Baltimore had spent decades working to reverse the effects of a prolonged period of population and household loss. The result, in many neighborhoods, was weak market conditions and persistent vacancy. Most interventions to date hadn’t reached the hardest-hit areas: concentrations of vacancy in low-demand, high-poverty neighborhoods that accounted for almost 90% of all vacant structures citywide. As new public and philanthropic funding became available, nonprofit organizations ReBUILD Metro and BUILD, along with their partners, wanted to put that funding toward smart, targeted bets rather than spreading it thin. They needed to know where investment would actually work, and why so much of it hadn’t before.
Vacancy in Baltimore wasn’t one citywide problem; it was many block-level problems, each shaped by its own market dynamics. CZB’s analysis, conducted with longtime collaborator Alan Mallach, found that vacancy itself wasn’t the right target. A single Vacant Building Notice, the city’s designation for a structure deemed uninhabitable, unusable, or a nuisance, was enough to measurably suppress what buyers were willing to pay for homes nearby: going from a 0% to a 5% concentration of Vacant Building Notices on a block shaved 35% off the average sale price. Roughly 15,000 buildings carried that designation in 2022, a number that had been declining but remained concentrated in the same struggling areas. Solving vacancy meant treating the health of a block, not the count of empty buildings on it, as the real unit of change.
Commissioned by ReBUILD Metro and BUILD, with support from the Abell Foundation, the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation, and an anonymous donor, CZB and Alan Mallach undertook a sweeping study of Baltimore’s abandonment crisis. The work explored the dynamics of vacancy and disinvestment across the city’s neighborhoods and identified a path forward built around investing in groups of blocks rather than individual properties, aiming to yield real results in the areas where vacancy had proven most stubborn.
The resulting strategy, completed in fall 2022, called for robust investment in the health of groups of blocks and a fundamental shift away from treating vacancy itself as the problem to solve. It gave ReBUILD Metro, BUILD, and their funding partners a clearer, evidence-based path to direct new public and philanthropic dollars toward the neighborhoods where they could do the most good.
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