‘Baltimore does not condone profiteering in squalor’: the Baltimore Plan and the problem of housing-code enforcement in an American city

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn 1941, the Baltimore City Council passed a law, the Ordinance on the Hygiene of Housing, declaring that all property in the city should be ‘maintained in good repair by the owner or agent, and fit for human habitation’. The campaign of housing-code enforcement that followed, known as the Baltimore Plan, made the city famous. When historians write about American housing-reform efforts during the mid-20th century, they tend to focus on big-ticket federal policies; by contrast, the Baltimore Plan seems too small to be significant. But it is more than a curiosity. First in Baltimore and then across the country, the neat cause-and-effect it posited between good stewardship and good housing crowded out more challenging ways of thinking about the problem. Eventually, the Baltimore Plan turned into a policy tool that reinforced the interests of the real estate industry at the expense of poor people. In that regard, the Baltimore Plan laid the foundations for federal disinvestment in the provision of decent housing and the midcentury tragedy of urban renewal.