Did Baltimore just have its best couple of years for new housing since the 1960s?
Shocking as it is to contemplate such a trend, in a city where the Census Bureau says population has dropped significantly below 600,000, my favorite data diver says it’s so.
Peter Duvall, who has spent years studying housing and demographic trends in the city, points to figures just released from the Baltimore Metropolitan Council to show 2022-2023 as a significant period in Baltimore housing, perhaps the best since Nancy Pelosi’s brother was mayor.
In 2022, Baltimore issued 2,533 permits for new housing units, according to the BMC.
The same year, the Baltimore Department of Housing and Community Development reported that 1,137 vacant buildings had been rehabbed and given use-and-occupancy permits. Some of those buildings were undoubtedly commercial or industrial. With that in mind, and using a formula to estimate the number of vacant buildings converted to new households, Duvall came up with a slightly lower figure. But still, his total estimate for 2022 was 3,549 housing units.
That got his attention, and both Duvall and Charlie Duff, president of the nonprofit Jubilee Baltimore, believed the housing numbers suggested that the Census Bureau might have missed something significant in determining Baltimore’s population.
Now we have the 2023 report from the BMC. It shows building permits for 1,850 multifamily units – the most of any jurisdiction in the region – plus 85 permits for single-family homes, along with 1,171 permits for housing conversions from offices and other non-residential buildings.
Based on his formula, Duvall calculated that another 400 new households resulted from the rehab of vacant houses.
That totaled 3,515 new units for 2023 — probably a conservative figure because DHCD says it issued 1,202 use-and-occupancy permits for rehabbed buildings, far more than Duvall estimated in his attempt to determine how many new households actually resulted from converting vacants.
Either way, he says, the city has not seen such numbers since the 1960s.
“Construction was extremely low for a long time from the 1970s to the early 2000s, when it was moderate,” Duvall says. “There was a strong period between 2016 to 2018, but not as high as recently.”
Duvall’s data analysis flies in the face of public perceptions about the city Donald Trump once called a “rodent infested mess” where “no human being would want to live.”
In fact, at least 570,000 of us live here, and Peter Duvall suspects, based on new housing trends, that the actual population is higher.
For instance, he points out, the number of Baltimore households grew by 17,500 between 2018 and 2022, representing a 7.4% increase. How, then, could we lose 5.4% of the population during that period, some 32,000 residents?
Even allowing for smaller household sizes, a significant factor in all of this, the population decreases represented in the census are, says Duvall, “extraordinary and impossible in the real world.”
If the numbers are wrong – and Duvall makes a good case that they are – it would not be the first time the Census Bureau goofed. In 2020, the agency claimed Illinois had lost 240,000 people over the previous decade. But a subsequent review concluded that Illinois’ population had actually grown by 250,000.
I bring this up because Duvall, who is not given to undue optimism, has identified some positive trends that suggest that Baltimore might actually be growing.
He does not think 2024 will be as good for housing starts, especially for new apartments, but only because of conditions affecting construction nationally. “As I keep telling people,” he says, “Baltimore’s problems are trending towards being ordinary city problems and not exceptional problems like they were from 1990 to 2015.”
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While we’re on the subject of new housing, I send congratulations to an organization with a long and strong commitment to homeownership: Habitat for Humanity of the Chesapeake.
For the 800th time in 40 years, Habitat Chesapeake recently moved a low-income family into an affordable home. The nonprofit reached that milestone with the completion of six new houses in Baltimore – four on Church Street in Curtis Bay and two on Ward Street in Pigtown.
It’s the mission of Habitat to create homeowners, not renters, and that’s huge. Research has found that children, especially those born into low-income families, do better in a stable household, with actual home ownership, than those whose families experience housing instability and move frequently.
Habitat Chesapeake rehabs old houses or builds new ones where vacants have been demolished. It arranges zero-percent mortgages to help people of low to moderate income become homeowners. Its work helps to stabilize city neighborhoods.
Mike Posko, the nonprofit’s CEO, says the work continues, with another 27 Habitat homes in Orchard Ridge, on the city’s northeast side, and five more in Curtis Bay. There are projects in the pipeline in West Baltimore, as well as in Anne Arundel and Howard counties. With additional funding, he believes the organization could turn 50 homes a year.
Posko says 300 of the Habitat homeowners have paid off their mortgages.
Recently, he and some Habitat staffers gathered for lunch at Nick’s Fish House. “We were all wearing Habitat T-shirts,” he says. “A woman came up and said, ‘I’m a Habitat homeowner,’ and we started talking. I said, ‘Have you paid your mortgage off?’ She goes, ‘Oh yeah, I paid it off like six years ago.’ And she’s sitting there with her family, and, you know, that’s the thing …”
Yeah, that’s the thing.
