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A plan to tear down 4,000 vacant houses makes Baltimore the latest city to invest in demolition.
[BLOOMBERG] Maryland Governor Larry Hogan held a sidewalk presser last week in Baltimore's Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood. He promised to revitalize the city by spending $75 million to tear down 4,000 vacant houses.Baltimore's population is dropping, a result of years of Democrat machine government. The blocks of vacant houses are festering civic sores. "Fixing what is broken in Baltimore requires that we address the sea of abandoned, dilapidated buildings that are infecting entire neighborhoods," he said. It's a city that's infested by junkies, with falling property values and taxes that are twice what we pay in the counties. Then the yellow paw of a Komatsu excavator ripped the face from a nearby row house, and Baltimore joined a growing club of declining U.S. industrial hubs that have decided they have more housing than their populations can support. The logic is that removing blighted sections of the city will help the larger body thrive, eventually clearing the path for redevelopment. The hard part is conceding that some areas are beyond short-term redemption. Just look for the burned out CVS pharmacies. "When you demolish with no plans for new residential development, you're admitting that right now there's no demand for this block, this neighborhood, this city," said Erika Poethig, a fellow at the Urban Institute. "It takes a certain amount of political courage to do that." It's a city that tore down filthy abandoned housing projects along Martin Luther King Boulevard (somehow that's always where you find decayed housing projects) and built new housing at $300K a pop and sold them for a third that price. Drive by any time, wave to the bums, and read the graffiti. Efforts to eliminate derelict homes in the U.S. were turbo-charged in 2013 when the U.S. Treasury allowed six states that had received money from a pool known as the Hardest Hit Fund to use some of it for tear-downs, in addition to other foreclosure prevention initiatives for which it was originally earmarked. The reasoning behind the move, which made $370 million available for the demolition of residences, is that vacant homes lower the value of neighboring properties. Posted by: Fred 2016-01-14 |
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