There has been intense public interest in Mayor Brandon Scott’s package of zoning bills, including Bill 25-0066, which is now before the Baltimore City Council. The bill removes single-family zoning in Baltimore residential districts citywide, with the aim of promoting density and population growth. It also would permit up to four dwelling units on a single residential lot.

This commentary is by Charles Williams, a resident of the Historic Marble Hill neighborhood of West Baltimore. Others are welcome to submit commentary on the legislation to editors@baltimorebrew.com.

City Council Bill 25-0066 isn’t about affordability. It’s about erasing accountability.

It invites exploitation, not opportunity, and puts legacy homeowners and neighborhoods like ours on the losing end once again.

I’m writing as a resident and homeowner in the Historic Marble Hill community, part of Upton, one of Baltimore’s oldest and most historically significant Black neighborhoods, where homeowners have spent decades restoring dignity and stability to blocks once written off as lost causes.

Our position is clear and unwavering: we are firmly opposed to Bill 25-0066 as written.

While it is being promoted as a step toward affordable housing, for communities like ours it represents the opposite – a green light for absentee landlords and speculative investors to buy cheap, divide historic homes into transient rentals and walk away from the consequences.

A green light for absentee landlords and outside investors to buy cheap, divide historic homes into transient rentals and walk away from the consequences.

To say my neighborhood has “historic homes” is almost an understatement. My block, the 1200 block of Druid Hill Avenue, is at the heart of Baltimore’s civil rights landscape.

Across from my home, Thurgood Marshall prepared arguments for Brown v. Board of Education.

Union Baptist Church, at 1219 Druid Hill Avenue, hosted Mary McLeod Bethune and other leaders.

And at the now-sadly-demolished Freedom House, the Baltimore branch of the NAACP led by Dr. Lille Mae Carroll Jackson welcomed Eleanor Roosevelt and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. when they came to Baltimore to work with local leaders.

In short, our block may face challenges, but its historic significance is beyond dispute.

Responsible Growth

Some look at West Baltimore and see a broken city, but I see a city full of potential – as long as growth comes with accountability.

For generations, Black family homeownership has been the ladder to stability, equity building, neighborhood leadership and inter-generational wealth.

Today that ladder is being torn away rung by rung. When reinvestment advances without enforcement, it looks less like realignment and more like re-segregation by another name.

You don’t have to look far to see what that means in practice. On our block, daily loitering and open-air drug activity continue near the corner store that has long been a hub for street dealing.

In recent weeks, that same pattern has spread to three properties that were condemned and closed this past April after years of community complaints about neglect, illegal activity and unsafe occupancy.

Those closures only happened because residents worked tirelessly alongside Housing Commissioner Alice Kennedy and the Department of Housing and Community Development (DHCD) to hold the owners accountable and restore safety to the block.

That fight was hard-won, and Bill 25-0066 threatens to undo it.

By stripping away critical safeguards, the bill makes it easier for the same speculative buyers to return, reconvert and re-exploit these properties without oversight. What the bill calls “density,” we experience as overcrowding and destabilization.

Doing our Part Already

We are not anti-renter. But balance matters. This block already carries its fair share of density as it stands.

Out of twenty-two parcels on the 1200 block of Druid Hill Avenue, only six still function as true single-family residences.

The rest are either vacant, condemned, illegally converted or operating as multi-dwelling, commercial or institutional structures.

That means barely 27% of this block remains stable, family-scale housing, a stunning decline for a community that once defined Black homeownership and civic leadership.

Only 27% of this block remains stable, family-scale housing, a stunning decline for a community that once defined Black homeownership and civic leadership.

We are already destabilized by the presence of this cluster of multi-unit rental properties without matching sanitation, curb management or code-compliance capacity.

Just a small example. If people don’t move their cars for city street sweeping and the city doesn’t enforce the requirement, then the sweeping doesn’t happen and trash builds up unless residents clean it themselves.

Legalizing four units “by right” at each of these addresses – as Bill 25-0066 would do – would push this block past the tipping point.

A Black Butterfly Issue

For Marble Hill, preservation isn’t about resisting progress. It’s about protecting progress already made.

Our homeowners have invested time, money and heart to restore 19th-century rowhouses, create gardens where vacant lots once stood and model what community-led revitalization can look like. To dismantle that under the guise of reform would be not only shortsighted, but profoundly unjust.

This isn’t just a Marble Hill issue. It’s a Black Butterfly issue. Communities like ours, stretching across Baltimore’s historically disinvested Black corridors, are once again being asked to bear the weight of policies written without us.

These neighborhoods have been the soul of Baltimore’s cultural and civic life, yet they remain the first to face displacement when development pressures rise.

We urge the City Council to reject Bill 25-0066 in its current form and work with residents to craft housing policies that foster equity, ownership and accountability.