Joe Weisenthal

We've heard the population decline story in Baltimore, but it's hard for me to believe people just leave and don't do anything with their houses.

They're just waiting for prices to recover.

Yeah, it had to happen.

All right.

Fair enough.

I was going to ask, how do you decide what to do with the vacant houses that you end up taking back and taking control of?

So you can work with private developers, as you mentioned.

I guess they can choose to renovate them.

They can choose to demolish them.

How do those conversations actually go?

Okay.

Wait, why do people think that TIFF only works for contiguous areas?

So one of the other things you're doing is taxing vacant land.

And we've done, you know, we are vacant houses, I should say, we've done episodes on odd lots about a land tax.

Walk us through like the pushback that you got to that plan.

Why do people seem opposed to taxing empty buildings or empty land?

Who would have thought that incentives matter?

Crazy, crazy stuff.

Can I ask how how does safety play into actually attracting capital back into the city?

Because I get that, you know, if you're a business or a developer and you're thinking of putting money into Baltimore, you want to see the crime rate go down.