream that we had was literally halted when Urban Renewal came to be … and we were told that Urban Renewal and Preservation could co-exist…. What I am trying to do is appeal to you as a governmental body and also from a more humanitarian standpoint. We came in [to homeownership in Union Square] and we had a dream and our dream became threatened when the wheeling and dealing began almost like insider trading…. I am begging you to help us retrace what happened and to see to it that no other neighborhood goes through it, and to ask the City to immediately stabilize the properties in our historic district and there are a number of them.
Whitely’s complaints echo standard complaints about dealing with government bureaucracies and question whose interests are served by government action. They also point to a cultural-structural-institutional gap that is central to many of the concerns voiced here and by preservation activists elsewhere in my research. For residents, historic buildings are foremost home and neighborhood—sources of pride, identity, senses of safety and security. For CHAP and for Housing and Community Development, they are properties to be managed according to regulations and relying on scarce resources. Everyone in this particular story could be blameless and in the right, fulfilling their positional responsibilities appropriately, and still be far apart in their understanding of the situation because of the differences of their orientation to the built environment that derive from their position in the process.
Maryellen Cahill, vice-president of the Union Square Association, continues in a similar vein, emphasizing neighborhood resident experience and its frustrations.
I am … extremely involved in my neighborhood and hope to become more involved in Baltimore City. The amount of time that it takes to get anything resolved in regards to a vacant building in our area or in any area in the City, is absolutely outrageous…. there are many people out there like me. They want to do something and they have had it. They are fed up. They’re fed up with all these boarded up buildings. They’re fed up with absentee landlords living out in the county, who could care less about their back yard filled with trash. There is no reason, we feel, that this can’t change.35
Cahill’s primary complaint is about the failure of code enforcement and the difficulty of getting the city to act. She describes countless phone calls, six appearances in court regarding a single deteriorating house, and the perceived insult of $75 fines being imposed, then deferred six months, and only raised upon a return to court.
Cahill echoes Whitely, implying that some corrupt influence is revealed by the difficulty of transferring vacant properties to developers who want to do something with them. At the invitation of CHAP Chair Goodman, they both couch this particular frustration in terms of the potential for growth in Union Square. Whitely cites recent high house prices to demonstrate the neighborhood’s success, and Cahill and Whitely both warn that vacancy, abandonment, and empty lots threaten these prices, as does the difficulty of getting the city to address them.
Last among the community representatives is Ardabella Fox,36 president of the Union Square Association, who complains about “extensive deterioration” in Union Square “caused by neglect, lack of code enforcement.” More important, she questions the mechanisms for city intervention and strategies for preserving vacant properties. First she asks, “Why not stabilize?” She has been told that stabilization costs $25,000 per property and demolition costs $15,000, what she calls a “minor difference.” She then raises the lien37 process and asks why “that’s where it stops,” why the city does “not go further to try to collect this thing?”38 Cahill also accuses the Department of Housing of allowing the buildings to reach that point of deterioration because “the codes were not enforced on those properties.”39
Whitely, Cahill, and Fox are insinuating that the city does not care about Union Square and can only be troubled to intervene where federal funding produces an opportunity to profit. I would guess that there is an undertone of racial discrimination—between a predominantly white city administration and an increasingly Black historic district—but the identities of the key players are hard to confirm with only their names at this temporal remove. Cahill’s “Why not stabilize?” captures the range of their comments well; there is a simple solution available to the city that would better serve the interests of the neighborhood if only the city were not either too incompetent or corrupt to implement it. As you will see, city authorities claim that this idea is emblematic of residents’ misunderstanding of the situation and the city’s capabilities.
The City Responds: Huppert and Miles on Enforcement and Federal Funding
When the director of Housing Inspection, John Huppert,40 presents his perspective, he first identifies himself as a long-time Baltimore resident, homeowner, and city worker, sympathetic to their concerns (another positional complication). He also clarifies his responsibility exclusively for code enforcement, “I can’t address all the issues that [you] have raised … I have nothing to do with UDAGs, HODAGs, CDBG monies, acquisition, disposition, or development.” Huppert walks the line between explanation and condescension as he describes the limits of the city’s enforcement powers and the scarcity of its resources. He also quickly defines a position that contradicts a number of comments by CHAP Chair Goodman about the city’s size and trajectory.
Huppert begins by taking up a fundamental background issue obscured by many of the previous comments: Baltimore’s radical decline in population. This also, of course, emphasizes the difference between the neighborhood resident’s view from the ground and the city administrator’s requirement for a broader, more abstract consideration.
I think the vacant house problem is substantially more complex than anyone here has given it credit for being. The biggest problem the City is confronted with is the loss of population … people have left the city … there are less people here. There is less need for housing and that is one of the biggest issues that we’re going to have to address … what do you do with the housing, if there’s no one to occupy it?
Huppert goes on to discuss the complex question of city ownership of vacant and abandoned housing. He explains that the city no longer “automatically take[s] title to a building once it goes to tax sale,” meaning that it has reduced its ownership of vacant buildings from about 50 percent fifteen years ago to about 10 percent in 1990. The previous policy produced a perverse incentive for “irresponsible investors” to buy marginal properties and milk as much value out of them as possible while allowing them to deteriorate, then abandon them and leave the city responsible (for cleaning, sealing, stabilizing, selling). He explains,
The City has a position now where we don’t want to own them. We want to force the owners of them to maintain them, to pay the taxes, to pay the other costs associated with maintaining them and we’re interested in pursuing very vigorously in court cases where we believe we can have a positive impact…. We have to begin with the ones where we can be successful.
Now, Huppert says, the city “own[s] a large number of tax sale certificates, but all that means is that no one else bid on the property” (emphasis added).
People can acquire properties for which the city holds the tax sale certificate (“Every year the city has a tax sale”), but the city does not technically own them and cannot simply dispose of them by fiat. He agrees with Cahill, moreover, that there are frequently significant liens against these properties but that the last known address of the owner of the lien is often the abandoned house itself: “You can’t find them; they’re gone.” Huppert concedes to Whitely that some of these properties for which the city holds the tax certificate may also be incorporated into urban renewal plans, as she alleges, and are not available to purchase, but he is “not in a position to discuss that, because I don’t know.”
Huppert and CHAP Commissioner David Norman explain how liens work. Norman begins by pointing out that it is only possible to collect the value of a lien if the property is sold to a private individual, not if it is transferred to the city government. Huppert goes on to say that the city can pursue “in personam” suits against property owners with large outstanding liens, but they only do so when the value of the lien significantly exceeds the legal costs associated with the suit and when they are convinced that the assets of the property owner are such that the owner might reasonably be compelled to pay off the lien: “There are individuals and corporations, who have absolutely no assets [as alleged by Whitely], and so they are not worth pursuing. But there are individuals who are worth pursuing, and the City Solicitor’s Office pursues them vigorously, and does collect money.” This, and further related comments, fails to satisfy community members, who feel there ought to be a better way for the city to collect the costs from property owners.
In response to a comment from Cahill, Huppert also distinguishes between property liens and Housing Court fines, for which nonpayment results in arrest. He explains that judges suspend most of the fines and states that these are not a significant source of revenue for the city despite the frequency of penalizable housing offenses. He explains that liens are initiated by many departments in city government, not just Housing, but that they then become the responsibility of the city Solicitor’s Office and are no longer dealt with by Housing or the initiating departments, with the exception of some research on a property owner’s assets in particular cases.
Returning to Cahill’s “Why not stabilize?,” Huppert explains the complications of stabilization, often including significant reconstruction, and he argues that buildings in Union Square will cost many times more to stabilize than to demolish. Cahill accuses the “Department of Housing” of allowing the buildings to reach that point of deterioration because “the codes were not enforced on those properties.”41 Huppert responds:42
I’ve got 6,000 vacant buildings in the City, and we take three to four hundred of them a year into Housing Court, because that’s all the resources that we have. Now, when we get them in, in many instances as you mentioned, we had them in five, six, seven times and the bottom line is a $50–$100 fine, that’s not correcting the problem.
Huppert makes another point about shepherding scarce resources and the costs of building stabilization that the city chooses to undertake. I quote him at length.
Now there was one question that was raised about, why the City is stabilizing privately owned vacant houses in the community when there are City-owned houses in the community? … What we look at … is stabilizing properties where we can get our money back…. We only have the resources to do 200 properties per year and we select properties where the value of the property is substantially greater than the value of the stabilization…. The owner [buyer] is going to pay it as soon as we put the property up at the tax sale, because they’re not going to want to lose a forty or fifty thousand dollar house because of ten thousand dollars in liens…. We have to get our money back from a collection of these liens.
“Code enforcement is not the solution. It is not going to end that problem and bring about the desired result that you’re looking for. Not in and of itself.”
Other strategies are as yet underutilized, according to Huppert, such as a violation in the CHAP Ordinance called “Demolition by Neglect.”
The only advantage [of pursuing a Demolition by Neglect charge] as opposed to going under the Building Code, is that you can get a jail sentence. [qualifies that there are many complications associated with the effort] But we are interested in pursuing that in a selective case. We’d like to find a bad individual, somebody who has a lot of vacant houses, somebody who has big problems all over the City and who also has a vacant house in a CHAP area and on that one, we’ll prosecute them on “Demolition by Neglect.” I’d like to see an owner of a vacant building put in jail. I’d love it. Because it sends out a clear message. (emphasis added)
“Every sin in this city is not directly attribute[able] to vacant buildings,” says Huppert in response to Cahill’s allegation implying racial discrimination: “there are some areas, though, that get better attention than other areas.”43 Without addressing the implications of Cahill’s allegation, Huppert44 explains that this pattern is about “cost allocation” above all and needing to use discretion about where to apply scarce resources—the same logic that drives Project CORE decades later. This avoids the question of which kinds of neighborhoods are likely to yield the property values that facilitate returns to the city as it allocates its resources, and the racist and systemic causes for those differences. To further explain the difficulty of enforcement, he says that he has witnessed a radical (two-thirds) reduction in the number of inspectors, even though their responsibilities have increased (33 inspectors in 1987 for 238,000 parcels). This despite the fact that
Mayor Schmoke held Housing Inspection harmless in the wors[t] budget year that this city has ever had in the twenty years that I’ve worked for the City. This department [Housing and Community Development] lost fifty bodies … and the Mayor said that none of them are to come out of Housing Inspection, and they didn’t.
Huppert has portrayed the city’s resource situation and the procedures available to it as a correction to complaints from Union Square residents who misunderstand what the city is capable of, however otherwise sympathetic or reasonable they are. Moreover, Huppert contextualizes the city’s limited ability to manage vacancy, abandonment, and demolition by neglect in the radical shrinking of its population, which both creates the problem of redundant structures and undermines its resource base. His comments focus on his department and what little it can do, but he actively avoids talking about other elements of the city bureaucracy and the use of federal money, leaving allegations of corruption and self-dealing, for the most part, unaddressed.
Ron Miles,45 neighborhood coordinator, explains that different parts of the city fall under the responsibility of the District Planner (non-urban-renewal areas that he also describes as “outer city neighborhoods”) and the HCD Planner (urban renewal areas). “The District Planner works with Union Square primarily, and in Franklin Square just across the border, which is an Urban Renewal area we have the HCD Planner.” He also explains that most of the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG)46 money is spent in the urban renewal areas.
In response to various questions, comments, and allegations from the community members present, Miles goes on to explain how CDBG money is spent to acquire properties.
In the case of Franklin Square, again they have a Planning Committee within the neighborhood and with a certain allocation annually the neighborhood identifies properties that should be acquired, lots to be developed and many other things, as far as, community development in the neighborhood. In our non-Block Grant areas … we’re not acquiring properties. [in response to “fishy”] … we would plan to acquire the property probably even before it went to tax sale. As we identify properties in a tax sale, I then use the Block Grant money to go through tax sale foreclosure. That way we reduce the time frame that is necessary [for acquisition through CDBG funding].47
Miles describes the city’s eagerness to transfer tax sale properties to developers but suggests that a basic standard must be met: “We are still open to both non-profit, as well as, private developers in assisting them in acquiring these properties, if in fact, they can get the rest of the financing that is going to be necessary to develop the site” (emphasis added). The implication is that this can be quite difficult because these properties are unlikely to yield a profit when redeveloped. References to failed redevelopment efforts at various scales are cited throughout the hearing. City authorities suggest that these were unrealistic projects, whereas community members imply mismanagement or wrongdoing.
This necessity to identify sources to completely fund projects explains another resident concern. Cahill had claimed that nonprofits acquire state funding for projects on the basis of plans to redevelop in a particular neighborhood but then shift the location of their investment, alleging a bait and switch, tricking the funders. Miles responds, “If they don’t get complete financing for that project the organizations then go back and reapply to the State to redirect the money,” making clear this is neither nefarious nor mismanagement, although it may reinforce the tendency to distribute resources unevenly that Cahill identified earlier.
According to Miles, all of these funding issues and areas for redevelopment are discussed at “the housing roundtable, where all the housing development non-profits get together on a monthly basis.” Neither CHAP commissioners nor residents appear to have been aware that such a thing existed.
Commissioners Goodman and Norman and the Limitations of the Growth Paradigm
CHAP Chair Deborah Goodman48 presumes that Baltimore will return to a growth trajectory, and her vision of preservation and neighborhood stabilization is, in part, in service to that. Early in the hearing, in the midst of Joanne Whitely’s testimony, Goodman stated the following:
In the long range view, where the City will go, I think that we have to stem this kind of decay, because it is a matter of time. Certain things will become essential to the City again, and right now you [in historic Union Square] are caught in the middle. You’re like in no man’s land. You’re not attractive for people to move to and yet in the next 20 years the growth will probably go that way, if you can keep these things intact, and I hope that we can do that.
Later in the hearing, Goodman gives an example of the kind of growth she is imagining, driven by the development of a medical center at the University of Maryland in Baltimore.
I’m trying to think of alternatives to these blocks of houses, in an area like Union Square for instance, which is right on the heel of the University of Maryland. Very valuable strategically for that school, and with those schools growing as they are, we will probably become a medical center in the next century of research, and so forth.
She goes on to advocate that the city invest in rental housing for students associated with the university, a suggestion immediately derided by Norman. In fact, there is a lot of back and forth between Chair Goodman and Vice Chair Norman; virtually every time Goodman asserts something or takes a position, Norman jumps in to contradict or correct her before anyone else has the chance (“mansplaining,” perhaps).49 This suggests some tension within the commission, compounded, perhaps, by sexist resistance to a woman in a leadership position.
This tension is best illustrated by an exchange in which, again, Goodman assumes a return to growth in Baltimore and Norman expands his argument against her claims based on his understanding of the limited capacity of the city bureaucracy.
MRS. GOODMAN: See, this is the overall problem that is bigger than the money and bigger than the Block Grant and bigger than the historic district is that matter of no plan. No long range view, because ten years from now when there is … because there is no plan and suddenly money would be available, there is nobody to put anything into place and we’re all going to pay for this.
DAVID NORMAN: Debbie, you can’t have a plan without an Urban Renewal District being designated.
MRS. GOODMAN: I’m not sure of that.
DAVID NORMAN: I’m sure about it. [Norman’s position is confirmed by others.]…
MRS. GOODMAN: [in response to explanation of CDBG funds being reallocated from various neighborhoods into a new project and committed for multiple years into the future] So, there it is. You rob Peter to pay Paul, and end up with your pockets hanging out anyway.
DAVID NORMAN: But you can’t … one thing Union Square might want to consider is petitioning City Council for designation as an Urban Renewal District. It will get more attention. Now I happen to be familiar with this process, going through it in Little Italy when Little Italy did not want to become an Urban Renewal District…. Because to the neighbors of Little Italy, Urban Renewal means bulldozed down [reference to earlier era]…. A lot of people are afraid of that term. But without Urban Renewal designation you cannot get money.50
We see here the complications of interpersonal interaction, the problem of information asymmetry, and the contrasting commitments of residents and governmental actors and the relevance of those in the broader story of vacancy and abandonment.
The residents of Union Square have a set of concerns and a set of expectations that are not in direct conflict with those of city authorities. Rather, they fit awkwardly: City authorities have to select carefully among possible interventions because of their scarce resources, do not experience the vacancy of properties as emotionally immediate, and know the limitations of the enforcement mechanisms they have at their disposal.
Moreover, disagreement about whether to understand Baltimore as permanently smaller than it once was or in a temporary population downturn, followed inevitably by a return to growth, permeates the conversation. Union Square residents seem to imagine that their neighborhood would grow if vacant properties were easier to acquire. But Chair Goodman seems to understand part of the purpose of historic preservation to be keeping neighborhood texture in place until it is needed again in the near future.51 Only Director of Housing Inspection Huppert is clear that Baltimore is contending with the problem of extensive housing for which there will never again be a demand. It has been nearly thirty years since that hearing, and we now know that Huppert was the closest to being correct.
This asymmetry is informational but also importantly positional. The distinct locations of the contrasting groups of players with regard to processes of abandonment and its management instill interests that are hard to reconcile. City bureaucrats struggle even among themselves to square a growth mission with observations of the reality of Baltimore in this period. Local residents struggle to understand why the city does so little to help them and fall back on racism and corruption as explanations, both of which may well be present but neither of which is sufficient to account for the full dimensions of the situation, even in combination. These conflicts and confusions appear inevitable in the absence of resources that defines the shrinking city context.
Vacancy in Baltimore Neighborhood Statistical Areas
We can place historical demolition by neglect in Union Square and the more recent Project CORE in broader context by returning to the neighborhood statistical area data that I relied on in chapter 2. These data reveal change over time and the city as a whole but also allow us to refocus on designated historic districts (HDs) and their contrast with the rest of the city. On average, Baltimore historic districts, particularly those designated in the earliest cluster, have higher status populations than never-designated neighborhoods, at least as measured by household income, education, and race. Running against the status trend, the average percentage of vacant units in HDs is substantially higher than that in never-designated neighborhoods, although they converge somewhat over the period (table 4.2).
|
% Vacant 1970 |
% Vacant 1980 |
% Vacant 1990 |
% Vacant 2000 |
% Vacant 2010 |
| Historic Districts |
2.5 |
9.9 |
10.5 |
15.5 |
17.5 |
| Never-Designated Neighborhoods |
1.4 |
5.7 |
6.7 |
12.3 |
14.2 |
How residential vacancy rates are connected to the social status of a neighborhood population is not obvious. Higher income should protect households from foreclosure, one of the causes of abandonment. To the degree that income and education are correlated, greater educational attainment might do the same. Whiteness, on the other hand, in a Baltimore that has lost many of its white residents since its population peak might seem likely to increase vacancy over time—we might expect to see more departures from predominantly white city neighborhoods. We might also expect to see more departures from neighborhoods in which the residents had the wherewithal to move, that is, higher incomes ones. All of these are indirect relations that rely on intermediary mechanisms to explain the connection. At the same time, the connection running in the opposite direction is quite clear and direct: Significant vacancy and abandonment damage the status of a neighborhood and the robustness of many neighborhood processes.
Despite the complex connection of vacancy to neighborhood status, vacancy bears obvious relevance for questions of neighborhood change. Vacancy indirectly indicates something about the real estate market; that is, it should, in general, correlate negatively with demand. But vacancy is also relevant for concerns about displacement because it tells us something about how much pressure to move out new in-movers might cause. Finally, vacancy is the logical endpoint of the process of rent capture prior to neighborhood revitalization that is key to at least one prominent theory of gentrification—landlords allowing their properties to decline in anticipation of large-scale neighborhood upgrading creating a rent gap.52
Vacancy rates increased greatly in Baltimore over the period for which I have data (figure 4.2). They seem to vary independently of status measures for HD clusters, at least higher status does not seem to consistently predict lower vacancy, although it may increase stability (notable in the vacancy rate of the highest status, early cluster). In the two earliest clusters (1969–1974 and 1980–1983), vacancy rates prior to designation were much higher than rates citywide, two and half to three times higher. In the 1980–1983 cluster, they remain high, relative to the rest of the city, but in the 1969–1974 cluster they actually decline, in both absolute and relative terms.
FIGURE 4.2 Housing vacancy by decade in historic district clusters
Data for 1970 is available only for census tracts and not for neighborhood statistical areas and appears to understate vacancy rates.
In the later clusters (2000–2004 and 2006–2015), vacancy rates prior to designation are much closer to those in never-designated parts of the city and follow a similar trajectory, increasing gradually, but remaining similar to if slightly higher than those in the rest of the city, reiterating the sense that emerged earlier that more recent HDs are more like the rest of the city. The decline in vacancy rates in the earliest HD cluster again suggests the possibility that designation does something, but it leaves open the question of why it would do so in one group of HDs but not in the others (except to the degree that historic designation in these neighborhoods captures aspects of privilege that are relevant to stability).
There are lots of interesting negative correlations in the weak to moderate range (−0.31 and −0.55) between vacancy and status variables. Most interesting among the correlations with vacancy rates is the suggestion that lower neighborhood MHI predicts increased vacancy in the future (table 4.3). The negative value of the correlation coefficient for the relationship between MHI and vacancy increases for vacancy rates decades after the MHI observation. This seems plausible if we understand vacancy as, in part, the result of the inability to afford occupancy. Units are abandoned by residents who can no longer afford to live in them, whereas higher household incomes ensure more residential stability and less abandonment. The time lag between decreased income and increased vacancy may reflect the time required for eviction or foreclosure.
|
MHI 1980 |
MHI 1990 |
MHI 2000 |
MHI 2010 |
| % Vacant 1980 |
−0.37 |
−0.24 |
−0.27 |
−0.19 |
| % Vacant 1990 |
−0.4 |
−0.33 |
−0.28 |
−0.17 |
| % Vacant 2000 |
−0.55 |
−0.46 |
−0.44 |
−0.36 |
| % Vacant 2010 |
−0.53 |
−0.43 |
−0.41 |
−0.35 |
*All coefficients reported are significant at the highest level.
The associations between vacancy and education are weaker, but they run in the same direction (table 4.4). In other words, more better educated people in a neighborhood in one year predicts somewhat lower rates of vacancy in that neighborhood ten years later and even more twenty years later (these coefficients are highly significant).
|
% BA+ 1990 |
% BA+ 2000 |
% BA+ 2010 |
| % Vacant 2000 |
−0.32274 |
−0.33238 |
−0.28681 |
| % Vacant 2010 |
−0.40392 |
−0.35831 |
−0.29839 |
*All coefficients reported are significant at the highest level.
Neighborhood education level in 1980 shows minimal association with vacancy in any year. I suspect this is primarily because education levels were much lower in the earlier years. Relationships running in the other direction (from vacancy toward education level in the future) are mostly not significant.
Only two correlations between neighborhood percent white and vacancy rates clear my threshold for a weak association (R>0.3), and those suggest that whiteness early in the period predicts decreased vacancy in 2010: percentWH80 x percentVac10, −0.32; percentWH90 x percentVac10, −0.31. The remaining associations in both temporal directions are too weak to mention, insignificant, or both. These correlations, although weak, run counter to my earlier suggestion that we might expect to see greater rates of vacancy in whiter neighborhoods because of the disproportionate departure of whites from Baltimore relative to Blacks, but the relationships among whiteness and neighborhood advantage should increase.
Returning to my experiment pairing HDs and never-designated neighborhoods that are demographically similar at baseline, then tracking their trajectories across the designation of some, yields some further insight. For the HDs designated in the early 1980s, the protective effect of either extreme whiteness or radically outlying educational attainment stands out in regard to future vacancy. Highly educated HDs Charles Village and Abell outperform smaller, never-designated Kernewood in terms of moderate increases in vacancy, but not never-designated Cheswolde, which also begins and remains much whiter than the other three. Similarly, overwhelmingly white, but poorly educated HD Canton sees moderate increases in vacancy relative to never-designated Brooklyn and Mill Hill, which lost much more of their white population. Canton’s vacancy increases are much more like never-designated Morrell Park, which also maintained its white population. The least and less white HDs have much higher rates of vacancy than their pairs and mostly greater increases.
The same seems to be true for the HDs designated in the early 2000s. High white, high educational attainment HDs (thus doubly protected) are similar to their never-designated pairs in moderate baseline vacancy and in increases in vacancy. High white, low educational attainment HDs (less, but still, protected) have relatively higher rates of vacancy than their pairs, but increase similarly moderately.
To summarize, HDs tend to have higher rates of vacancy than never-designated parts of the city, both before and after designation, although the ways designation and status interact seem to moderate increases in vacancy or protect HDs from it. In the highest status HDs, the earliest cluster, vacancy declined over time in both absolute terms and relative to never-designated parts of the city. In the lowest status HDs, the second cluster, vacancy remains high relative to the rest of the city, and in the latest two clusters, vacancy is much like the rest of the city. Put another way, I cannot detect any consistent correlation between vacancy and historic designation, but lower average status in a neighborhood (defined in terms of income, education, and race) is weakly correlated with higher rates of vacancy in the future whether or not the neighborhood is designated. The causes of vacancy, as current scholarship indicates, are more complex than the age of the structures or the status of neighborhood residents.
Conclusion
At its core, the project of this book is to complicate our understanding of the relationship between historic district designation and neighborhood change. Key to that project is noticing that the effects of designation on other neighborhood characteristics is related, among many other things, to cities’ growth trajectories. Just as an examination of a rapidly growing Brooklyn is essential, so is one of a shrunken and shrinking Baltimore in which the particularities of vacancy, abandonment, and demolition by neglect constitute the conditions in which historic designation plays its role.
We have seen that rates of vacancy are substantially higher, on average, in designated historic districts in Baltimore than in the rest of the city, both before and after designation. Vacant and abandoned homes create quality-of-life issues that may depress neighborhood status in important ways and function as the mediating factor that explains correlations between vacancy and lower income and less education. Causal explanations that go beyond speculation will require future research, but the 1990 residents of Union Square articulate this assault on their quality of life and cannot understand why the city will not do more to help them remedy it. Various scholars have noticed the unevenness of decline and abandonment, but these are just some of the asymmetries experienced by residents whose relationship to their neighborhood is fundamentally different from that of the city officials responsible for their maintenance, no matter how well intended.
Baltimore’s effort to address abandonment, Project CORE, has not produced conspicuous results in terms of its stated goal of demolishing empty housing, nor has it yet affected historic structures profoundly. Somewhat perversely, however, it may be doing something more like what Union Square residents almost thirty years ago were asking the city for—investment in rehabilitation. More time is needed to see what Project CORE becomes and whether any of its effects are important, but the prospect is intriguing. We can say that the relationship between designation and neighborhood change is distinct in the context of shrinkage.53
