At a public meeting earlier this year with United Workers, where Baltimore Housing Commissioner Michael Braverman finally committed city funding to the city's affordable housing trust fund. (Credit: United Workers Media Team)
The door-to-door campaign paid off
Or rather, the campaigns.
Late last Friday, a coalition of affordable housing advocates in Baltimore announced that they had reached an agreement with Mayor Catherine Pugh’s office and members of city council to allocate $20 million a year to the city’s affordable housing trust fund. The trust fund was created in 2016, after a campaign by many in the same coalition to get a question on the ballot establishing the fund. The measure was approved by 83 percent of voters.
A year and a half later, as Next City reported, the fund was still empty. As of March, the advocates — including members of United Workers and the Baltimore Housing Roundtable — had secured a verbal commitment from the city’s housing commissioner to put $2 million into the fund. But they were still going door to door, drumming up public support for an allocation ten times that amount. As the weeks went by with no further commitments from officials, the Baltimore Sun reported, the coalition began working on yet another campaign, this time pushing for a ballot question that would require the city to set aside 0.05 percent of its total property assessment for affordable housing.
