Now that Gov. Wes Moore has created a new initiative to rebuild or replace some of Baltimore’s many vacant houses, the question emerges: Can our city attract enough new residents to live in the houses that get rebuilt?

The city has been losing population since the 1960s, and doubters quote a recent Census Bureau report that showed the city continuing to lose people, especially Black families, in 2023. There are something like 13,000 vacant houses in the city, and skeptics ask how we will ever be able to convince 13,000 new households to move to Baltimore.

The governor’s order creates the Baltimore Vacants Reinvestment Council, which will push community, corporate, philanthropic and government leaders to leverage targeted investments to move at least 5,000 vacant properties into homeownership or other positive outcomes over the next five years. Legislation passed in April pledges $50 million per year to the initiative, while state housing Secretary Jacob Day says the state will fund an additional $27 million per year through a Baltimore regional neighborhoods initiative.

We think there are reasons for optimism.

First, there is good market research. Housing market research firm Zimmerman/Volk Associates studied the city a few years ago on a contract from Live Baltimore. They reported that every part of the city had good growth potential and that there was enough residential demand to support 7,000 new or renovated houses and apartments a year for five years. That’s 35,000 new households — more than enough to deal with the vacant houses.

More important than market research, however, are some actual facts. The Census Bureau report that showed the city losing population also showed the city gaining 5,000 households. Each one of those households occupied a house or an apartment that presumably no one had occupied the year before.

And that level of household growth is in line with census reports for the previous five years. According to the Census Bureau, Baltimore City grew by 17,500 households in the five years between 2018 and 2022. It adds up to a net gain of 22,500 households in only six years. That’s 9.4% of all the houses and apartments in the whole city — the kind of growth you might find in boomtowns like Denver and Seattle.

So, there are enough people who want to live in Baltimore City. But wait a minute, our friends say. Isn’t the city still losing population?

Maybe. The Census Bureau says our households are getting smaller, and maybe they are. But that doesn’t matter when it comes to rehabbing vacant houses. It takes a household to occupy a house or an apartment. The household might be a single person, or it might be a family with 16 kids. It’s still a household, and it can still occupy a house that is vacant today.

Well OK, our critic-friends finally say: perhaps people want to live in the city. But that doesn’t mean that they want to live in the neighborhoods that have most of our vacant houses. Don’t people want to live near the harbor, or in neighborhoods that are already strong enough not to have vacant houses?

Sure. A lot of people want to live in strong neighborhoods, and our strong neighborhoods are getting stronger every day. But thousands of people, thousands of households, are moving to places that are less glitzy and historically less strong. According to building permit data, big new development projects along the water and downtown account for only about half the city’s new households. The other half — more than 10,000 households in the past six years — have moved into inland neighborhoods. They haven’t moved into the obvious strong neighborhoods like Roland Park, Bolton Hill and Mount Washington, if only because those neighborhoods don’t have vacant land to develop or vacant houses to rehab.

They are moving to neighborhoods like Pen Lucy, a rowhome neighborhood of about 2,700 people on the northeast side of the city. Pen Lucy has had its problems, mainly with open-air drug markets, and people began to move out in the early 2000s. According to the Census Bureau, the neighborhood shrank from 1,312 households to 1,250 households between 2000 and 2010, and most people predicted that it would continue to shrink.

But Pen Lucy began to turn around in 2018. By 2020, it had gained 90 households. Today, houses in Pen Lucy are selling for $250,000 or more. That’s enough to support the cost of good rehab.

Ninety new households may not sound like a lot, but Baltimore has about 255 neighborhoods, most of them nowhere near the waterfront. Most of them are a lot like Pen Lucy. If 200 neighborhoods can add 90 households each over the next decade, that’s 18,000 households. And, as our friends often remind us, Baltimore City has about 13,000 vacant houses.

Gov. Moore, you’re making a good investment. We can do this.

Charles Duff is the chair of Jubilee Baltimore, a nonprofit developer of affordable and market-rate housing. Peter Duvall is the executive director of Community Development Services, working for the rights and dignity of marginalized communities.