Vacant Houses

Surrounded by clusters of trees and tall grasses, the community garden on Woodland Avenue provides Mary Waller with a serene, pastoral view from her wide front porch, less than half a mile from the Pimlico Race Course . But only a few of Waller's neighbors are left to enjoy it. Her side of the street is lined with rowhouses long abandoned and left to deteriorate, a lasting reminder of how her block in Northwest Baltimore has languished since...

In an ambitious attempt to redevelop blighted, near-vacant neighborhoods, about 900 rowhouses throughout East Baltimore will be torn down or repaired and sold under a plan that marks the beginning of what could be the largest revitalization of poor communities in the city.Yesterday, the Board of Estimates unanimously approved spending $1.7 million, the first chunk of the $34.1 million allotted to the project. Under the plan, which has been in the works since 1995, huge blocks of rowhouses would be acquired.

Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke's ukase to the police to investigate scrap dealers and prosecute scavengers stripping vacant houses of plumbing fixtures and other valuable items is long overdue. Even a cursory look at the city shows that vacant houses are being devoured by human termites at an alarming rate."Some scrap dealers may think it's a victimless crime. It is not," says Housing Commissioner Daniel P. Henson III. "You leave a home vacant for 24 hours and it's totally stripped."Two factors have caused this epidemic of stripping fixtures.

Work crews began demolishing 67 houses Friday morning on an East Baltimore block that once was targeted for luxury rowhouses but now has "the highest concentration of blight in the city," according to city officials. About 10 a.m., Mayor Stephanie C. Rawlings-Blake took the controls of an excavator owned by P&J Contracting Co. and made the first swipes at the façade of 1979 Perlman Place, at the corner of Sinclair Lane. As a P&J employee sprayed the collapsing building with a high-powered hose to to water down dust, the home's walls and floors collapsed inward.

A recent change in Baltimore's building code allows the city and community leaders to take control of vacant houses from absentee owners and turn them over to non-profit developers for renovation.The city housing department, in conjunction with the non-profit Community Law Center, filed suit in District Court yesterday against the owners of two rowhouses in East Baltimore.The suit asks the court to appoint the Middle East Community Development Organization as a receiver of the properties so they can be renovated and sold to families in the community, which is located near Johns Hopkins Hospital.

When then-Mayor Martin O'Malley initiated an ambitious effort to take control of 5,000 vacant houses in Baltimore in 2002, the program was touted as a sweeping attack on blight and a targeted way to redevelop neighborhoods. The goal to acquire the properties within two years turned out to be unrealistic, and five years later the program hasn't entirely delivered on its promise. Moreover, the city attempted to take on only a fraction of the estimated 40,000 vacant houses that pockmark Baltimore neighborhoods.

IN OCTOBER 1998, after Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke announced a crackdown on vacant houses, we published a picture of abandoned, trash-strewn rowhouses in the 600 block of N. Calhoun St. "Let's see how long it takes to clean up problem houses like the one above," we wondered. The situation warranted renewed editorial attention in March 2000. Martin O'Malley had become mayor four months earlier, but still no action had been taken. "Was trash attack just propaganda?" we asked. At long last there is some good news: Those West Baltimore rowhouses have finally been cleaned and boarded up. And while it's too early to celebrate victory, the O'Malley administration is at least making a serious effort to crack down on vacant houses.

The neighbors knew Ricardo Paige as "Pops," a kind man who lived and worked as a handyman in the Pen Lucy neighborhood renovating vacant houses for landlords. But Paige, police and prosecutors believe, unknowingly crossed the wrong people in the neighborhood. Authorities believe that drug dealers who used vacant houses on the block thought Paige might have turned over a drug stash to police. On March 20, 2007, they confronted him in the house where he was living and working, in the 500 block of E. 43rd St., and shot him six times, including once in the mouth.

Baltimore City firefighters battled three fires in West Baltimore, requiring more than 100 firefighters — almost a third of the shift's manpower, a department spokesman said Wednesday. Firefighters were called about 5:30 p.m. to the 1300 block of N. Calhoun Street where three row houses caught fire; two were vacant, said Chief Kevin Cartwright, a department spokesman. On the opposite side of the street, Cartwright said five vacant houses had also caught fire. A third fire broke out one block away in the 1300 block of N. Carey Street, where one occupied home and two vacant houses caught fire.

Three Baltimore scrap metal companies have pleaded guilty to improperly buying metal, after a city crackdown on thieves who strip metal from vacant houses to sell.Each of the companies did not keep accurate records of their transactions and did not submit transaction sheets to police officials, as required by law. Police detectives depend on dealers to record who brought in the metal, in case the materials were stolen.Industrial Metals-Early Corp. of the 1500 block of N. Warwick Ave. was fined $800, Franklintown Metals & Cores of the 100 block of McPhail St. was fined $450 and Baltimore Scrap Corp.