Click HERE to read the report!
The Baltimore City Open Land Database (BOLD) was developed in concert with efforts to advance tax sale reform in Baltimore City. Every year in Baltimore, 6,000 – 10,000 property liens are sold at the City’s annual tax sale due to nonpayment of property taxes or other municipal liens, including water bills. Some of these properties later end up in tax foreclosure, and there is evidence to suggest that tax lien sales and tax foreclosures play a role in neighborhood disinvestment and decline. [A data story which details the relationship between tax liens and vacancy appeared in Vital Signs 15].
In order to address the effect of tax sales and tax foreclosures on properties and homeowners, there is a robust and active local community of private and public entities working towards homeownership preservation, which has effected positive changes in state laws. In 2015, Community Law Center (CLC) founded the Baltimore City TaxSale Work Group as a subcommittee of the Baltimore Homeownership Preservation Coalition (BHPC). The Tax Sale Work Group was developed from CLC’s Public Nuisance Project, funded by the Abell Foundation.
CLC’s Public Nuisance Project demonstrated the power of community associations to bring code enforcement actions against the worst properties in their neighborhoods, but required nearly a full year of attorneys, law students, partners, staff, interns, and volunteers, to gather data on community associations, property ownership, and code enforcement status. The BOLD web application arose out of the need to streamline data gathering, as well as the desire to put data into the hands of nonprofits, community development corporations, researchers, policymakers, and community stakeholders who are working to stabilize their communities, preserve homeownership, and break the cycle of vacant properties in Baltimore. BOLD both advances the use of data-driven tools for developing solutions to vacant property problems and streamlines the data collection process on Baltimore City properties.
TRAINING – The Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance is available to provide training to communities and organizations on the BOLD tool. To request training, please contact BNIA at [email protected] or 410-837-4377.
WEB DEVELOPMENT – To connect to the source code used to develop this website, please visit our GitHub page HERE.
The beta version of BOLD is now available online at https://bniajfi.org/bold/
For more information about the BOLD website or the data available through the website, please contact:
Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance, Jacob France Institute
410-837-4377
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Community Law Center
Community Law Center provides legal assistance to nonprofit and neighborhood organizations in Baltimore City and across Maryland. If your organization would like legal assistance to operate your organization, address nuisance issues in your community, respond to zoning or liquor license concerns, create green space or urban agriculture use, or embark on other activities that involve legal issues, please contact Community Law Center:
Web: https://communitylaw.org/
Phone: 410-366-0922
Email: [email protected]
Project Sponsor:
