For the fifth consecutive year, Mayor Brandon Scott’s administration has pulled owner-occupied properties off the tax sale list, sparing debtors with low incomes from potentially losing their homes.

The mayor’s directive applies to households with appraised values at or below $250,000 as of Jan. 1, which Scott’s office said encompasses the majority of homeowners at risk of having their liens purchased — and potentially losing their homes — during the annual tax sale. The move has become one of the mayor’s signature policies since his first full year in office in 2021.

But even as the city’s efforts to reform and modernize tax sale are set to expand throughout the state, the mayor continues to catch heat from the city’s tight-knit cohort of housing justice advocates to do even more.

On Wednesday morning, at a city spending board meeting, activists challenged that, in an increasingly competitive, and unforgiving, housing economy, the administration should exclude homes up to $300,000. They also urged the administration to create payment plans to allow homeowners to repay debts without investors attempting to profit by buying those debts or taking control of the property.

“Reforming this predatory system of property tax collection is essential‚" North Baltimore City Councilwoman Odette Ramos, who has taken up tax sale reform as a pet issue, said in a statement Wednesday afternoon. She also pressed the administration to get more homeowners to sign up for the state’s tax credit program — which city officials noted at an April hearing was being underutilized by city residents.

Concerns about the city’s tax sale program have loomed over the Scott administration since the beginning of the mayor’s tenure.

A 2023 Baltimore Banner analysis revealed that at least 41,000 homes had gone through tax sale since 2016, resulting in financial windfalls for investors and enormous losses for city residents, sometimes over a debt worth less than $1,000. Tax sale, the analysis found, has been used disproportionately as a collection method in predominantly Black neighborhoods while largely white areas have mostly avoided it.

The following year, a West Baltimore community organization filed a federal lawsuit against the city and a lien purchaser, arguing that the city’s tax sale system strips low-income people of their generational wealth and violates the Constitution.

Meanwhile, a handful of homeowners have reported grave flaws in the system, including, in one instance, a lost check in the city’s Department of Finance and inconsistently applied water bills. This past February, a former employee in Baltimore’s finance office was sentenced to four years in prison by a federal judge after admitting to removing and reducing Baltimore homeowners’ tax liens for cash bribes over a nearly decade-long period.

City Hall harbors a complicated relationship with the tax sale process.

On the one hand, it helps the revenue-strapped city by raising the money it needs to perform everyday services including trash and recycling pickup. And, in some cases, it can help remove vacant and abandoned properties from neighborhoods and return them to productive, safe uses.

Tax lien purchasers have said that the majority of homes that wind up on the tax sale list are dangerous nuisances that no one wants and that can go on to either be demolished or repurposed.

But there are notable exceptions, said Allison Harris and Margaret Henn, attorneys with the Pro Bono Resource Center of Maryland and the Maryland Volunteer Lawyers Service who work with homeowners caught up in the tax sale.

In a February letter, Harris and Henn said that an overwhelmingly majority of their tax sale prevention clients are Black, and about 70% either live with a disability or are older adults. They said while they have pushed the city repeatedly to institute a payment plan policy, their pleas have been met with resistance due to citywide “tech issues” that may not be solved for another few years.

On Wednesday, Scott encouraged the city’s five-member spending board to approve the plan to remove the owner-occupied homes from this year’s list. He said he would be open to considering raising the cutoff to $300,000 at a later time, once it received more analysis.

Baltimore Banner reporter Emily Opilo contributed to this article.