Vacant Houses

The vacant brick rowhouse at 2037 Orleans St. looks like many of the 16,000 abandoned homes that beset Baltimore. The front door is covered with plywood. The weedy backyard is strewn with trash. But this empty house stands out in one notable way: It's owned by Police Maj. Melvin T. Russell, commander of the Eastern District - a man who has seen firsthand how blight has damaged East Baltimore and whose job makes him a role model in the community. "I'm an advocate against these people," Russell said Monday, referring to owners of run-down vacants.

A Baltimore jury convicted Alvin Ray Wright Sr. Tuesday of grabbing a 13-year-old girl just a block from her home, throwing her into the basement of a vacant East Baltimore building and repeatedly raping her. "She thought she was going to die," Assistant State's Attorney Aaliyah Muhammad said during closing arguments. "He beat her into submission. " As the jury returned its guilty verdict on the first count, a faint, thin smile passed the lips of the girl. Her father hugged her tight.

When Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke first took office in 1987, he pledged to recycle dilapidated vacant houses back into the city's housing stock. The mayor can cite some successes. But mounting evidence suggests that far from getting better, Baltimore's vacant housing situation is getting worse.The number of boarded-up houses is rapidly climbing, particularly in the inner-city. A new trend also is evident. Houses are no longer even boarded up but are allowed to create a public safety hazard as a haven for drug addicts and targets for would-be arsonists.

A 25th Street insurance agent, Ken Abrams, got to the heart of what makes his neighborhood stand out. "There is a lot of diversity in the Old Goucher neighborhood. and we are proud of it," he said. "But this feature is not as well known as it should be. " Old Goucher sits between Charles Village and Station North. It draws its name from the old Goucher College campus with its inventory of ex-academic buildings, those big gray stone teaching halls and red-brick dormitories mixed in among blocks of Baltimore's iconic rowhouses.

This much is indisputable: The number of vacant houses in Baltimore City has risen alarmingly in recent years. There are no accurate numbers, though. Forget the 7,700 figure the housing department likes to throw around. Nearly two years ago, the Johns Hopkins Institute for Policy Studies put vacant houses in the city at 27,222. "Sixty percent of the abandoned housing stock has been abandoned more than two years and therefore is unlikely to be salvageable," researchers concluded.What is to be done?

Stephen Church is a 26-year-old police officer in Annapolis He hails from Baltimore, however, and wants to continue to live here. But how can a man afford a house in the beginning of his career?Officer Church found a way. Recently he became the first applicant to be awarded a loan in Baltimore City's new $8 million vacant house loan program. His future home, a boarded-up, two-story rowhouse in the 1600 block East 29th Street, still bears the smoky scars of a firebombing. But if everything goes well, Officer Church hopes to move in before the end of the year.

Moving ahead with what officials hope will be the transformation of a badly blighted section of East Baltimore, the city has begun acquiring properties for a major revitalization effort centered around a biotech park. As a first step, the city is moving to take control of about 70 vacant houses outside the boundaries of the proposed biopark. These buildings -- mostly along three blocks of North Broadway just north of the Johns Hopkins medical complex in the vicinity of Madison Square and Collington Square -- are scheduled for renovation by private developers, officials say. The houses will be offered first to East Baltimore homeowners displaced by the renewal project.

Property tax breaks meant to encourage homeownership have been awarded to 465 vacant houses in Baltimore, depriving the city of uncollected revenue in a difficult budget year and calling into question past promises from city officials to crack down on tax scofflaws, a Baltimore Sun analysis has found. Owners of the vacant homes received a total of $325,000 in tax breaks. That's enough money to run municipal swimming pools for more than two weeks, one of the many services that had been on the chopping block - stoking the ire of residents - as the city slashed its budget to address a $65 million shortfall.

Hoping to lower the city's stock of more than 40,000 vacant properties, Baltimore's housing commissioner said yesterday that he will step up efforts to combat the problem with a new plan.Daniel P. Henson III, who serves as the head of Housing and Community Development and the Housing Authority, assembled more than 60 housing developers, city department leaders, community leaders and other housing specialists to draw up the plan.Some initiatives have already begun, Henson said.He said that two state's attorney slots have been created and filled to handle issues in housing court.

Seven Northwestern High School seniors are learning the intricacies of real estate law in an effort to take back vacant housing in their community from absentee owners.Each Wednesday this school year, the students -- most of them members of Mary Otho's first period social studies elective in criminal and civil law -- are excused from classes and instead spend 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the legal clinic, studying the law and learning how to use property records.This month, the students took their map of vacant properties in Northwest Baltimore to the Park-Reist Corridor Coalition, a citizens group.

Gone are the plywood-covered door and windows that never seemed to keep the vacant house sealed very long. Gone too is the gaping hole where the first floor should have been — a dungeonlike pit where police say a 13-year-old girl was raped one night last fall as she walked home. Now a new porch light hangs from the brick facade, just above a metal mailbox. Inside, the transformation unfolds room by room: Hardwood floors cover a rebuilt first level, cherry-finish cabinets hang in the kitchen, and the three bedrooms and 21/2 bathrooms feel brand-new.

Baltimore stakeholders continue to push for solutions to the high number of vacant and boarded-up houses that dot the city. The latest effort, " Baltimore Builds Expo : Restoring value to Baltimore's vacant property," is scheduled for 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. June 9. Admission is free, but guests must register by calling 410-396-4111. Check out the website for information. The event will be held at the Westside Skills Center, 501 North Athol Avenue in Baltimore's Allendale neighborhood.

Baltimore city police found the body of an unidentified man Sunday afternoon in the Central Park Heights neighborhood and are investigating the death as a homicide. Officers were called to the 3000 block Oakley Avenue shortly after 3 p.m. The victim, who was discovered inside a vacant home, had sustained a gunshot wound to the head, police said. Mary.gail.hare@baltsun.com Text NEWS to 70701 to get Baltimore Sun local news text alerts

In this week's State of the Union address, President Obama announced to cheers the formation of a new Justice Department unit tasked with going after the big banks and mortgage companies whose reckless lending led to the collapse of the housing market and caused millions of Americans to lose their homes through foreclosure. The bursting of the housing bubble deepened the recession that began in 2007, and it continues to drag down the economy's recovery. It's about time the people responsible for this mess were held to account.

The hulking white duplex at 2108-2110 Mount Royal Terrace - a vacant eyesore for 20 years - is a financial and emotional drain on neighbors, who maintain a five-block stretch of historic homes that overlooks the Jones Falls Expressway and acts as the eastern border of Reservoir Hill. But for two nights this past weekend, residents gathered on the sidewalk in front of the empty house, watching it and imagining what it would be like if someone lived there. The occasion was an exhibit by two students at the nearby Maryland Institute College of Art, who used the 120-year-old home as a movie screen, with videos projected onto the plywood that covers the first-floor windows.

The vacant brick rowhouse at 2037 Orleans St. looks like many of the 16,000 abandoned homes that beset Baltimore. The front door is covered with plywood. The weedy backyard is strewn with trash. But this empty house stands out in one notable way: It's owned by Police Maj. Melvin T. Russell, commander of the Eastern District - a man who has seen firsthand how blight has damaged East Baltimore and whose job makes him a role model in the community. "I'm an advocate against these people," Russell said Monday, referring to owners of run-down vacants.

The sign on the door of 4 S. Frederick St. announces that an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting is held at this address.Not so well marked in the same small office building just south of city Police Department headquarters is the Baltimore branch of the Atlanta auction company the city has hired to sell nearly 170 vacant houses this month.This a very curious sale billed as the first annual Home Festival Auction. The sale is full of government rules, but it also promises to deliver some good deals for owner-occupant purchasers with a lot of faith.

IT IS DOUBTFUL that anyone has ever counted every one of them, but there are about 40,000 vacant houses in Baltimore City out of a total housing stock of 304,000 units, according to housing Commissioner Daniel P. Henson III.Even more shocking is the fact that 11,242 of them are open to the elements, posing a tremendous fire hazard and nuisance problem to themselves and to neighboring structures. More than 95 percent of these houses are privately owned.The city is now planning to go after these problem houses with new vigor.

There are roughly 16,000 vacant rowhouses scattered about Baltimore. The city owns about 3,500 of them. A Baltimore police major owns one of them. It's ironic because most of these houses are attributed to slumlords and absentee landlords. But here a high ranking member of the city police force owns one of the city's foremost symbols of blight. The major, Melvin T. Russell, commands the Eastern District, historically one of the most violent and one of the most pockmarked by vacant rowhouses.

A 17-year-old woman was killed in a single-car accident Wednesday morning after she apparently lost control of her vehicle on a wet road and struck a vacant house in Pasadena. The victim was identified by the Anne Arundel County Police Department as Kala Marie Austin, of the 3600 block of Robin Air Court in Pasadena. According to police, officers from the department's Eastern District responded at 7:37 a.m. to a report of an accident near Mountain Road and Fairwood Drive in Pasadena.