Vacant Properties

Baltimore officials moved Tuesday to take back undeserved tax breaks from owners of vacant properties who are profiting from a program intended for primary residences. The effort followed a Baltimore Sun report that the owners of 465 empty homes - cited by the city as unsafe or uninhabitable - had their city property tax bills reduced by a total of $325,000, thanks to homestead property tax credits meant for owner-occupiers. Challengers to Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake in the Democratic primary next month were quick to pounce on what they described as a symptom of insufficient oversight.

Re: Your article in Friday's Sun paper outlining a new vision for North Avenue, a place of dereliction since the '70s ("A vision for North Avenue"). I am heartened to see and hear that there are still people in Baltimore that care about their neighborhoods, even though one would feel extremely skeptical when driving along the corridors of North Avenue in East and West Baltimore — and let's not give South Baltimore a free pass. Trash and graffiti are the first signs of decay, along with vacant properties, in any city.

Where the passengers on the tour bus rolling west on North Avenue saw blocks of crumbling and abandoned buildings and overgrown lots, Lou Fields envisioned another Pratt Street in the making. Fields, who heads a nonprofit heritage tourism group, is leading an effort to revitalize what he views as one of the city's most overlooked thoroughfares. Progress is possible, he says, even in tough economic times. "Attention, awareness and appreciation — if you don't have those things going on, nothing's going to happen," said Fields, who views his role as that of "visionary crusader.

More commercial property owners should consider converting their buildings to apartments, given the high vacancy rate downtown. The city should create a Tax Increment Finance district in the oldest parts of downtown to pay for capital improvements and encourage new development. City leaders should condemn and acquire certain vacant properties when property owners let them deteriorate, and should set time limits for developers to move ahead with renovation of properties awarded to them by the city.

Housing officials have sold more of the city's vacant homes in the first seven months of the budget year than in all of the previous year — but the sales still represent fewer than 3 percent of the 4,000 empty houses owned by the city. As housing advocates, community leaders and developers gather today for a day-long summit on Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake's "Vacants to Value" program, data from the city housing department indicate that despite incremental gains, officials are far from making a dent in the city's 30,000 vacant properties.

The abandoned rowhouse next door to Wendy and Brian Malaney has been a nightmare of a neighbor. The rowhouse's roofing material blew off, and water seeped through the Malaneys' adjoining walls. Later the pipes burst in the neighboring property, flooding their basement. The air they and their two young daughters breathe is now heavy with the noxious stink of mold. Abandoned buildings are a perennial problem in Baltimore — a city where many residents share connecting walls.

Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said she would accelerate redevelopment of Baltimore's more than 30,000 vacant properties by cutting bureaucracy and speeding the sales of city-owned properties. "Vacant houses are more than just an eyesore," Rawlings-Blake said at a Wednesday morning news conference. "Just ask someone who lives next door to one. " Vacant properties constitute one of the city's most pernicious problems, depressing home values and blighting the landscape. Officials have counted 16,000 unoccupied buildings, which harbor vagrants, attract vermin and pose fire hazards.

Criticism, even of the constructive sort, is often unwelcome, but the charges of inefficiency and lack of direction at some city agencies contained in Mayor Stephanie C. Rawlings-Blake's transition team report are exactly what Baltimore needs to hear right now. Faced with a $120 million budget shortfall, Baltimore can't afford not to cut inefficient programs and agencies, while making every effort to save the ones that work. But the transition team's 230-page report suggests there is no simple or painless way to return efficient government and fiscal solvency to the city.

Baltimore should privatize trash collection, cease sending fire trucks and engines to medical calls and consider extracting property taxes from nonprofits, such as hospitals and schools, according to a comprehensive analysis of city government presented today to Mayor Stephanie C. Rawlings-Blake. The report, prepared by a 150-member volunteer transition committee, is particularly critical of the Department of Housing and Community Development — which "appears to lack a clear and coherent vision for revitalizing ... neighborhoods," and calls for an audit and management review of the Recreation and Parks Department.