The emptiest neighborhood in the Baltimore region is not an area hit by foreclosures or years of decline. It's a U.S. Army base, and the nearly 39 percent vacancy rate at Aberdeen Proving Ground is part of a trend of fewer soldiers living there.
But the rest of the top five vacant areas in the region, measured in an Associated Press study by census tract, all are in East Baltimore neighborhoods that have weathered declines for decades.
"It's a continuation of what has been a long, sad story," said John McIlwain, a senior resident fellow for housing at the Washington-based Urban Land Institute. "These old, inner city areas ... have been flat on their back for decades. Nobody's quite figured out how to turn this around."
A Baltimore Sun analysis of areas with 1,000 or more homes, based on the AP data released this week, showed the top vacancy rate in both the state and the Baltimore region to be for a census tract in Aberdeen Proving Ground in Harford County. Four hundred of the Proving Ground's 1,035 housing units were vacant in the first three months of the year, a 16 percent increase in vacancies compared with the first quarter of 2008, according to the data, which AP collected from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the U.S. Postal Service.
The housing, which includes stone residences with views of the Chesapeake Bay as well as outdated, two-bedroom homes, some in disrepair, is reserved for soldiers and their families.
"Over the years, the number of soldiers here has decreased," as civilians do more jobs once reserved for military personnel, said Proving Ground spokesman George Mercer. The base will be losing many soldiers beginning in 2010 and 2011, when the base school that trains mechanics moves to Fort Lee, Va., as a result of base restructuring that will also bring new civilian jobs to Aberdeen. "A lot of the soldiers in housing won't be here.
The Army has turned over management of the housing to Picerne Military Housing, a Rhode Island-based developer, which will either raze or renovate existing housing and develop new homes. The new homes, probably a mix of about 350 single-family and attached homes, will be built during the next four to five years, Mercer said.
After Aberdeen Proving Ground, the emptiest census tracts in the Baltimore region lie in East Baltimore neighborhoods such as Oliver and Broadway East, the data show. Those highly vacant areas include the blocks around the former American Brewery, a Victorian landmark on Gay Street just south of North Avenue that has been restored by a Columbia-based nonprofit that plans to occupy the site. The blighted blocks around the brewery were featured in a series of articles in The Baltimore Sun in 2006 showing the decline of a neighborhood struggling with crime and high vacancies that had lost more than half its population over three decades.
An area bounded by Sinclair Lane, Federal Street, Chester Street and Edison Highway had 455 vacant homes out of 1,184 homes in the first three months of the year, a 38.4 percent vacancy rate. In adjacent blocks, just south of Federal Street, more than a quarter of the homes - nearly 300 out of 1,119 - were vacant, the analysis showed.
Baltimore's housing commissioner, Paul T. Graziano, said he had not seen the report, but said it appears to reflect "the vacant property challenge we are faced with every day.
"Baltimore suffered over 50 years of disinvestment, which took its toll on our neighborhoods," he said in an e-mailed statement. "Despite our best efforts, it is clear that additional tools are required.
Graziano said he is hopeful that the City Council will approve legislation to establish a Land Bank Authority, an agency proposed by Mayor Sheila Dixon that would streamline the sale of city-owned vacant property.
Nationally, the AP analysis found that the nation's emptiest neighborhoods are clustered in places hit during the 1980s recession, such as Flint, Mich.; Columbus, Ohio; Buffalo, N.Y.; and Indianapolis, rather than in the parts of the nation hit hardest by the foreclosure crisis, such as middle class, suburban Sun Belt neighborhoods.
The number of abandoned homes scattered throughout the nation's 65,000 neighborhoods could prevent the economy from recovering, federal officials fear.
Sun reporter Jamie Smith Hopkins and the Associated Press contributed to this article.
Copyright © 2009, The Baltimore Sun
