Ex-mayoral candidate hired for housing survey
Jody Landers pitches idea of a graphic representation of city housing sales – and housing commissioner Graziano buys it
Above: Joseph T. “Jody” Lander at his Federal Hill campaign office in 2011.
Baltimore will pay $35,000 to former City Councilman and mayoral hopeful Joseph T. “Jody” Landers III to develop a housing market database of all city neighborhoods.
But don’t expect to download the information to pick your dream neighborhood. The data will mostly be used to support the marketing efforts of the mayor’s Vacants to Value housing program.
“The database will also be used for a study on optimizing the city’s homeownership assistance incentives and to analyze the impact of foreclosure auctions and short sales on neighborhood real estate markets,” Tania Baker, a housing department spokesman, said.
Landers, who was executive vice president of the Greater Baltimore Board of Realtors before he quit to run for mayor in 2011, said he had developed a template to graphically represent housing market data for the Dundalk Renaissance Corp.
Based on its favorable reception, he pitched the idea to city housing commissioner Paul T. Graziano, who accepted the proposal.
The end result will be a “graphic view” of housing sales, with average prices and the percentage of foreclosure auctions and short sales, among other variables, going back 18 years.
Analytic Tool
Landers said the material will give the city a new tool to analyze the impact of its housing programs on a micro level. Mapping all 260 city neighborhoods, he said, will be a laborious process and will probably take him three or four months to complete.
The Planning Department periodically conducts studies by neighborhood of population, racial mix, educational levels, housing stock and income. Asked if the housing department could have conducted a similar study of house sales, Baker said in an e-mail response:
“While it could be done in-house, it is a more effective use of limited staff resources to outsource this particular project. Mr. Landers’ access to and familiarity with proprietary data, extensive knowledge of Baltimore’s neighborhoods and their real estate markets and ability to carry the study out in a timely fashion were key factors in the decision to use outside resources.”