Baltimore

City Population Decline:

-1.6% 📉 since April 2020

2010 Census Population: 620,961

2020 Census Population: 585,708

Estimated 2021 Population: 576,498

Census Demographics

Housing

While the total population of Baltimore City has decreased by nearly 6% since 2010, the percentage of owner-occupied homes has decreased even more, from 60.2% in 2010 down to 52.6% in 2020. This means that fewer homeowners are residing in the city and more homes are being rented.

With an average of 52.6% owner-occupied homes across Baltimore City, the top 5 most populous community statistical areas (population of 17,000 or greater) currently vary widely from 40 to nearly 70% owner-occupied homes.

Vacant & Abandoned Homes

Below is a time-series of the percent of residential properties across Baltimore City that were vacant and abandoned between 2010 and 2020 (all available data). In 2020, Baltimore hit its lowest percent of vacant homes in 10 years at 7.7%. However, as you can see by the small range of the y-axis, the percent of vacant homes has been relatively stable since 2010 (7.7 to 8.2 percent).


Maryland's WYPR reported on vacant and abandoned homes in Baltimore in September 2022. To learn more about the impact of vacant homes, listen below.
Only have a few minutes? Check out this quick YouTube playlist where several Baltimore news channels covered the issue after a vacant home caught fire in southwest Baltimore in January 2022. The fire claimed the lives of 3 firefighters.
Figure 1.
Figure 2.

The figures above illustrate a simple analysis of the relationship between overdose calls and the percent of vacant and abandoned homes in Baltimore City. In Figure 1, each purple dot represents a community statistical area in Baltimore City. Neighborhoods are plotted by the percent of vacant and abandoned homes in the community (x-axis) and the number of overdose calls for service per 1,000 residents (y-axis). The yellow regression line represents the relationship between the two; the grayed area surrounding the line represents the standard error of the relationship. This suggests that neighborhoods in Baltimore City with more vacant homes were more likely to have more overdose calls in 2020. In Figure 2, this relationship is represented statistically. According to this analysis, on average, a one-percent increase in vacant and abandoned homes was associated with an increase of 0.825 (nearly 1) overdose calls per 1,000 residents. A neighborhood with 0% vacant homes was expected to have 3.779 overdose calls per 1,000 residents. (Please note that this analysis does not include control variables.)

This Twitter feed includes tweets from various Baltimore news sources. You can create or follow customized Lists on Twitter that deliver a feed curated from a specified list of accounts. To embed a List on your website, copy and paste the URL to publish.twitter.com to generate the embed code.

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This dashboard was developed by Jess Spayd, a data analyst and graduate student based in Baltimore, MD, as part of a project for the Urban Data Analytics course in the Johns Hopkins University Data Analytics & Policy program.

You read about Jess's final project on vacant homes in Baltimore here.

All visualizations and captions are original work.