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

“Well, listen, I have to say that my predecessors with the tools and knowledge and understanding that they had, they didn't do a bad job, right? The only thing that I'd say that they did, that I do differently in thinking about it differently is that, and this is just mayors, this is politicians, right? Folks like to tell folks that I'm going to handle this issue in my time in office. There's no way in holy hell that any mayor was going to eliminate a vacant housing in Baltimore in four years, let alone some of them, many of them before me got a lot less than even four years, right? So when you think about that, the approach for us, it has never been about the approach. Baltimore between our city government partnership with the state government, with our private community, with the folks in philanthropic and CDCs and developers, they've always had the strategy. They always had the know-how and the do-how of taking vaccine.”
2026-05-04 · Odd Lots · How Baltimore's Mayor Is Fighting the City's Vacant Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Literally the same neighborhoods. In Baltimore, they call it the Black Butterfly and the White L. So you got this white L that goes down the city and out. And then you have these two heartbeats, so to speak, of the black butterfly, the wings. And you can see that the vacants in Baltimore are a direct correlation to that, a direct correlation to purposeful disinvestment into those neighborhoods and all the other things, deindustrialization, all of those things that happen.”
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 lot less than the 30 or $40,000 it had years prior to that. But when I became mayor on December 8th of 2020, Baltimore had 16,000 vacant properties, the number essentially had not moved. So we knew that we needed a different strategy to dealing with this longstanding challenge. That is, you can directly, I showed this at City Lab. I'm a mapping a data guy, right? When you look at the 1937 racial redlining map in Baltimore, and then you look at the vacance map in 2020 or even the vacant map today. The same neighborhood”
2026-05-04 · Odd Lots · How Baltimore's Mayor Is Fighting the City's Vacant Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All over the city of Baltimore for a long time, but I knew it had to be a priority because you cannot, and we will not be the best version of Baltimore if we are not a whole version of Baltimore. And when you think about it like this, when I was a junior in high school in the year 20 December of 2000, Baltimore had 16,000 vacant properties. Wow.”
2026-05-04 · Odd Lots · How Baltimore's Mayor Is Fighting the City's Vacant Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, for me, it shows up on my radar the day I was born, right? So I was born and raised in Baltimore, born in 1984. So the fortune or misfortune of growing up in the 80s, 90s, and 2000, when you think about all of the crazy things that happened in the United States at that time, of course, we're talking about drugs showing up into neighborhoods, the war on drugs, failed war on drugs, and zero tolerance policing. But I also live in the city that is the birthplace of racial redlining. It was signed at the very desk that I sit in. The racial redlining law was signed in Baltimore City. I grew up on a block with a vacant house that my dad, me, and my brothers cut the grass at every single time. Because he said by the time the city gets around to cutting it for the owner, it's going to be a foot high, right? So for me, this wasn't something that I discovered when I became the mayor of Baltimore. It had been very prominent in my neighborhood that I grew up in, in Park Heights.”
2026-05-04 · Odd Lots · How Baltimore's Mayor Is Fighting the City's Vacant Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source