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Pigtown

Washington Boulevard

July 12, 2012

11. Slumlord Justice

Carol Ott had enough. “Maybe I woke up on the wrong side of bed that morning,” she says. “I don’t know exactly what pushed me over the edge.”

For years, the feisty, 5-foot-1, mother of two dutifully attended Pigtown neighborhood meetings. Each time, the same topic—the shuttered shopping center at the intersection of Washington and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevards—came up. It was bad enough that the community’s grocery store had departed. Now, across the street from the Welcome to Pigtown mural at the Southwest Baltimore neighborhood’s gateway, the abandoned shopping center had degenerated into an open-air drug market and the portico alongside the long-gone Save-a-Lot, for all intents and purposes, had become a homeless camp.

“When I moved there in 2000, the grocery store was still open, but it closed several years later and became an eyesore, garbage strewn everywhere,” Ott recalls in the living room of her rowhouse on a recent evening. “Nobody was maintaining it. A doctor and his business partners, including at least one other physician, owned it, and were doing nothing to improve it. Apparently, they wanted an extraordinary amount of money for the property and, meanwhile, the drug activity kept up.”

Frustrated at another community meeting one night—“we had like five different neighborhood groups then, and I went to most of them”—Ott stood up and walked out, swearing she was done with meetings.

“There’s got to be a better way of dealing with this,” she remembers thinking. “It was typical of neighborhood meetings anywhere, city or suburbs, doesn’t matter. Same people, same complaints, nobody steps up. I figured I’d force the shopping center owners’ hand and make it public on the Internet.”

Not long after reaching her boiling point in late 2008, Ott launched her still-active, slightly infamous Wordpress blog—Baltimore Slumlord Watch. The blog, which includes pictures Ott takes of abandoned properties as well as “reader-submitted” photos of abandoned homes, provides information on the legal history and housing violations of blighted properties, their impact on the surrounding neighborhood, contact information for local elected officials, and the names and addresses of negligent owners. It’s direct, data-base researched, and at times, just a bit snarky, like Ott, who typically goes vacant-house hunting in jeans and bright red Converse high tops, generally toting a cellphone camera—and box cutter, for protection. It’s not a coincidence, she notes, that vacant homes attract crime. (Until this story, Ott maintained her anonymity as the person behind Baltimore Slumlord Watch, partly for fear of retribution toward her family.)

Her initial post outed the Timonium doctor listed as the resident agent for the company that owned the then-vacant Pigtown shopping center and listed the hospital where he had surgical privileges. From there, the plan to goad one irresponsible landlord into accountability grew into a citywide housing resource. Ott regularly posts updates on Baltimore issues like lead paint and fire-department station closings, as well as vacant housing efforts in other cities.

Today, Baltimore Slumlord Watch, with 12,000-15,000 hits in a month, possesses genuine social media clout. “Friends” and “followers” on Facebook and Twitter include City Council President Bernard C. “Jack” Young, Baltimore City Del. Keiffer J. Mitchell Jr., and Maryland Attorney General Douglas F. Gansler, among other politicos, not to mention numerous housing advocates and journalists. Not all are necessarily fans, however; one local columnist and talk-show host, Ott says, blocked her Twitter account after describing the blog as a negative portrayal of Baltimore.

E-mails from property owners, unsurprisingly, are nasty, but generally at least threaten legal action, not physical harm. “I get, ‘Dear Mr. Slanderer,’ a lot,” Ott says with a laugh. “I’m like, if you’re going to threaten me, at least get the legal term right if you want me to take you seriously. It would be libel. Then again, I’m very careful.”

(Postscript: In 2018, Carol Ott transitoned to a job with the Fair Housing Action Center of Maryland, where she serves as the director of tenant advocacy.)