While sifting through the latest US Census data in 2015, Seema Iyer and her colleagues at the Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance spotted an ironic trend afoot in several dispersed city neighborhoods.
Belair-Edison in Northeast Baltimore, McElderry Park over east and Pigtown in the city’s southwest section had the three highest proportions of residents using Housing Choice Vouchers, a federal program that heavily subsidizes rental costs for very low-income families. But those same three locales had among the largest concentrations of rent-burdened households — those that spend 30% or more of their monthly income to foot the rent — as well as recent declines in homeowner occupancy.
The nexus soon became clear to Iyer, who heads the Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance (BNIA) within the University of Baltimore’s Jacob France Institute: Owners in each distressed neighborhood were opting not to sell in a housing market still reeling from its late-2000s crash, and instead renting out their dwellings to an ample market of voucher users.
But did community leaders know that this took place in their own neighborhoods, let alone in others across town?
“The way we’re organized politically, geographically, policy-wise, we’re not organized to cross-fertilize ideas,” Iyer said of Baltimore and its nearly 250 neighborhoods. “Imagine if we could build community-based coalitions around similar experiences, and what more of a powerful voice they would have if they band together to try and address their mutual issues.”
