Chris Taylor peered down the street at the house. It was a vacant. And it was a problem.
He'd been getting calls for weeks about this property, about the teenagers hanging out there, the drug dealing and prostitution. He dialed a number, placed his cell phone against his ear, and began walking around the side of the building toward the alley.
As Taylor's phone connected to the person on the other end, he saw a door open. A young man walked out and pulled his hoodie over his head, casting a shadow on his face.
Standing 6-foot-1, Taylor was significantly bigger than the teen. But he was alone. And he was unarmed. And this was an alley in West Baltimore.
The teen kept his hand in his pocket as he approached.
Taylor hesitated.
"I think you're f---ing lost," the teen told Taylor.
In 2006, Taylor, then a 30-year-old Pennsylvania transplant, moved to Union Square. On his block, more houses were vacant than occupied. But he and his wife, Megan, loved the old house they bought in an area once inhabited by Baltimore intelligentsia, such as H.L. Mencken. And they weren't about to leave.
The couple didn't know it at the time, but Union Square was about to join a handful of neighborhoods bucking the trend of decline in Baltimore. After decades of residents fleeing for the suburbs, fewer and fewer of Baltimore's neighborhoods resembled the kind of place to which anyone would want to move. But for Taylor, Union Square was just the opposite: a place with cheap housing, proximity to downtown and a ton of promise.
So what if nearly half the houses were vacant? Union Square was about to start forging a comeback.
Taylor fixed his eyes on the youth and took the phone from his ear. On the other end was Southern District Commander Maj. Scott Bloodsworth.
"I've got the police commander on the phone," Taylor says he told the teen.
The young man's eyes widened.
"This is my neighborhood," Taylor said. "You're the one who's lost."
Minutes later, the cops arrived and placed the teen in cuffs. As for the vacant house?
"That's the good news," Taylor said. "It's currently under construction."
The vacancy problem
If Baltimore has a fundamental problem, it's represented by the vacant house: 47,000 of them — to be exact — about 16 percent of the city's housing stock. They're the result of Baltimore's population decline from 950,000 people in 1950 to 620,000 today.
The vacant house is an invitation for crime and litter to increase and a sense of community to decrease, activists say.
"The vacants are a huge, key issue," says Adam Van Bavel, a community activist from Pigtown, one of Baltimore's better-known transitional neighborhoods.
When Van Bavel moved to his block in Pigtown in 2007, only five of the 25 houses were occupied. Drug dealers used the vacants on either side of him. Now, most houses are occupied — including four vacants in the last year taken over by homeowners.
"Pigtown is one of those neighborhoods that could have easily been a Canton or a Federal Hill 10 years ago, but for some reason it wasn't," he says. "I can tell you that the residents of the neighborhood are doing everything we can to get more people moving into Baltimore City."
Since 2008, only 14 of Baltimore's more than 225 neighborhoods have sold more houses each year than the previous year. One of those is Union Square. That puts the tiny South Baltimore neighborhood with its $61,000 median home sale price in 2010 in the same category as Federal Hill ($285,000 median home sale in 2010) and Butcher's Hill ($250,000 median home sale).
For a neighborhood to consistently attract more residents, it needs to offer safety, cleanliness and a sense of community. And to build such a community, neighborhoods often need a leader.
Rosemary Wakeman, director of the Urban Studies Program at Fordham University, said younger, more daring people are often the first to start a wave of revitalization in a neighborhood.
"Often, the artist community makes up the pioneers," she said. "I think individuals can make a difference when they act as a functioning community. You have to have community leadership that can lobby for better services in a sustained way over time."
It's by no means an easy task for those who take on the challenge. Such urban pioneers often risk their time, money and safety in such an endeavor.
Taylor recently finished his fifth year as president of the Union Square Community Association and challenged for a City Council seat but lost. Sometimes, he thinks there might be something wrong with him for even undertaking such a mission in the first place.
"I don't know if we should be lauded or put in an insane asylum," he says.
Just ask Sebastian Sassi, who worked for years to try to remake Pigtown before deciding to move out. A hot neighborhood for investors a few years ago when it began a transformational period, Pigtown's home sales have regressed recently.
