By: Robert J. Terry

A new initiative by Baltimore officials to get the city’s surplus of vacant properties back on the tax rolls has prompted an environmental nonprofit to spring into action — and marshal mobile technology and crowdsourcing in its effort.

Baltimore Green Space is planning to send 20 two-person teams throughout the city on Dec. 11 to take pictures with their smartphones of vacant lots that have been turned into community green spaces.

They include gardens, so-called pocket parks, horseshoe pits and other lots converted into what the city calls “community use” spaces. Baltimore Green Space says it has given the city about 200 block/lot numbers but there are many more. And with 13,000 vacant lots throughout the city time is of the essence, organizers say.

“The city faces an information problem — it simply cannot know which of these ‘vacant’ lots are actually community assets that improve the livability of neighborhoods and thus property values,” Baltimore Green Space writes in an online event listing publicizing the effort.

The Daily Record’s real estate reporter, Melody Simmons, wrote about Baltimore’s “Vacants to Value” initiative last month.

“The simple truth is that urban blight in Baltimore is a problem of too much supply and not enough demand,” Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said Nov. 3. The city owns about 4,000 of an estimated 16,000 vacant dwellings, she added, and will work to “get its house in order” first as the program launches.

Six teams of Baltimore Green Space volunteers fanned out across the city a couple of weeks ago and put geocoding software and smartphones to work, photographing 150 properties to plot on a map.

The Dec. 11 effort will kick off at 9 a.m. at the Cork Gallery on Guilford Avenue.

Update: I chatted with Miriam Avins, Baltimore Green Space’s founder, about the effort and she said the technology/crowdsourcing strategy grew out of the group’s efforts to map all the addresses and lot numbers of community gardens in the city. The process is rife with confusion, she said, because of murky address information, ownership data, you name it.

“We really need to sort out what’s what,” she said.

The city supports Baltimore Green Space’s efforts, she said. While a community garden may not generate the property tax a residential building does, city officials recognize the value in these kinds of amenities.

“You have to think about it on the neighborhood level,” Avins told me.