Breaking the Fourth Wall: Week of August 5

Today we continue the weekly "Breaking the Fourth Wall" series that directs the blog's spotlight toward a particularly innovative or promising affordable housing project, luminary, or organization. 

Image Credit: Christopher Connelly/NPR

Many reports have documented the effect of the foreclosure crisis and economic recession on urban neighborhoods. Droves of distressed properties owned by banks and absentee landlords have become blighted, further contributing to a sense of decline in some of America's poorest communities. However, intrepid community activists in Baltimore have undertaken a successul campaign to call attention to rundown buildings and shame neglectful landlords and banks. Carol Ott, who began the Baltimore Slumlord Watch blog to highlight the effect of many decades of absentee ownership and pressure landlords to tend to the deteriorating properties. Ott began her efforts in the hopes of shaming absentee owners in her own neighborhood and her website features pictures of abandoned, neglected, or foreclosed properties and the contact information of the landlords or bank representatives (found by combing public records) who are in charge of the buildings' upkeep. The project's newfound notoriety has attracted a coalition of local street artists to Ott's movement. These artists see Baltimore's more than 16,000 vacant properties (though some peg the number at around 30,000) as blank canvases to express their outrage with the predatory policies of landlords and banks and hope for a brighter future in Baltimore. In East Baltimore's once-vibrant Johnston Square, a group of activists/artists who are part of the Wall Hunters Project quickly set to work painting large murals  depicting the fragility of Baltimore's neighborhoods on the sides of vacant row houses. In a twenty-first century twist, each mural features a large QR code that directs onlookers to a page on Ott's blog detailing the contact information of the person or bank who has allowed the property to languish when they snap a picture of the code with their mobile device. The shaming of absentee landlords and foreclosing entities has led to some tangible results in many of the Charm City's neighborhoods and, perhaps just as importantly, have shown that the relationship between art and grass roots activism is still alive and well in the digital age.