One of the biggest challenges facing Baltimore is blight. For decades, the city has grappled with population loss, leaving behind thousands of vacant homes and empty lots that scar neighborhoods. These empty spaces not only serve as a constant reminder of visible decline, but also drain city coffers and undermine community safety.
Both the city and the state have launched ambitious initiatives to tackle this very problem. But what if the government’s own policies were quietly making the problem worse?
In our new report, published by the Center for Land Economics (CLE), we uncovered a fundamental flaw in how Baltimore’s vacant land is valued for tax purposes. Baltimore’s vacant lots are systematically underassessed to a degree that may amount to as much as half a billion dollars in undervaluation. This flawed methodology not only actively encourages blight, but also punishes development and unfairly shifts the tax burden onto ordinary homeowners and businesses. The good news is that these problems are correctable.
You can read the full report here.
Quick Note for Progress & Poverty readers
This report is the culmination of over many months of work digging into Baltimore assessments. The Center for Land economics got connected to Baltimore Thrive, an organization in Baltimore doing work to advance land value taxes, who raised concerns with us over local assessment quality issues.
At the same time, we were developing our open-source automated valuation method (AVM) software, OpenAVMKit, and so Baltimore became an early test case that helped shape our development process. That said, the content you will find in the linked PDF report ultimately represents just a small fraction of the analysis we performed.
Next week, we will be officially launching OpenAVMKit, the fruits of our labor these last six months as well as Lars’s years of experience in mass appraisal and land economics research. Our goal is to give researchers and assessors in both the private and public sector more power tools for real estate valuation, all in a standardized, transparent, reproducible, free and open source package. Furthermore, we want to improve the state of the art of land valuation in specific; in the coming weeks, we will share detailed updates on the technical question of land valuation specifically. Please subscribe to get notifications.
With that out of the way, onto a few findings from the report.
A Tale of Two Lots
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