How Baltimore's Mayor Is Fighting the City's Vacant Housing Crisis
Odd Lots
Bloomberg
4.5 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 4 May 2026
⏱️ 52 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Since Mayor Brandon Scott took office in 2020, he's fixated on a very visible problem in Baltimore: the tens of thousands of vacant homes that dot the city. It's hard to build new houses when there are so many that sit empty and unused. And the process of tracking down owners, convincing them to sell their vacant properties, and then converting those homes into usable housing supply is a tall task. In the last few years, the number of vacant homes in Baltimore has dropped from 16,000 to just over 11,800. On this episode — recorded in Madrid while we attended the Bloomberg CityLab conference — we speak to Mayor Scott about deindustrialization, redlining, and gun violence's historical effects on the current housing crisis, how his government identifies, block-by-block, redevelopment opportunities and matches projects with publicly-minded developers, and why Baltimore natives aren't huge fans of The Wire.
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Transcript
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| 0:35.0 | Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts Radio News. News. |
| 0:36.9 | The... Radio News. |
| 0:49.4 | Hello and welcome to another episode of the All Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. |
| 0:50.8 | And I'm Joe Wisenthall. |
| 0:55.6 | So, Joe, we are here in Madrid as part of Bloomberg City Lab. |
| 1:00.4 | Tough, tough assignment for us. I know. I know. A real hardship posting. Yeah, real hardship posting, |
| 1:05.7 | but willing to do it. Yeah. So there are mayors from all over the world here, all talking about the challenges and opportunities facing cities. And we're about to speak to one of them in particular. |
| 1:11.6 | And it's actually a really interesting test case of, I think, a lot of themes that kind of |
| 1:17.8 | touch on the odd lots ove, let's say. |
| 1:20.9 | Well, one of the things that comes up all the time, obviously, on odd lots over the years |
| 1:25.3 | is housing, right? |
| 1:26.3 | And one of the things that we've discovered, |
| 1:28.3 | I would say, is, okay, it's easy to say housing is a stress everywhere, housing is a challenge, |
... |
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