YouSaid · the spoken record

Brandon Scott

lines on the record: 55
first: 2026-05-04
most recent: 2026-05-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“All right, so if you're going to get crab cakes, you have to go and get the best crab cake in the world from Coco's Pub. You'll never eat another crab cake after having that one. So thoughts start you there. But since you're into art and culture, you should then, right now, up and through August, we actually have at the Walters Art Gallery, which is free to the public. We actually have a Dornian Fletcher exhibit that is the jewelry and the costumes from Black Panther or Wakonda Forever in display in Baltimore at the museum because we found out that some of the art at our museum inspired her to do her jewelry art. So that's a great way to spend your time there.”
2026-05-04 · Odd Lots · How Baltimore's Mayor Is Fighting the City's Vacant Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's pretty much it. I need to know these are the kind of things I need to know. So if you're coming in the summertime and you love food, so you're coming in Baltimore, so you can't come to Baltimore and not eat craft. So would you prefer crabs or crab cakes?”
2026-05-04 · Odd Lots · How Baltimore's Mayor Is Fighting the City's Vacant Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the casino that's next to it Well, it depends what time. Now I have to ask the question what time of year you're coming”
2026-05-04 · Odd Lots · How Baltimore's Mayor Is Fighting the City's Vacant Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's group chats with an S with an S. So we talked to Mirrors every day. I'm the president of the African American Mayors Association. We talk to each other every day. We're always sharing things. If you're a mayor, one of the best things that you have to be in order to be a great mayor, you have to be a great thief. You have to steal from mayors across the country and steal ideas and make them better for your that because if you're not learning from your counterparts, who are you learning from?”
2026-05-04 · Odd Lots · How Baltimore's Mayor Is Fighting the City's Vacant Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, that's the beauty of it, right? That we're all listen. I'm a part of the best Bloomberg Harvard class. That's the fifth class. So don't let any of the other mayors tell you they're not from our class. They're not part of the best. But like we all talk through each other pretty much every day, right? Like there's a whole bunch of mayors.”
2026-05-04 · Odd Lots · How Baltimore's Mayor Is Fighting the City's Vacant Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So for us, our fire department's using housing department's using it, like even with vacans to help identify the structures and whether if we need to look at condemnation and those kind of things. And there'll be other things that we can push to use it. We just have to be smart about it.”
2026-05-04 · Odd Lots · How Baltimore's Mayor Is Fighting the City's Vacant Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, see, for me, I hate to say this, but that one's always going to be the violence number for me. That's the one. Where are we? Every day when I wake up, that's the first thing. Well, now's in the afternoon while I'm here. But every day when I wake up at home, it's the first thing that I look up. And then it's also the vacant's number, right? Like, where are we today? How many has it gone up? Has it gone down? We want to make sure that we're hitting our goals, right? Like all we had out 15% goal for violence this year, right? Like that's what I want to see continuously to do that. But I have a lot of things that I follow. I'm a dashboard data person. So I have dashboards. We have a housing dashboard, public safety dashboard. We track a lot of things on dashboards.”
2026-05-04 · Odd Lots · How Baltimore's Mayor Is Fighting the City's Vacant Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some things have gotten shorter, and now we got to a point where a lot of our stuff is waiting for the applicant, right? But it was about simple stuff, right? Well, there wasn't the applicant put something in. We put it back. The system didn't automatically notify the applicant now that we were made waiting on them, right? Those kind of simple things, when you're talking about operating a city government are important to have from a systemic point of infrastructure point of view, making sure that those things are there. Making sure that you have the staffing necessary to go through all of the things that are necessary. And that's where we've been really focusing, building, building that infrastructure up, both from the data side and the technical side, but from the human capital as well, because you need both of them.”
2026-05-04 · Odd Lots · How Baltimore's Mayor Is Fighting the City's Vacant Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, so modern think about that right now that like we can modernize those systems and we're modernizing our permanent systems, different agencies had systems that didn't talk to each other.”
2026-05-04 · Odd Lots · How Baltimore's Mayor Is Fighting the City's Vacant Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's it. Listen everywhere you go, you're going to hear the same thing, whether it's me and me and Mondami talking about it or me and Van Johnson from Savannah. We all talk about making sure that our systems are working better, right? We're going through that now. When I took office, they were still doing time cheats by hand in city government.”
2026-05-04 · Odd Lots · How Baltimore's Mayor Is Fighting the City's Vacant Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think for us, one, you get to be that close 29 minute train ride away from DC and you don't have to pay DC prices, right? Like we're just going to keep. And when you think about, especially for defense and other tech companies, Fort Meade is there. You know, all of these things are NSA. All of these things are really close to the city of Baltimore. And you're in a perfect spot. You can get to DC untrained in 30 minutes. You can get to Philly by training 45. You can get to New York in two hours and 30 minutes. And you're in this where the location of Baltimore physically is an advantage over basically, in my opinion, any other city in the country. But when you add on the infrastructure of the university, like you're just not going to get a Johns Hopkins and the University of Maryland in the same place, in the same city, anywhere else, you're just not going to get that kind of and the opportunities that Baltimore provides to folks.”
2026-05-04 · Odd Lots · How Baltimore's Mayor Is Fighting the City's Vacant Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's going. The bridge has been demolished and it's moving pretty fast for an infrastructure project of that size. People like, oh, the bridge's not being rebuilt. I'm like, this is the bridge, you guys. This doesn't happen that quickly. But we're still a port city. We're obviously a big hub for tourism and culture and sports. We're also Eds in Med City, right? With Hopkins and University of Maryland, we're a big arts and culture city. And we're a growing tech city, which is where we think the growth is for us. We had like 600 million in capital investment into those. That enlightened manufacturing will continue to be a growth area for us.”
2026-05-04 · Odd Lots · How Baltimore's Mayor Is Fighting the City's Vacant Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, just in Baltimore. I think for us, listen, we're blessed. We still have some industry. We're always going to be a port city. The world found that out a few years ago when the Keybridge collapsed and found out how important the port of Baltimore is to the world regularly.”
2026-05-04 · Odd Lots · How Baltimore's Mayor Is Fighting the City's Vacant Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We pay every month, they pay every four months, all of these kind of things converge the issue, but water rates. And listen, the thing about water utilities is that taxpayer dollars for like property taxes and other money doesn't go into that. Water utility systems only come from the systems themselves. And when you think about the world and the craziness that we're living in today and the cost of the equipment and the materials that needed to make sure that water, that's going up. There's no other way, essentially, to deal with it. But I think that for us, it's really about setting the structure in a more simplified understandable way for the residents and making sure that our partners around are playing a more critical role when it comes to the resources. And that's what we're going to do.”
2026-05-04 · Odd Lots · How Baltimore's Mayor Is Fighting the City's Vacant Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think that what I would say is that I thought it was going to be a real technical question. I think that a few things, right? Yes, water rates have increased. They're increasing everywhere. But I would say that our increases up until last year were the lowest that we've had pretty much in my lifetime. But I would, no developer has said to me that like, oh, I'm not going to come and renovate houses in Baltimore because of the waterville. We know that costs are rising across the board. And we're going through a process now even and where this conversation really normally leads to is like, oh, well, the county pays less for their ward than we do and they don't have to pay all these fees and then you have to spend this long explanation saying, well, they actually do play those fees except for the county just hides the fees and other bills that they don't see, right? And we're working with five county partners through a bill that me and the county executive put into state about how the water system is going to look moving forward because the city does the water for the surrounding county as well.”
2026-05-04 · Odd Lots · How Baltimore's Mayor Is Fighting the City's Vacant Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and it's also why we work with different kind of developers, right? Who smaller developers who are taking these other things and we can partner them with folks to get these people there. We have to be thinking about all of that because people are going to say that anytime you make that investment.”
2026-05-04 · Odd Lots · How Baltimore's Mayor Is Fighting the City's Vacant Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a very important thing to me, right? I love the city of DC. My brother lives there, but I know that if you talk to specifically to old time black Washingtonians, they will say that we're no longer chocolate city. We're a latte city, right? Like they feel like they've lost a bit of their culture with a lot of folks coming in from all over and feeling like some of the original Washingtonians have just been pushed out, right? And we're very intentional about understanding that we do want people to come from all over. But we also, and we have this very unique opportunity with all the vacans to make sure that the folks that have stayed in Baltimore and lived through all this can benefit from it from as well. And we do that through things like my Buy Back the Block program where we're taking people who are renters. In fact, paying more in rent than they would in mortgages and making them homeowners.”
2026-05-04 · Odd Lots · How Baltimore's Mayor Is Fighting the City's Vacant Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your city is running a TIFF money, obviously. The city money is a TIFF money for us. The state is fronting their $50 million investment each and every year. And then we have the private investment and we have philanthropic investment into the vacant strategy. So it's really everybody coalescing together. And then obviously the operational portions of it is on the city as well for the most part. The state has some of the operational portions of it. When you think about the housing department, all of those things on the city, on the city's books, and even some of the capital investment in our own capital budget is also on the city, the city's books as well.”
2026-05-04 · Odd Lots · How Baltimore's Mayor Is Fighting the City's Vacant Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, yes and though, right? I will tell you that, for example, if we're at the In and Out of Shopping Center's conference in Vegas every May, a few years ago, let's say 21 and 22, folks will be saying to Mr. Mayor, I love Baltimore, but until you guys reduce homicides and shootings we can't invest there. But then you would get folks that would say, like, until you guys get under 300 homicides, right? It depends on the person, but you know it was the big elephant in the room. Do you guys have a plan? What's your plan? Is the plan working? How are you going to do it? A lot of folks with, some folks would still invest if you show them the plan even before we actually were able to implement the plan. But it was the big elephant in the room and we've been able to really The best is out there for us to go”
2026-05-04 · Odd Lots · How Baltimore's Mayor Is Fighting the City's Vacant Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you can see, look, and this building that is actually documented on a PBS documentary called The Body Politics. So my entire first two and a half years in office building that is something people can see.”
2026-05-04 · Odd Lots · How Baltimore's Mayor Is Fighting the City's Vacant Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you think about that, and then at the same time, we put $50 million into our community violence intervention ecosystem where we pay people who used to be involved in that life to prevent conflict, to go out there through safe streets and we are us and these other organizations to do that great work because there are things that our police officers could never get in between because no one's going to tell them that, right? At the same time, we also focus on the flow of guns. We're going after gun stores. We won the largest settlement against the gun store in this country's history. We won a settlement against the ghost gun company. We're going after gun traffickers. We're doing all of that and investing into youth and education and historic ways. That's the way that we've been able to do it.”
2026-05-04 · Odd Lots · How Baltimore's Mayor Is Fighting the City's Vacant Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is your one chance to change your life. We will help you in any way that we can. If you need housing, job training, education, if you want to be relocated, we'll do that. But if you don't stop doing what you're doing, I am going to bring the hammer down on you and we're going to remove you. Out of the folks who have taken us up on that, over 90% of them have not been revictivized or recidivated.”
2026-05-04 · Odd Lots · How Baltimore's Mayor Is Fighting the City's Vacant Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was ridiculous, and two, they said it's not going to work the way you say because we're going to be smart on crime, right? Being smart on crime is how you really get tough on it. We're going to throw away the idea that you just go out and arrest everybody for everything and crime will go down because it didn't. But what we've been able to do is, one, we use our focus deterrence model, what we call GVRS, the group violence reduction strategy, which we actually use data, which is something also funded partially by the folks, good folks at Bloomberg, to identify who are the most likely to be the victim or perpetrator of gun violence. And we actually go to them, many of them, and say they get a letter directly from me that says, I know who you are, I know what you do.”
2026-05-04 · Odd Lots · How Baltimore's Mayor Is Fighting the City's Vacant Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, let me just start to say that doesn't work. So if you think about those years of zero tolerance, so I'll give you a Z year, for example, 2004, the city had 278 homicides, right? They arrested 91,000 people in the city of 600,000. Oh my God. Last year we had 133. We arrested 17,000 people significantly less homicides with significantly less arrest because it's never been about how many people you arrest. It's always been about who and for what. And the way that we've done it is we, by law, a law that I passed as a city council president in 2019, the mayor of Baltimore has to present a comprehensive violence prevention plan, at least every two years. And that is what we did in 2021. I unveiled our first comprehensive violence prevention plan. I said that we would reduce homicides in the city by 15% from one year to the next, and people literally laughed because they laughed because one, they thought.”
2026-05-04 · Odd Lots · How Baltimore's Mayor Is Fighting the City's Vacant Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gun violence in Baltimore. Now, the only thing people want to talk to me about how did I reduce gun violence in Baltimore? And I think it's not just that we did it. It's how we did it. Because listen, we're talking about a place that when I was growing up, we had breathing while black policing, right? Seven times in my lifetime, I was sat down on the curb and put in handcuffs, including in the rain, simply because I was outside and looked the way I look accused of committing crimes that I couldn't have possibly committed because I was two hours away at college when it happened. So when you think about that and think about that I'm 42 now, but 18 out of the 42 years that I've been alive, Baltimore had over 300 murders. And we went from in the last six years, right? Violence has dropped over almost 60% in the city of Baltimore. Going from 300 plus to now 133, which is still 133, too many.”
2026-05-04 · Odd Lots · How Baltimore's Mayor Is Fighting the City's Vacant Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that it is the number one reason why Baltimore is so hot right now. Because after all those years, I'll just say it like this. If this were 2021 and were at City Lab, the only thing people want to talk to me about is, how am I going to reduce?”
2026-05-04 · Odd Lots · How Baltimore's Mayor Is Fighting the City's Vacant Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we actually didn't get any public pushback, right? The reality was that the way Maryland is set up, we had to get the state to say yes. There's been this theme, right? So we're independency, there's no county government for us. Amen. Hallelujah. It's just us and state and the federal government. But it's been this sentiment that like the city doesn't know what it's doing, et cetera, et cetera. But you can't really argue with the data, right? Whether it's, you know, we've reduced basically eliminated one in four vacant houses in my time in office, right? We've reduced violence in the city to the lowest levels on recorded record. You can't really argue with the numbers. So now folks are more ready to give us more of that authority to deal with the issues because it's also a drain on them, right? And that's what we're saying to them is that this takes money out of the state's pocket, right? The inability for us to do stuff with these owners hurts the state of Maryland just as much as it hurts the city of Baltimore.”
2026-05-04 · Odd Lots · How Baltimore's Mayor Is Fighting the City's Vacant Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Since my grandmother and grandfather moved to the neighborhood, right? So that's the way that we're doing it. And it just depends on where you are because we want to mix it. For example, we had a housing project Perkins Somerset in Old Town. Now we have the new one where we have the mixture, right? We have mixed income. We have to make sure that we're providing a multitude of opportunities because it can't just be all high end. It can't just be all affordable. We need working class, all of those things.”
2026-05-04 · Odd Lots · How Baltimore's Mayor Is Fighting the City's Vacant Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, I'm going to go back to the neighborhood block level planning. And that's all this is Baltimore, right? So those neighborhoods love their neighborhood aesthetic and they want to keep them as much as possible, right? So even, for example, in that block of parkis that I talked about where we knocked down, which were we have row homes, connected row homes for the most part in Baltimore. We have single family too. I live in one, but connected row homes, even though we built a multi-unit senior apartment building for senior living there, it actually looks on the outside like the Rohomes that were there before. So we have to make sure that we're meeting the aesthetic of the neighborhood and what the neighborhood actually needs. So that neighborhood needed that, right? It needed places for older adults to actually who want to remain in the community to do that. The next phase that we're doing there that will break ground on before the years out, hopefully, is the first home ownership opportunities built there.”
2026-05-04 · Odd Lots · How Baltimore's Mayor Is Fighting the City's Vacant Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess because no one tried it before, I had no idea. But it's probably also a little bit of hidden racism in people that were saying that. They were also saying like, you can't do Tiffany that is this kind of area, right? But they were wrong. We knew they were wrong. The numbers speak for themselves.”
2026-05-04 · Odd Lots · How Baltimore's Mayor Is Fighting the City's Vacant Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A strategically investing in the neighborhoods that have been disinvested in, in the butterfly or the red line neighborhoods. And that's how we're going to build upon what we're doing.”
2026-05-04 · Odd Lots · How Baltimore's Mayor Is Fighting the City's Vacant Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what we're doing is we're using the VVN, the vacant building notice, all across the city and identifying like, we're going to put a TIFF on that. So we offered out and people were going crazy. Like, it's not going to work. No one's going to apply for this. You have to have it in one area. That's the way the TIFF works. Well, we put out in our first round $28 million worth of TIFF financing. We got $380 million worth of applications. So the demand is there. And this is affordable housing TIFF in neighborhoods. And you can see if you look at our map, right, you can see that it's going right in those red line neighborhoods, right in those disinvested neighborhoods. And in fact, as a part of my state of the city, we unveiled a investments map data map where you can see since I've been in office where the investment has gone, right? And we did a heat map. It was Baltimore. It was purple. So the darker, the more purple, the more investment. And you can see that we are.”
2026-05-04 · Odd Lots · How Baltimore's Mayor Is Fighting the City's Vacant Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is where I cut in and Instrument financing where essentially you would put all this money up front and you would get it back on the back end, which is they used to incentivize development all around the country. This is the first time that that tool is being used for something that's not a non-contiguous area.”
2026-05-04 · Odd Lots · How Baltimore's Mayor Is Fighting the City's Vacant Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're also one of the most innovative things that we're doing. Folks typically use TIFF tax increment financing for like new developments, right? For us, think about like Harbor East or Harbor Point, all the fancy areas. Well, we're actually doing it on TIFF. And this is the first time.”
2026-05-04 · Odd Lots · How Baltimore's Mayor Is Fighting the City's Vacant Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If the houses are going to be demolished, we do that. We do that in partnership with the state. The renovation will, when we award an RFP to someone, we're awarding it for housing, like to renovate, to do this. So we do that, but that again goes back to the block level planning, right? And making sure that we like, okay, in this neighborhood, we need this, right? This block is these houses are too far gone. We're just going to knock that down, make it parkspace or RFP the land, right? This block, this small developer can handle this block only has three vacants and it's a block of 10. They can handle just doing these particular one. Or we have scattered sites. So we do that identification through our block bot strategies, through our neighborhood strategic investment areas, identifying those things before we get over to the developers or the CDC or individuals.”
2026-05-04 · Odd Lots · How Baltimore's Mayor Is Fighting the City's Vacant Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's what I'm saying, right? And for us, we've only had those shows. So we had the wire, we had the corner, we had homicide life on the street. Now when they maybe do a complete Baltimore story on the show, HBO hint like neighborhood. Because in New York, we have”
2026-05-04 · Odd Lots · How Baltimore's Mayor Is Fighting the City's Vacant Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess for us we understand it and we appreciate it for the storytelling. People don't look at NYPD Blue and think like, oh, this is all New York.”
2026-05-04 · Odd Lots · How Baltimore's Mayor Is Fighting the City's Vacant Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That we are not just giving it to people who just want to make a buck, but they understand that, yes, we want them to make money. We believe in capitalism, but they have to understand how this is. And now they're selling houses over there like I was wondering.”
2026-05-04 · Odd Lots · How Baltimore's Mayor Is Fighting the City's Vacant Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think about it like this. They started talking about the plan when I was in middle school, right? The city finally was able to have all of the properties acquired when I was a staffer in the city government and on the board of their CDC in 2008 and 2009. We finally had them all demolished around 11 or 12. The first new housing units didn't get built until I was mayor, right? When you talk about those large amounts of vacant properties, it just takes a long time. Single ones you can replenish them a little quicker. And it takes a lot of block by block level planning, identifying a developer, making sure the developer fits with the neighborhood, making sure that we have the partnership with the state because they also have their sway and control over the money that they're pumping into. Everyone has to be aligned and making sure.”
2026-05-04 · Odd Lots · How Baltimore's Mayor Is Fighting the City's Vacant Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It used to take two to three years, right? Now we've worked with the court, we have a special in-rim docket, right? And we're getting that time down a lot faster. But we're doing that thousands of times, right? Over and over again. And when you're talking about that takes the time to assemble blocks, right? Now think about this block 4,800 block of Park Heist Avenue, right? So the Park Heights master plan, it's the neighborhood I grew up in, is one of the largest redevelopment issues in the country.”
2026-05-04 · Odd Lots · How Baltimore's Mayor Is Fighting the City's Vacant Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Someone complains there's a vacant house to me, the owner's not taking care of it. We give them a citation, they have 30 days to remedy that citation. We literally, legally can't do anything for that time frame. Then we come back again and we have to do it. Now after that one, then we maybe cut the grass, lean it, et cetera. We have raised the fines up. We can find them up to $1,000. Then they get a vacant building notice, right? And if we want to take that property through receivership and all these other things in REM, we have to go to court. They know how long that takes. That could take”
2026-05-04 · Odd Lots · How Baltimore's Mayor Is Fighting the City's Vacant Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's where the block by block comes in, really. So we do block level planning for these, but it's also about strategic. We have strategic investment in zone seven of them where mostly the vacants are. And what we're telling folks is that we have a plan for each block. And we don't just do big developers. We work with small developers. We work with community development corporations. And the great thing about the city of Baltimore versus Detroit, where folks are like, oh, you guys should create a land bank like Detroit. Well, we visited Detroit and they were like, well, you guys don't need to do that because your housing department has the authorities that our land bank has now. We didn't have that within the city of government. And now what we've been able to do because also it's not that easy to get to the point of getting a vacant back to renovation. So I'll step back and walk you guys how this worked. You own a house is vacant. And then we, our housing department, our inspectors come out.”
2026-05-04 · Odd Lots · How Baltimore's Mayor Is Fighting the City's Vacant Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Prices to recover waiting or waiting for the city or someone to come along and give them more than what they paid for, right? But then you have, we have a lot of folks who pass away and their kids are gone and they don't want the property. It runs the gamut. There is not one sole reason why you have so many. But when you think about we were a city of basically a million people and now we're a city of 600,000, right? You think about the amount of people that lost that left the city of Baltimore for a multitude of reasons. And then when you add on to that red line. Deindustrialization, you know, crime and violence and drugs that just showed up out of nowhere. All of a sudden, you add all of those things together. You have really a recipe for disaster, so to speak.”
2026-05-04 · Odd Lots · How Baltimore's Mayor Is Fighting the City's Vacant Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They bought the house where my mom grew up in and my dad, who was following my uncles, his older brothers and older cousins to Baltimore visiting in the summertime. My uncles were working at Bethlehem Steel. Him and my mom met in the rest is history. But those went away. Those jobs went away, right? And then some people did leave. And then when you add onto that, that a lot of folks that left left those houses and they left their houses and people died, right? Older folks died. They left from the people who didn't care for them. You had a lot of folks come in and buy up property that were vacant when people did move out and just sitting on them.”
2026-05-04 · Odd Lots · How Baltimore's Mayor Is Fighting the City's Vacant Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not two blocks are the same. Everything is different. That's why our strategy is block by block. But just to give you the historical context, we know that we got a lot of vacans when suburbs were built, right? Like we had suburbs being built, white flight, all of those things happened. That happened in cities around the country. So we had that. Then we had deindustrialization. We had Bethlehem Steel and General Motors. General Motors is actually the reason why I am here because my mom's parents moved to Baltimore. My granddad, when they were down to the last $100, was a thinking about moving back to Royal Virginia. Got a job at General Motors and boom.”
2026-05-04 · Odd Lots · How Baltimore's Mayor Is Fighting the City's Vacant Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a couple of things one, the thing I can tell you about Baltimore that is probably so much different than any other city is that We're a city of neighborhoods, right? And I literally tell people this: that those neighborhoods can literally be a city of countries.”
2026-05-04 · Odd Lots · How Baltimore's Mayor Is Fighting the City's Vacant Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very tough issue for even people to understand. You mentioned like dollar houses, people like, well, if you sell all the vacans for a dollar, they'll go away. No. Because one, the overwhelming majority of the vacance in the city of Baltimore are not owned by the city of Baltimore. They're owned by private folks who are sitting on them or folks that we have to track down. And many, I hate to say this, a good bit of them were ones that back in the day one of my predecessors sold for a dollar. But if I sell you a house for a dollar and you don't have the 100, 150,000 dollars needed to actually get it up to living standards, it's still going to remain vacant.”
2026-05-04 · Odd Lots · How Baltimore's Mayor Is Fighting the City's Vacant Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can go look, it's reframe Baltimore will tell you how many, right? And the number sometimes fluctuates because we take some off, some go up, but it's that collective way that we've done it because it's a very”
2026-05-04 · Odd Lots · How Baltimore's Mayor Is Fighting the City's Vacant Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going to end this crisis for good over the next 15 years. And this strategy is our strategy so that everyone is bought in. That's the difference. And now that we're all working together, and then we got a blessing a few months later, we got a governor elected. And now the governor of Maryland is also a member of that, right? The state of government has given us $50 million a year. So now we've been able to just think about that. I told you.”
2026-05-04 · Odd Lots · How Baltimore's Mayor Is Fighting the City's Vacant Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And even demolishing them, turning them to park space, getting them renovated, building a lot of housing, all of those things, it's been about the capital. That's what they did not have. They didn't have the capital and they did not have a unified strategy that was about something greater than one mayoral term. And I think that's where we have struck goals, so to speak, is that we came out and I stood with the community and build, which is a community organization that has relationships with churches and communities and mosques and everything all over the city of Baltimore and represents a lot of residents and neighborhood leaders and business community and the greater Baltimore community myself stood up and said we are coming up with this strategy that we as in Baltimore as a community not just city government not just private not just philanthropic not just the residents we are”
2026-05-04 · Odd Lots · How Baltimore's Mayor Is Fighting the City's Vacant Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source