Homers for Homes: How new Orioles ownership can create more homeownership in Baltimore

Baltimore still has more than 13,000 vacant houses; some could be renovated and modernized, some torn down and replaced with new housing. Hope Village in East Baltimore offers a model for smaller, affordable homes that could be built on some of the city’s many vacant lots. The mayor’s office, the Greater Baltimore Committee and the BUILD organization have a plan for scaling up the effort to deal with Baltimore’s vacants; the plan needs about $3 billion. In my Sun column of this date I make another pitch to Michael Bloomberg to part with one of his many billions to kick-start the GBC-BUILD plan here. I noted in an earlier column that Mr. Bloomberg is part of the Rubenstein partnership purchasing the Orioles from the Angelos family. I think it’s great that billionaires want to buy a baseball team and bring a World Series back to a city that has not seen one in nearly 41 years. But Mr. Bloomberg is worth $96.3 billion now, according to Forbes, and I’ve appealed to him several times in columns and blog posts to put some of that wealth into renovating Baltimore’s many vacant homes and selling them at affordable prices. It would have a huge impact on city life. Here’s a suggestion: Mr. B. could start slowly with, say, one renovated home for every home run the Orioles hit at home: Homers for Homes. Or, if the new ownership group has an interest in developing the land around Oriole Park into an entertainment-hospitality zone, as John Angelos did, then maybe the state, which owns the land, should cut a deal — development rights at Camden Yards in return for $1 billion over 10 years for the GBC-BUILD plan on vacant houses. I’m not a baseball analyst, but that seems like a good trade to me.