Six months ago, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore packed into a crowded multipurpose room at a West Baltimore community center and set an ambitious goal: knocking 5,000 vacant homes off the city’s tally in five years.

Since then, a group of some of the city’s and state’s most prominent movers and shakers have attended monthly gatherings on the 17th floor of a Downtown Baltimore office tower, outlining, debating and raising questions about how to reach that lofty benchmark. These conversations have publicly displayed just how tangled Baltimore’s web of blight has become.

Now, after half a year of talk, Maryland housing commissioner Jake Day, who leads the monthly work group, took a first step at speeding up the workflow: On Tuesday, he told the Baltimore Vacants Reinvestment Council that the state Department of Housing and Community Development will be expediting funds to community development organizations, condensing the usual 18- to 24-month timeline. The money will also be paid up front and directly to the developers instead of by reimbursements, which Day said would help developers move quickly and with more surety.

“Our process as it stands is unacceptably slow,” Day, seated at a conference room board table in full view of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, said Tuesday. “We cannot accept the current processes as they stand. Everybody has to have that mindset and approach.”

On Wednesday, Day gave remarks at a news conference near Druid Hill Park and said improving the pace of funding represented just a small slice of what’s needed to attack the problem. The city counts more than 12,000 vacant and abandoned homes and as many as 20,000 vacant lots across more than 3,000 blocks in its latest estimates — numbers that have remained stubbornly high for more than a generation.

Money and government attention are critical to curbing blight citywide, but the true scope of the problem spans industries and sectors: law, business, philanthropy and community are all expected to play a role.

So far, the money has been slower to land than expected, too, but last year the state approved allocating $50 million a year toward the costs of demolishing, rehabilitating and acquiring vacant properties. More money from the city, in the form of bonds paid for through a special tax district, is expected in September.

“Everybody owns a little piece of the problem, and so everybody’s got to contribute to the solution,” Day said. He said he recently looked at himself in the mirror and asked what he could do to disrupt the status quo — and landed at shortening the funding timeline.

Applications for funding opened this week, and Day, the former mayor of Salisbury, said community development organizations will be able to apply through the end of May. Applicants will be asked what they can reasonably acquire within the next 12 months.

The housing department will start disbursing money in July, which Day acknowledged subverts typical bureaucratic processes.

The standard framework is “risk-averse,” he said Tuesday, as well as “defensible and thorough.” But it’s not fast. Funding approval generally requires careful vetting, and reimbursements generally take 45 days or longer to be deposited. By the time it’s distributed, a developer’s costs will likely only have increased.

Behind the scenes, council members and meeting attendees have bemoaned the slow pace of the monthly meetings, which have included presentations about the city’s strategy for reducing residential vacancy and a demonstration of a data dashboard that’s under construction. The gatherings have also included frank discussions about the city’s lack of capacity in the housing department — especially in the permits and inspections divisions — and about the money still needed to make a dent in the vacant stock.

Day said in addition to the public sector, he expects philanthropic and financial partners to increase their involvement as the vacants initiative ramps up. The housing secretary is scheduled to meet on Thursday with several banks to discuss creating a construction loan specific to people who seek to rehabilitate a vacant Baltimore home, an idea Greater Baltimore Committee President and CEO Mark Anthony Thomas presented to the vacants council on Tuesday.

In addition to Thomas and Day, the council includes representatives from the Maryland attorney general’s office, the Baltimore Department of Finance, the stadium authority, community organizers from BUILD, and the city. It also includes members of the philanthropic community and a representative from Johns Hopkins University.

Maryland Comptroller Brooke Lierman, who attended Wednesday’s event near Druid Hill, said she would use her position as the chair of the Maryland Community Investment Corp. — an entity which can apply for and direct federal awards into neighborhoods — to usher in new financial resources to Baltimore to “bring vacant properties back to life.” And Mayor Brandon Scott, who also attended Wednesday’s event, credited the state for urgently providing money and leadership.

“We all know that in order to achieve this ambitious goal, we need to work faster, more diligent and more in sync than we thought possible or that we did before,” he said. “This is a team effort, and that team effort does not stop with elected officials or government officials.”

Correction: This story has been updated to correct Jake Day's statement about when the state is accepting applications for funding.