From Vacant Houses to Growth-Ready Capabilities: A Place-Based Growth Diagnostic

This talk explores housing vacancy as a source of insight into how cities can unlock new growth opportunities. Using Baltimore as a case study, it highlights how strengthening institutional coordination, capital access, and prevention capacity can shape more resilient development trajectories. The talk connects place-based innovation to Growth Lab frameworks on capabilities, complexity, and structural transformation. 

Speaker: Terrance Smith, Chief Innovation Officer for the city of Baltimore

Whether attending in person or virtually, please register in advance. Room attendance is permitted for the Harvard community. Lunch will be served. The Zoom session is open to the public.

Speaker Bio: Terrance Smith is a public innovation leader focused on designing trustworthy public institutions that demonstrate ability, humanity, and integrity through how systems actually operate.

He currently serves as Chief Innovation Officer for the city of Baltimore, leading two high-performing teams advancing public safety recruitment and retention and housing vacancy prevention, while delivering system-level outcomes and building institutional capacity for trust and performance at scale.

Previously, Terrance was a Public Innovation Fellow at the Bloomberg Center for Public Innovation at Johns Hopkins University and served as Innovation Director for the City of Mobile, Alabama, where he founded the Mayor’s Office of Strategic Initiatives and led the city’s Innovation Team and Datacenter. In Mobile, his work helped reduce blighted properties by 53 percent, earning national recognition from Fast Company and catalyzing legislative change and new models for cities addressing long-term disinvestment.

Across housing, public safety, and service delivery, Terrance’s work centers on a core insight: public innovation succeeds when trust is designed into systems, not treated as a byproduct. He has been named a Bloomberg Cities CityLab Innovator to Watch and a Top Forty Under Forty by Mobile Bay Magazine.

The Growth Lab’s “Development Talks” is a series of conversations with policymakers and academics working on economic growth and development in countries, regions, states, and cities in the US and around the world. The seminar provides a platform for practitioners and researchers to discuss both economic growth and development and analytical work centered on policy.