Baltimore’s mayor has a new plan to deal with vacant housing, but is it bold enough?

Sixteen thousand — year after year, for more than two decades, that’s been the official annual count of vacant houses in Baltimore City, give or take a thousand.

The figure has held strong through multiple mayoral administrations and tens of millions of dollars spent razing, rehabbing and reselling the unoccupied properties, which lower surrounding property values, attract crime and put lives in danger: Earlier this year, three firefighters were killed, and another seriously injured, when an empty house on South Stricker street caught fire, then collapsed while they were inside.

Every mayor has had an ambitious plan to reduce the number, and every mayor has failed, with new buildings abandoned as fast as the old ones were dealt with. Now, Mayor Brandon Scott plans to spend $100 million of the city’s $641 million American Rescue Plan funds on his housing initiative, which includes a vacants strategy.

We’d love to think this time will be different, but history suggests we should be skeptical.

Vacants, and the ills associated with them, have been an intractable problem in Baltimore for nearly a century. The roots trace back to racist redlining policies of the 1930s, denying non-white residents access to home loans and thus homeownership; along with the loss of jobs and population in the city, and the growth of the surrounding suburbs.

In the early 1970s, Mayor William Donald Schaefer’s administration launched the popular “Dollar House Program,” a version of which today’s City Council considered reviving. The shortlived initiative, in which residents could buy a house for a buck and a promise to fix it up, helped revive a handful of neighborhoods in downtown areas, but didn’t stop the accumulation of new vacants in other communities.

In the late 1980s, the city estimated there were about 5,500 vacant properties in Baltimore when Mayor Kurt Schmoke took office. The number swelled to more than 8,500 in the ’90s, despite Mayor Schmoke’s efforts to renovate or remove dilapidated buildings and to offer low interest loans to developers and firsttime homeowners.

By the time Martin O’Malley unveiled his “Project 5000” plan during his State of the City address in 2002, the number of vacants was in the 16,000 ballpark. Under the plan, the city bought nearly 7,000 unoccupied properties — then got stuck with most of them, as officials struggled to find buyers.

In 2009, Mayor Sheila Dixon pushed forward a proposal for a nonprofit, quasi governmental land bank that would oversee the acquisition and disposition of vacants. But it was yanked from the drawing board within weeks of her resignation in January of 2010, following a gift card misuse scandal.

Next up was Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, who in November of 2010 announced a “Vacants to Value” plan meant to speed up sales of abandoned properties, in part by cutting red tape requirements. But she still wound up spending roughly $10 million per year to try to raze structures — four times as much as other mayors spent. The city tore down 1,700 properties between 2010 and 2016, but the project made no meaningful dent in the overall count.

Later that year, Catherine Pugh took office and implemented a demolition strategy that was adopted in part after her resignation by Mayor Jack Young, who added a rehabilitation component. Neither effort made headway.

During this time, from 2016 on, Gov. Larry Hogan got in the act, committing $75 million in state funds to teaching down properties under a joint state and city program called “Project C.O.R.E.” The number of vacants dropped, but not lower than 15,000.

And that brings us to Mayor Scott. His plan, announced Friday, takes what he calls a “holistic approach” to dealing with vacants, by addressing not just abandoned buildings, but the issues that lead to them, including eviction and neighborhood decline.

He plans to commit $56 million to community and affordable housing development in strategic areas and $4 million to prevent displacement among low-income residents. About $40 million is slated for “blight elimination and prevention,” also known as vacants. The funds will be used to rehab properties and streamline the permitting process, as well as prevent more vacants from developing by increasing homeownership opportunities, helping seniors and others care for their homes.

He’s right that the ultimate solution will involve investment in communities, to make them places people want to live, and in residents, to give them the opportunity to own homes. But is Mayor Scott’s plan bold enough? We hope so, but in many ways, it looks like more of the same.