Baltimore City might be entering its YIMBY era

Baltimore is among the mid-Atlantic’s most affordable major metropolitan areas to live in. But that doesn’t mean it’s cheap.

Rent prices are on the rise. So is the median home price. The share of households with enough income to afford the average home has dropped significantly over the last two decades.

A City Council imbued with fresh blood is taking its first major stab at alleviating the problem. Fireworks have followed.

Former Mayor Catherine Pugh opposed the proposals at an explosive public hearing. Angry constituents threatened to mobilize at the ballot box. And a few council members have accused the bill’s supporters of shrugging off the backbone of Baltimore’s tax base: Black homeowners.

The public’s concerns ranged from the practical — less parking, more people, more trash — to the philosophical — changing the character of the city.

But the people who hold those concerns often aren’t the same people who need more affordable housing. It boils down to one question: Can governments respond to two sets of concerns at once?

With its suite of ambitious zoning proposals almost all across the finish line, Baltimore is attempting to walk this tightrope.

The most sweeping piece of the legislative package, a proposal championed by Mayor Brandon Scott to allow multifamily housing in all Baltimore residential areas, is due for consideration by the council Thursday. Some residents sounded the alarm at public listening sessions and to the city’s Planning Commission, which ultimately recommended the bill favorably.

The city must adapt to modern housing demands, promoters say, especially as national and regional shortfalls make the cost of living less attainable — sometimes forcing people to choose between their home costs and an energy bill. The city, research shows, doesn’t have enough residentially zoned land to accommodate housing for its projected growth.

At public hearings in City Hall, advocates for low- and moderate-income households said zoning revisions could bring relief.

The issue is top of mind for the mayors of Richmond, Virginia, and Washington, whose constituents also are eager for more affordable housing options, said Scott, who met with D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser and Richmond’s Danny Avula last week. A second-term Democrat, Scott said the topic plays an outsize role in Baltimore, where city and state leaders hope to clamp down on the volume of vacant homes and where predominantly Black neighborhoods remain largely cut off from large-scale investment.

Scott said he doesn’t call himself a “YIMBY,” a pro-housing acronym for “yes in my backyard.”

But he called the zoning package “good policy” that can balance the needs for more housing variety with community concerns. The mayor pointed to East Baltimore’s Johnston Square neighborhood, a city-backed investment initiative that has carefully baked in community feedback. This legislation may help accelerate the work.

“This policy is just a way for us to help hasten that,” Scott said, “because we also cannot sit by the wayside and think that we have 20, 30, 40 years to solve this issue.”

Developers, and development, warrant extra scrutiny in Baltimore.

There’s possibly no better example of developer-inflicted trauma than the failed overhaul of West Baltimore’s Poppleton neighborhood. On the east side, there’s an 88-acre neighborhood waiting for its promised renewal initiative just north of Johns Hopkins’ downtown hospital. And homes all over Baltimore are decaying as massive residential portfolios default on their loans.

Those examples are “extreme outliers” caused by specific issues the city can learn from, said City Councilman Ryan Dorsey, the architect of the zoning package. The crisis in Poppleton was fueled by zoning that favors companies capable of mass-scale development, he argued. The new zoning bills would encourage smaller-scale development, he said, such as homeowners interested in additions to accommodate caregivers or growing families.

Dorsey, who failed in past efforts to pass pieces of the housing package but has found allies in the mayor and council President Zeke Cohen, said he leaned on the available data. An October report from Maryland Comptroller Brooke Lierman found that the state’s housing stock is growing much more slowly than the places it loses population to. Baltimore-area residents’ monthly costs, including median gross rents, are also higher than in competitor areas such as Philadelphia, Richmond and Raleigh, North Carolina, the report found.

Population loss hurts the tax base, Lierman has said, and is linked to strains on the labor market, slowed economic output and declining state and local revenues that pay for government services.

The recommendations cited in Lierman’s report include “upzoning” provisions that allow for more units of housing on a given piece of land and eliminating requirements mandating a specific number of off-street parking spaces in new buildings. The city’s zoning package includes upzoning provisions and doing away with parking “minimum” requirements — not parking itself but the requirement for a minimum amount.

The city package collected some of the best zoning practices being used and tested across the country, said Kathryn Howell, director of the National Center for Smart Growth Research and Education at the University of Maryland, College Park. It can help create much-needed relief among low-income households, which are being “leapfrogged” by those with more expendable funds.

Though communities are right to be skeptical, Howell said, housing affordability conversations need to start with supply — and in budget-constrained cities, zoning revisions may be one of the only feasible options.

“You won’t fix the housing crisis by just unlocking land,” Howell said, “but without unlocking land, you won’t fix your housing crisis.”

Polling data shows voters overwhelmingly support affordable housing and identify it as a top priority. They also support government intervention, the polls show, but tend to embrace some ideas — such as building more housing near transit lines — more than others.

No measure of the city’s package was as hotly debated as the parking minimums bill. Supporters said the changes might steer more riders toward the city’s fledgling transit system and speaks to those who don’t own cars.

Pugh, who lives in Ashburton, asked the committee if the city would consider exempting certain communities from the change. Other detractors used stronger language.

“I’m a little bit appalled,” said Cynthia Gross, an East Baltimore resident. “All I hear about you all doing is taxing me, making my life harder, but making it easier for the developer who doesn’t pay property taxes.”

There were other criticisms, too. At an October town hall hosted by Scott, attendees raised concerns about awarding “bad actors” even more leeway, adding more cars to crowded streets and densifying neighborhoods without the city services to accommodate the growth.

At a final Planning Commission meeting to discuss the bill, residents lamented the death of “single-family values” and said the revisions would alter the sought-after character of their communities.

The legislation will almost certainly enable more, and denser, housing, especially on smaller and irregularly shaped lots, said Samia Kirchner, associate professor of architecture and urban design at Morgan State University. Renderings of allowable buildings developed by city planning officials depicted structures considerably larger than those in less dense neighborhoods such as Howard Park and Hamilton.

Kirchner said the policies seem tailored to a city with limited land availability. Baltimore has the opposite problem, with its thousands of empty lots. Policy efforts may be “better focused,” Kirchner added, if they centered on renovating and reoccupying the existing infrastructure, via investment in community land trusts, for example, or increased funding for restoring vacant homes.

The city should incentivize more reliable and accessible public transportation first, Kirchner added, before it forces residents to worry about their parking spots.

There also could have been more “thoughtful” legislation with attached affordability requirements, said City Councilman James Torrence, chair of the Housing & Economic Development Committee and one of the package’s loudest council critics.

Torrence, who tried to advocate for amendments that would have incentivized more development in commercial and arts districts, said he wants more residents to be able to afford to live in Baltimore. He said he supports Councilman Paris Gray’s piece of the package, which would allow property owners to build closer to property lines.

But the rollout of the first pieces of legislation felt bungled, Torrence said. There needed to be more community input, he said, and a plan tailored to meet Baltimore’s housing market, not a one-size-fits-all solution.

“I wholeheartedly agree that we need to attract more residents,” Torrence said. “That’s why I appreciate the productive conversations I’ve had with the mayor, because we have a similar goal. We need more residents. It’s just: How do we get there?”