When Shea Frederick started house hunting in 2013, he went the typical route: Heading online to look at different properties. But Frederick, a computer programmer and noted internet do-gooder among Baltimore?s civic hacking community, wasn?t looking for brand new houses. Instead, he was using an interactive online map he had built, BaltimoreVacants.org, to look for neighborhoods with vacant houses available to rehab. He found a prospect in one of Baltimore?s eastside neighborhoods. When he first crossed the threshold, he saw soiled needles and thousands of empty vials. "It was quite the sight, and smelled really bad," Frederick remembers. "People had just been getting high and shitting in the corner for, like, 15 years in this place." No turning back, however. It was July 2013, and Frederick had just spent $9,000 to purchase his first vacant house from the City of Baltimore. A little more than one year and $100,000 later, Frederick would move into this newly rehabbed house in Greenmount West, one of several Baltimore neighborhoods that has undergone a noticeable transformation over the last half-decade thanks, in part, to a six-year-old city program called Vacants to Value.
For decades, Baltimore has been plagued by vacant properties. More than 16,000, about a quarter of them city-owned, line its blocks today. Nonresidents might know them best through the eyes of Chris Partlow, a character from the HBO series The Wire who dumped dead bodies into va...