At a City Council work session on a bill that eliminates the single family zoning requirement in neighborhoods across Baltimore, a representative of Mayor Brandon Scott’s office told the critics in the room “your voices were heard.”

He pointed to an administration amendment scaling back a provision that allows a property to be converted to four units “by right.”

Under the amendment, only one additional unit would be allowed automatically, said Ty’lor Schnella, Scott’s deputy director of government relations. The third and fourth additional units would have to get Zoning Board approval.

Speaking afterwards, Lauraville resident Jody Landers dismissed Scott’s major proposed amendment as “an appeasement effort.”

“They’re saying, ‘No, we’re not going to quadruple it – we’re just going to double it,’” Landers said. “That’s what this essentially does – it says you can double the density in a given neighborhood. We say no.”

He was part of a crowd of nearly two dozen opponents attending the Land Use and Transportation Committee work session, a group that had erupted into laughter when Schnella remarked, at one point, “you’re talking about a modest zoning change.”

By contrast, there was sustained applause after extended remarks by the bill’s most passionate Council opponent, Vice Chair Sharon Green Middleton, who represents Northwest Baltimore’s 6th District.

“For some reason you’re not mentioning the Black homeowners in legacy neighborhoods,” she began.

Middleton compared the movement of Bill 25-0066 through the council (along with others in Scott’s legislative package introduced eight months ago) to the years-long comprehensive rezoning process, Transform Baltimore, which she said “built trust and respect.”

“When that was finished, there were no questions, there were no protests,” she said, as audience members nodded in agreement.

Bill proponents are out of touch with “our middle class neighborhoods, not just our under-served neighborhoods,” she said. “People that make decisions don’t live in these areas and don’t understand the day to day problems.”

City: New Housing Needed

Proponents, however, see the bill as a major way to address one of those problems – housing affordability.

“The median sale price of a home in Baltimore has gone up 34% since 2020,” Schnella said. “40% of renters in Baltimore spend more than 35% of their income on rent.”

Making proponents’ central case for the bill, he argued that increasing housing supply would make housing more affordable.

“We don’t have enough of the kinds of housing that people want, in the neighborhoods that people want to live in: flexible, small scale, multi-family homes,” he continued.

“If the city makes vital efforts to create new and renovated housing matched closely to market preferences, it could attract between 4,294 and 5,855 additional households each year over the next five years,” he said, citing the quasi-public nonprofit, Live Baltimore.

“New and renovated housing could attract between 4,294 and 5,855 additional households each year”  – Ty’lor Schnella, Mayor’s Office of Government Relations.

Baltimore is the only jurisdiction in Maryland with a net shortage of land to support housing growth through 2045, he said, adding “we are already operating at a deficit across every zoning category and many high-density districts are nearing build-out.”

The city Housing department, he said, estimates “that Baltimore needs to add 147,000 housing units over the next 15 years just to keep pace with demand and population stabilization.”

Addressing “those who argue that we already have enough vacant homes and should focus only there,” Schnella asserted that “even if every viable vacant property were redeveloped, Baltimore would still face a shortage of housing capacity to meet future demand.”

“Low Public Trust”

At yesterday’s work session, public testimony was not permitted by Chairman Ryan Dorsey, who drew protest at a December 1 hearing when he disallowed testimony from people waiting online.

But sharp questioning indicated that some committee members share some of the public’s concern that the city is ill-equipped to protect them from the potential harmful impacts of effectively upzoning much of the city.

They raised the specter of unaccountable out-of-town speculators, shoddy and illegal apartment conversions and new construction and quality-of-life problems like trash and blight.

Shouldn’t the city do more “proactive inspections for things like checking electrical work to make sure it’s done properly?” Councilman Paris Gray wanted to know.

“We get calls from people who purchase homes and then effectively come to find out they’ve bought a lemon – the electrical was shoddy, the plumbing was really bad,” Gray said. “I would love something done so that people are protected from some of these fly-by-night folks.”

“This would go a long way to instilling trust in the public because right now I think –  I know – that they don’t think that we’re doing a great job,” he added.

Housing Commissioner Alice Kennedy said they were still evaluating this.

Councilwoman Phylicia Porter had a tone of exasperation as she grilled Kennedy about the city’s persistent permit backlog.

“We had a hearing the other night,” Kennedy told her. “We’ve actually turned the corner on the permitting system.”

“I saw that hearing,” Porter said. “We’re still having people reach out to the council’s office to follow up on permits . . . we’ve had significant issues.”

Pressed by Porter on the lack of inspectors to enforce nuisance trash and other code enforcement problems, Kennedy talked about efforts to staff up, including a nine-member “sanitation team.”

When Porter asked if the end result would be a speedier response by the city and asked to meet with Kennedy offline (“I want to see duration times before and after before I can support this bill”), Schnella suggested she bring the administration any ideas about how to improve the process.

“We’ve been talking about some of these issues, during budget season and in Baltimore hearings, for a number of years now,” the 10th District Councilwoman said. “The ideas are there, we just need to see . . . the implementation.”

Owner-occupied Amendment

Councilman Mark Parker also offered amendments, including one that specifies that the new use created by the bill “may be permitted only if the property is owner-occupied.”

Parker said he found one aspect of the legislation, that it helps people to b able to stay in their homes by renting out a portion of them, is “very compelling.”

His amendment, he said, “protects us, a bit, against the impact of rampant speculation by massive corporate owners of property that we have already seen in the city.”

“Parties that see housing as a way to enrich themselves and screw everybody else,” he said, “have disastrous impacts on communities.”

The 1st District councilman also brought up an issue much discussed in the community, but so far not addressed by the committee:

A city Law Department report warning that 25-0066 may be vulnerable to legal challenge because it could be construed as an end-run around the comprehensive rezoning process, which requires extensive public notice.

“Do you have a sense of the depth of the vulnerability?” Parker asked the Law Department’s Jeffrey Hochstetler, who replied, “There’s not clear case law on this exact topic.”

Hochstetler added,”If you’d like something more specific, we could look at that, drill down.”

No one asked him to.