Some had hoped the Baltimore Planning Commission might amend Mayor Brandon Scott’s sweeping zoning deregulation bill – even a bit – to make it more palatable to community leaders who have been denouncing it for months.

Known as the “Housing Options and Opportunities Act,” Bill 25-0066 would remove the existing prohibition on converting single-family dwellings to multi-family dwellings in residential zones. And it would permit up to four dwelling units on a single lot.

In other words, it would up-zone well over 100,000 properties across the city.

Allowing two, rather than four, dwellings per lot might be more appropriate, compromise-minded critics like planner and nonprofit developer Charles Duff have said.

That’s what Commissioner Doug McCoach had advocated at an earlier hearing as a way to reduce the risk of “real damage to legacy homeowners.” Chairman Jon Laria had allowed as how “that certainly is one way to do it.”

At the commission hearing on the bill yesterday, McCoach appeared still to be thinking that way. He pressed bill advocate, Councilman Ryan Dorsey, to provide “real data, not projections” about how the legislation would benefit neighborhoods or homeowners.

“I still haven’t heard any single compelling research for going to four units,” McCoach said, noting the potential shock current residents may have if adjoining properties are allowed to be split up without requiring them to get permission from the Zoning Board.

“I still haven’t heard how we can get around the lack of notification to neighbors who may suddenly have a four-unit building, as of right, being developed,” he said.

“What is your response to all these communities who are saying, well, how do I know if I’m gonna have a four-unit apartment building next door next week? And then, why four?”

“Well, fundamentally,” Dorsey replied, “because I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with 10 or 20 [units]. And that reasonable people can disagree, and that I think four is a modest, in-between proposal.”

Laria pressed the mayor’s newly appointed planning director, Timothy Keane, to give him “a bit of a reality check,” noting that Keane has led planning departments in the U.S. and Canada.

“Having done this in more places certainly than I have done, how big a step, how big a deal, big a thing, do you think this is?” Laria asked him.

“It will be not dramatic in the sense of it happening so quickly and neighborhoods changing,” Keane said. “There will still be plenty of single-family homes in the city, but then you’ll be able to go to many neighborhoods in Baltimore and see a variety of housing types.”

“Try more stuff”

Saying he was persuaded by Keane and others, Laria, a prominent retired land-use attorney, threw his support behind the bill, saying:

”You don’t get to pick four because you like it more than two. You get to pick four because you have a big enough building to do it according to the standards.”

Bold ideas are needed, Laria said, to achieve the goals of “more housing options, more density, more affordability” and not fall into the “that-won’t-work-in-Baltimore trope.”

“We’re not amending the Constitution here . . . We’re seeing if we can make something happen by a progressive land-use policy”   – Planning Commission Chair Jon Laria.

“The solution is to try more stuff, to do more things, to listen to people from other places about other ideas, and to implement them and hopefully, you know, see what happens,” Laria concluded.

He offered an amendment, with which the commission agreed, requiring a study of the bill’s impact to be conducted three years after it goes into effect and for every three years thereafter. Under this way of thinking, McCoach’s hoped-for data would come after-the-fact.

With that, the panel voted unanimously to recommend Bill 25-0066 to the Council.

“We’re not amending the Constitution here,” Laria quipped. “We are going to change this in the hopes of stimulating growth, and seeing if we can make something happen by a progressive land-use policy.”

“As expensive as they want”

The vote came on the heels of blistering testimony, primarily in opposition to the bill.

The first to speak was Historic Sharp Leadenhall President Betty Bland-Thomas.

“This city has historically eliminated the voices of the Black residents in Baltimore City who primarily live in urban areas,” she said, maintaining that city officials failed to consult with residents on this bill and the others in Scott’s sweeping housing package.

“We will see in the end what your decisions have made, because we’re going to make a report card on what has happened in our city,” she declared. “And I want it to be noted, we didn’t support this.”

The Community Law Center also opposes the bill, staff attorney Christina Schoppert Devereaux said, “entirely because nothing in it will create affordable housing.”

“Nothing in this bill will create affordable housing”  – Christina Schoppert Devereux, Community Law Center.

She noted that other cities have provisions to ensure that developers pass some of the extra revenue they reap from up-zoning on to renters.

She urged the Scott administration to do the same.

“If you up-zone to 12 units in San Diego or even to 4 units, you have to provide affordable units,” she noted. “Simply increasing supply is not going to make prices go down. Baltimore City real estate is not a closed market, we have Real Estate Investment Trusts, you all know that.”

Similar approaches have not succeeded elsewhere, said Devereaux, who noted that she has been a lecturer in urban studies and planning, most recently at UC San Diego.

“We’ve seen it in places like Charlottesville, we’ve seen it in San Diego, we’ve seen in LA, we’ve seen it in DC, we’ve seen it in Brooklyn – it doesn’t work,” she said.

Laria pushed back at her testimony.

“If you have a large vacant structure that cannot be used economically as a single family home, and you instead acquire it, develop it and turn it into something that has many units, how is that not creating more housing?” he asked her.

“Because empirically . . . when you let a developer build to meet the market, they’re not going to build affordable,” she said.

“Why not?” he asked.

“Because you’re not mandating it,” Devereaux replied. “They can make them as expensive as they want.”

Another Solution: Freeze Rents

There were some speakers in favor of the bill, including former Zoning Board Executive Director Rebecca Witt.

“Housing is a basic human need and a fundamental human right and any choice to artificially limit housing supply, such as limiting areas to only single family dwellings should, in my opinion, require clear evidence that those limits protect public health and safety,” said Witt, testifying remotely.

Speaking in person yesterday, Northeast Baltimore’s Russell Poole explained why he opposes the measure.

Rather than pass the bill, Baltimore would do better to make housing more affordable by freezing rents, stated Poole, who contended that the measure will exacerbate, rather than correct, racially segregated zoning patterns.

“The only way redlining is going to be solved is by giving people opportunities to acquire and accrue wealth,” he argued, pointing to the high rate of poverty and relatively low rate of home ownership among Black residents.

“The only people who are going to have enough equity to buy and convert homes, or even build homes on vacant lots, are going to be wealthy people and corporations,” Poole said.

“If you pass this bill, the only place in Baltimore where a person can acquire a home in a neighborhood designated for single family will be Roland Park, Guilford or Homeland”  – Attorney John Murphy.

Attorney John C. Murphy made a similar point. He argued that the legislation robs non-affluent residents of the opportunity to live in neighborhoods they can afford that are now zoned as single-family areas.

“If you pass this bill, the only place in Baltimore where a person can acquire a home in a neighborhood that is designated for single family will be Roland Park, Guilford or Homeland, all of which are restricted by covenants to allow only single-family ownership,” he said. “Those are very upscale neighborhoods.”

As he has in past hearings, Murphy observed that “people want to own their homes. It’s the American Dream.”

Renting vs. Owning

Dorsey refuted the “American Dream” point fervently.

“I own a home not because I want to, but because the scarcity of housing and the economics of rent are such that I would have to pay twice as much to rent a home as what I pay to own it,” he said.

“I would love for there to be so sufficient a supply of housing that my choices were equal between home ownership and home rentership. I would love for somebody else to mow the lawn,” he said.

“I have a yoga instructor who owns a home on Deepdene Avenue in Roland Park and wants to sell that home and downsize into and move into something that is affordable as a rental unit. And no such thing exists that meets her needs,” he recounted.

“There’s no reason that people should be pushed or socially engineered into home ownership”  – Councilman Ryan Dorsey.

“Not everybody wants to own”

Demonstrating, perhaps, the fundamental difference between two schools of thought in the debate, Dorsey continued:

“And so I say that not everybody wants to own a home. There’s no reason that people should be pushed or socially engineered into home ownership simply because it is the cheaper option.”

“Nor do I think that it is always this kind of windfall of wealth-building that it is so often asserted to be that I have to continuously put money into my home and that I should hinge my long-term financial well being on me one day selling that house, presumably to move to some area that has some place that I can afford for just long enough until I’m dead after I retire.”