Dionne Curbeam, then a young Baltimore City public schoolteacher, brimmed with pride and anticipation at the thought of owning her own Belair-Edison row house. “Before I moved in,” she said, “I rode by that house every day just to look at it.”
Seventeen years later, Dr. Curbeam’s home reflects all that she treasures, from her second-floor office to her “woman cave” in the basement, decked out in Baltimore Ravens purple. “I am just truly blessed to be able to have a place to call my own,” said Dr. Curbeam, now interim vice-president and chief information officer at Coppin State University.
Hers is one of more than 500 formerly vacant Baltimore homes acquired, renovated and sold over the last 20 years by the St. Ambrose Housing Aid Center, a non-profit with a mission of creating and maintain equal housing opportunities for low- and moderate-income people, primarily in Baltimore City.
St. Ambrose offers a broad slate of services, including an in-house real estate brokerage, financial counseling, legal help and access to down payment assistance. In a city scarred by the legacy of redlining, blockbusting, and other predatory and racist real estate practices, the non-profit’s program has strengthened vulnerable neighborhoods throughout Baltimore and, according to new data, has also helped hundreds of families to build generational wealth.
As policy makers consider how to address Baltimore’s declining population and vacant housing surplus, St. Ambrose’s targeted and comprehensive housing program can also serve as a model for revitalizing city neighborhoods and increasing homeownership throughout the city.
Nearly $100,000 in appreciation
A 2023 statistical analysis funded by the Abell Foundation, which was an early supporter of the non-profit’s vacant house reinvestment initiatives, found that homebuyers with modest incomes who purchased renovated homes enjoy significant equity and wealth creation, the key promises of homeownership. According to the study, the average price for a home purchased through the program is $136,000. Appreciation for houses occupied by their original owners has averaged $96,000. Those who sold their houses earned an average of $44,469 in constant dollars, and less than 10% of homes have been foreclosed upon.
The program has also fostered neighborhood stability: Seventy-six percent of the homes are occupied by their original buyers, and of the remainder, three-quarters are occupied by homeowners. Of houses that sold, St. Ambrose homeowners had lived in the house an average of eight years, and nearly 90% were purchased by owner-occupants intending to use the house as their principal residence.
The study “proves that homeownership, for low to moderate-income folks in middle neighborhoods is by and large a very good thing. It’s good for the neighborhood, it’s good for them,” said David Sann, St. Ambrose’s director of housing and development, who launched the program in 2004 with the aim of helping public-sector workers like Dr. Curbeam.
All too often, parallel efforts across the country have steered prospective buyers to neighborhoods where home values never increased, “and so that promise of equity appreciation, asset appreciation, wealth accumulation, was in many cases a lie,” Sann said.
One of 40 teachers who have become homeowners through the program, Dr. Curbeam’s experience is a testament to St. Ambrose’s ability to make the promise of wealth accumulation a reality. Her home has amassed nearly $60,000 in equity. But until she came across the St. Ambrose Housing Aid Center at a local housing fair, she had been frustrated in her search for a house she could afford that would increase in value.
Representatives at the fair were promoting an initiative to expand homeownership that prioritized teachers, police officers, firefighters and other civil servants. “I felt empowered,” Dr. Curbeam said. Within months, she had found and moved into her new home.
The benefits of home purchases such as Dr. Curbeam’s revealed by the study dispel the myth that Baltimore’s vacant housing stock offers little or no potential for equity appreciation.
For example, it found that the program built wealth “not just in the higher-end communities, but across the board,” Sann said. “I was pleasantly surprised by that because it’s somewhat counterintuitive. You would think that the higher-end neighborhoods are probably going to appreciate more than the middle neighborhoods, or the more distressed neighborhoods that we work in. But that wasn’t true.”
Everything in-house
The seeds for the housing program were sown by Vincent Quayle, co-founder of the St. Ambrose Housing Aid Center. With modifications, Quayle’s vision has paid off for many homeowners and for Baltimore itself, and it has proved to be a self-sustaining model for St. Ambrose.
The St. Ambrose program purchases HUD foreclosures at a 50% discount and rehabs them for new homeowners who meet specific credit and income requirements. Modeled on for-profit housing counterparts, the St. Ambrose housing program is a full-service operation assuring greater efficiency, quality control and access to down payment and closing cost assistance.
“Construction management, contractor relations, design, sales and financial coaching: We have all of that in-house,” Sann said. “That’s not found very often in the nonprofit arena.” His team includes an architect/project manager and a financial counselor with whom prospective buyers are required to work with.
The housing program’s ability to provide free in-house legal advice on housing-related issues such as foreclosure, tax sale prevention and title issues for clients who meet income restrictions is a rarity, said St. Ambrose board member Rahn Barnes, director of loan pools and grant programs for Healthy Neighborhoods Inc. From time to time, his clients encounter legal problems that would be easier to resolve with inside counsel. “I don’t know a single community development entity, definitely in Baltimore, in Maryland, maybe on the East Coast that also has a legal department,” Barnes said.
St. Ambrose also runs Charm City Realty, started by Quayle as a way to cut costs and increase efficiency. With his own broker’s license, Sann can list St. Ambrose properties and avoid commission fees for outside Realtors.
Part of the success of the program stems from being strategic about which properties have the potential to appreciate in value and serve a stabilizing role in their neighborhoods. That means focusing on “places where you’ll find the houses that can fall through the cracks,” said Bob Pipik, president of Healthy Neighborhoods. Increasing homeownership “in a one-by-one way has a stabilizing influence on those markets, whereas if you had 10 vacant buildings and put a homeowner there, you’re probably not moving that block.”
[Read more about what Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott and other candidates had to say about vacant properties in Baltimore.]
The program is active primarily in North, Northeast, and Southwest Baltimore in areas where its scattered-site approach helps to sustain those middle neighborhoods that are healthy, yet vulnerable to declining homeownership. But highly distressed neighborhoods with swaths of blight would require a more comprehensive form of intervention beyond the scope of St. Ambrose, Sann said.
Value and affordability
The program’s focus on middle neighborhoods and close attention to the economics of obtaining, renovating and selling moderately priced homes are central to its success, Pipik said. “They’ve done a great job of keeping the pipeline going by managing construction costs and maintaining affordability,” he said. “They also work in specific parts of town and have had a pretty critical kind of stabilizing influence on the market.”
The program’s first acquisitions were in Northwood, where Sann zeroed in on a cluster of three-bedroom, 1950s townhouses of similar construction. Many of the houses were unoccupied and destined to deteriorate as rentals or vacants before Sann scooped them up. “They weren’t fancy, but they were solid,” he said. “There wasn’t a lot of uniqueness, so we were keeping your costs down a little bit and the market was strong enough to support the sales.”
Over time, adding value while keeping the end product affordable became a science for St. Ambrose. All St. Ambrose homes come with new roofs, and the organization is specific about the materials and appliances contractors can use. “We specify all finish materials to ensure a consistent, quality end product that buyers can count on,” Sann said.
Sann didn’t start out as a housing advocate. A life-long Baltimore-area resident, he left a career in financial services to work at St. Ambrose. At the time, he and his wife lived in Belair-Edison, a “great, great place to live,” but under siege from blockbusting. As the neighborhood transitioned racially and generationally, some Realtors— “scoundrels” in Sann’s words — were frightening white homeowners into selling their homes at a loss only to mark them up for Black homebuyers. Sann and his wife plunged into the fight against blockbusting as members of what is now Belair-Edison Neighborhoods.
At St. Ambrose, Sann’s experience in Belair-Edison was a useful primer on what aspiring homebuyers of color were up against in a city beset by white flight and financial discrimination. He was in the right place to help solve the problem. “It’s what I always liked about St. Ambrose is that you could be entrepreneurial,” Sann said. “If you saw a need in the community and you were able to figure out how to address it and could figure out how to pay for it, you were always empowered to do so.”
By design, “this was not an affordable housing program,” Sann said. “It is in a de facto way, because we’re working in neighborhoods that are affordable. We don’t want them to go down in value. We want them to gradually go up in value, right? So, the person gets a good house, pays a fair price for it and they’re good to go. The neighborhood sees an eyesore turned into an asset.”
Editor’s note: Reporting for this story was funded by the Abell Foundation.
As a people we have a strange attitude about the role of housing in our society. First in importance is that housing is needed for shelter. For too many, acquiring decent shelter has been and continues to be unaffordable. However, second in importance is that “housing” serves to create net worth. What we ignore is that a housing unit is a depreciating asset, an asset that requires continuous expenditure of funds for maintenance; then, every decade or so, requires huge expenditures for systems replacement and upgrades. The actual monetary value of a housing unit is best described as its replacement cost, less depreciation. Some net worth comes from repayment of mortgage debt, of course. However, most of the increase in resale value of a “residential property” comes from increases in land value. Economists have long argued that the best public policy for expanding the supply of housing affordable to most households is to greatly reduce the taxation of housing unit values, shifting most or all of the property tax to the value of land. Speculators in land would not be happy with this change, but almost everyone else would in the long-run benefit significantly.