There has been great interest in Mayor Brandon Scott’s package of zoning bills, including Bill 25-0066, which is now before the Baltimore City Council. This is a transcript of extended remarks made at the Planning Commission’s October 30 meeting by the legislation’s chief proponent, 3rd District Councilman Ryan Dorsey.

We’re running it as part of The Brew’s coverage and publishing some of the letters we’ve been receiving – from supporters and opponents – on the legislation. Send submissions to editors@baltimorebrew.com.

When people say to me, I didn’t ask for this, what I’m reminded of is that I’ve spoken to hundreds and thousands of people about what they want as the ends. And I’ve looked at the proposals for means to achieve those ends.

And this is what I think is a necessary but small part of the means to achieve those ends:

Those ends where anybody who wants to live in Baltimore can live in Baltimore, anybody who wants to live in Baltimore can live in the neighborhood of their choice, and can live there at a price that they can afford.

That our neighborhoods can be diverse, and that they can thrive in their ability to support local businesses and local jobs that can only come from not just a dense population, but a mixed population that cannot exist if our housing is a one-size-fits-all solution, if our neighborhoods are intent on only catering to the people who own, or want to own, or can own a home.

The American Dream?

That brings me to this assertion that this is, like, ‘American Dream’ kind of destiny – that all shall own a home, and all shall want to own a home, and that all do want to own a home, or that renters are merely transient.

How can we possibly believe that 51% of the population of Baltimore City is just passing through? This is just factually absurd. 51% of the residents of this city are renters, and they are as equally important to this city’s lifeblood and backbone as anybody else who has the privilege of home ownership.

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. I would love for there to be so sufficient a supply of housing that my choice were equal between homeownership and home rentership.

Because I would love for somebody else to mow the lawn. I would prefer, more frankly, for there not to be a lawn, and there just to be native pollinators everywhere.

You know, I would love for somebody else to be responsible for the caulking around the windows that I’m paying somebody to do right now. I would love for somebody else to be responsible for the roof.

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.

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

Wealth-building?

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, is just like an absurd way of looking at something that I see, as a fundamental human right.

Housing as something merely a commodity that I have to rely on, as if we can’t make housing affordable enough that I can accrue wealth over time.

There’s so much I want to say about this bill and this idea of unintended consequences, or that it’s not well thought out.

We are seeing the unintended consequences of exclusive single-family zoning, the scarcity of housing that it makes. We’re seeing the unintended consequence of the rental market getting so much higher and so much less able to grow because of the constraints of where any of it can grow at all.

We are also seeing the intended consequences of “those people there” and “us over here.”

A Modest Proposal

I love the idea of an affordability mandate on top of by right allowance. I heard you can’t achieve affordability without an affordability mandate.

I also heard that the places that do this say you can build four units by right, and if you build one affordable unit, you can have eight units. And if you build two affordable units, you can have 12. Great. If that’s where we want to go, I’m all in for it.

But what I think we have here is – I was recently referred to in a publication as cynical. I was referred to as cynical for using the word “modest” to describe this proposal and, as [former Zoning Board executive director] Becky Witt said in her testimony, I cannot find how our zoning laws are rooted in public health, public safety or the general public welfare only in the preferences of certain people in some interests.

I frankly think, throw out zoning for all but, you know, the most important things, like put the industrial toxins over there away from where they’re going to harm people, which is where all of this zoning started. Allow things to operate organically.

But short of throwing out virtually the whole thing, I think that simply allowing for four units is an extremely modest proposal to take us in the kind of direction.

The last thing I’ll say is that I have been talking about this for a long time with a lot of people, and listening for a long time to a lot of people.

Reversing a Trend

When I began talking with Council President Cohen about this, he said, “Show me what are the other places that have made these kinds of changes.”

And one of the places that I referred to was Austin that has made some changes, particularly around how the ability to subdivide lots and build multiple houses on lots that could only previously have one home on them, and and how one year after making these changes to allow greater housing supply creation, they had bucked the national trend very significantly in terms of reversing the trend of rents skyrocketing upward.

They had actually gone down.

And his response was “Yeah, but Austin is still wildly unaffordable. My brother lives there so I know, I hear about it.”

Realtor.com recently reported that Austin is now the most affordable housing market in the country. I said to him, initially, my response was, “Yes, they’ve made this change. Yes, they’ve reversed the trend, but still it’s the beginning of reversing a long, long, long pattern of supply constraint.”

We have an absolute demand for a huge number of small units, and our housing supply is the exact inverse.

And so when I heard earlier also about how other cities are displacing people while also producing small, high rent units – we have an absolute demand for a huge number of small units, and our housing supply is the exact inverse.

We have three times as many large dwellings as we have small dwellings in this city, and three times the demand for small dwellings as we have for large dwellings. Our supply and demand could not be more mismatched.

But what’s happening is, we are still not producing at a rate sufficient to reverse that trend of the rents continuing to be sky-high.

The market demand is still extremely high and that cannot be corrected until we start to produce a sufficient supply to reverse that, kind of continuously.

And so the places that are still seeing production are still not seeing nearly enough production.

Because we need to go further and do this, along with all the other things that we’re doing around vacancy abatement. You know, again, this is just one part of the puzzle. There’s no reasonable person who would say that this is some sort of panacea, some sort of silver bullet.

But it’s a new tool that we need in the bucket in order to correct the course of things.