Gov. Wes Moore set a target Tuesday of eliminating 5,000 vacant Baltimore homes in five years, committing state support and making the issue an administration priority.

Moore signed an executive order enabling a series of state actions aimed at reducing the city’s count of vacant homes, estimated at 13,000 houses and some 20,000 empty lots. It will form a program called Reinvest Baltimore that will unite city and state leaders with local organizations to revitalize neighborhoods; launch a data dashboard called VacantStat to measure and monitor key metrics; and create a Reinvest Baltimore council, headed by Maryland’s top housing official, that will review progress at least quarterly.

The executive order comes about 10 months after Mayor Brandon Scott’s office, along with partners at the Greater Baltimore Committee and BUILD Baltimore, an interfaith community advocacy group, rolled out a 15-year comprehensive strategy designed to abate the city’s vacant housing epidemic. Moore did not attend Scott’s announcement, raising eyebrows at the time.

On Tuesday, a packed room erupted into applause and a standing ovation when Moore, state housing Secretary Jake Day, Scott and other local leaders took the podium. Day, the former mayor of Salisbury, called out the expensive and emotional burdens that come with high levels of abandoned homes.

He said the epidemic is so massive it requires a coordinated response from community, philanthropic and public sector partners. Generations of racist policies, population loss and property tax hikes have loomed large over Baltimore, squeezing the city residents who chose to stay.

“This is a moment when our city and our state collectively say: ‘Enough,’” Moore said later.

The governor, a first-term Democrat, said the coordinated approach could become a model for the rest of the country. The initiative will add jobs, catalyze business growth, and address the region’s shortfall of available homes by adding to the city’s housing stock. There could be as many as 96,000 units needed to clear the deficit, according to state estimates.

Scott, during remarks, said the city and state will champion the issue together.

“Let’s be very clear,” he said, “we’re all working together towards the same goal under the same vision.”

The city’s vacant housing reduction plan calls for at least $3 billion in public and private funding to crack down on neighborhood blight, invest in infrastructure needs and scale up whole blocks at a time. It hinges on the use of a first-of-its-kind, non-contiguous tax increment financing package that will enable the city to float bonds to cover public infrastructure bonds that future property taxes in individual neighborhoods will ideally repay later. The so-called neighborhood TIF has been labeled by some in City Hall as a risk, and the City Council is expected to advance or reject a vote on the proposal over the coming weeks.

The city has also asked the state for hundreds of millions of dollars in financial assistance as well as a portion of the state sales tax. Earlier this year, state lawmakers greenlit an allocation of $50 million a year in perpetuity for property demolition and stabilization costs — which, over 15 years, would generate less than the $900 million the city and its partners factored into the original proposal.

The coming collaboration allows the city to turn a page on the past, said the Rev. George Hopkins, a BUILD co-chair. He called the moment “historic.”

“From this day forward, Baltimore won’t only be known as the city where redlining was created,” Hopkins said. “Baltimore is the city where redlining was confronted, and we created something different.”

There are signs, though, that the details of the newfound collaboration might still require some fine-tuning.

Asked whether the state would support the city’s agenda — including the requests for financial assistance and a cut of the sales tax — Day, the housing secretary, would not say. Instead, he said, some decisions are “obvious” for the state and the city to make on their own.

The two entities and the private sector, he added, will use Reinvest Baltimore to synchronize their efforts, coordinate a response and “deconflict.”

Notably, Baltimore City Housing Commissioner Alice Kennedy attended Tuesday’s event but did not give remarks. Instead, Kennedy, from her seat in the audience, responded with a call-out when Scott asked for an exact accounting of the number of vacant homes in Baltimore as of Tuesday: 13,168.