Maryland REALTORS®’ CEO, Chuck Kasky, is joined by Baltimore City Councilman, Ryan Dorsey, and Maryland REALTORS® Director of Advocacy, Lisa May, to discuss the historic limitations of single-family zoning that impedes new housing development and promotes exclusionary policies.
Councilman Dorsey explains his proposed Abundant Housing Bill will seek to create diverse, affordable housing opportunities for all and foster economic growth for Baltimore City neighborhoods that face struggles with population density.
Abundant Housing Act For the purpose of amending certain provisions of the Baltimore City Zoning Code to promote increased development of low-density multi-family dwellings in certain residential districts; establishing standards for the conversion of single-family dwellings into low-density multi-family dwellings; establishing opportunities to increase density if a low-density multi-family dwelling is a certain distance from certain City amenities; amending certain permitted and conditional uses; amending certain bulk and yard standards; eliminating certain required off-street parking requirements; and defining certain terms.
For more legislation details please visit: https://baltimore.legistar.com/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=5845395&GUID=14D78850-8A86-4317-AA8C-A9003052FFDB&Options=&Search=
Maryland REALTORS®’ CEO, Chuck Kasky, is joined by Baltimore City Councilman, Ryan Dorsey, and Maryland REALTORS® Director of Advocacy, Lisa May, to discuss the historic limitations of single-family zoning that impedes new housing development and promotes exclusionary policies.
Councilman Dorsey explains his proposed Abundant Housing Bill will seek to create diverse, affordable housing opportunities for all and foster economic growth for Baltimore City neighborhoods that face struggles with population density.
Abundant Housing Act For the purpose of amending certain provisions of the Baltimore City Zoning Code to promote increased development of low-density multi-family dwellings in certain residential districts; establishing standards for the conversion of single-family dwellings into low-density multi-family dwellings; establishing opportunities to increase density if a low-density multi-family dwelling is a certain distance from certain City amenities; amending certain permitted and conditional uses; amending certain bulk and yard standards; eliminating certain required off-street parking requirements; and defining certain terms.
For more legislation details please visit: https://baltimore.legistar.com/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=5845395&GUID=14D78850-8A86-4317-AA8C-A9003052FFDB&Options=&Search=
Let's put some dots on the wall. Maryland is facing an estimated shortage of housing to the tune of over 120,000 units. Historically, to have a balance in housing, you wanna add one housing unit for every two jobs that are created. Pre pandemic, Maryland was producing one unit for every three jobs. Since the start of Covid, we are only producing one of, for every eight jobs created inflation and rising interest rates are causing even more pain. In addition, different consumers have diverse needs, so we have to pay attention to a lot of different types of consumers. In her brilliant book cast the origins of our discontent, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America, as she explores through an immersive deeply research narrative and stories about real people. How America today and throughout its history, has been shaped by a hidden cast system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings. Richard Rothsteins 2017 masterpiece. The color of law argues that exclusionary zoning laws, and I will argue that's a redundant term, exclusionary zoning, is in effect redundant along with other government interventions, make it difficult for black people and others to find affordable housing in arbitrary lines, how zoning broke the American city and how to fix it. M Nolan Gray rights zoning is not a good institution gone bad. On the contrary, zoning is a mechanism of exclusion designed to inflate property values, slow the pace of new development, segregate cities by race and class, and enshrine the detached single family house as the exclusive urban ideal. If you are interested in these issues, please read these books in that order. Their common thread there is housing policy. The debate in the world of urban planning scholars fairly quickly becomes part of the debate. In public policy, circles and public officials are moving to restrict the ability of local governments to regulate land use in the name of encouraging more housing. Meanwhile, many local governments are acting in advance of state or federal intervention and will be addressing those issues and others in this episode. Hello, I'm Chuck Caskey, Maryland Realtors ceo, and you are listening to Get Real Estate, the Maryland Realtors podcast. Joining me today is Ryan Dorsey, city councilman for Baltimore's third district. He works to strengthen communities, make neighborhoods more accessible and safer, increased government accountability and transparency, and ensure that Baltimore is affordable, attractive, and inclusive for all who choose to live there. Councilman Dorsey is a lifelong resident of Baltimore's third district, raised in the Be Air Edison and Mayfield neighborhoods. Attended and graduated from St. Francis of a CC to Baltimore School for the Arts and the Peabody Conservatory of Music. Talk a little bit about that. Uh, my daughter went to bsa, so that's cool too. Before running for office, Councilman Dorsey worked as a project manager and a small business that was founded in Baltimore and has been in his family for three generations. And he's an Appalachian Trail through Hiker. Welcome, Councilman Dorsey. Thanks, Chuck. Also with us today is Lisa May, Marilyn Realtors Director of Advocacy and Public policy, who is really going to be our point person for our legislative proposals, both at this state and even the local level. So Lisa, welcome.
Speaker 2:Thank you, Chuck, and thank you Councilman Dorsey for being here.
Speaker 1:Glad to be here. Let's just get a little bit of a baseline for our listeners, because we talk about zoning and planning, planning and zoning. First of planning and zoning. But zoning is about, let's just say a little over a hundred years old in the United States. And I recommend people just, you'll do a search, just a history of zoning in America, and you would get several hundreds, very, very good articles or books been written about this. And there's a lot of good history there. But although it was embodied or originally, I guess proposed as a way to bring order to development in cities especially, but other places as well. And, you know, in, in the early 20th century, if we're gonna be honest, first of all, why is local land use, why is land use mostly local? We'll talk a little bit about that. But in the meantime, you know, in the early 20th century, if we're being honest on, on the coasts, basically in California New York zoning ordinances were the brainchild of New York businessmen, for lack of a better term, where, you know, high fashion shops were being displaced, had displaced mansions, and in the middle section of fifth Avenue, and by 1916, they were at risk of being crowded out by their own suppliers, garment manufacturers, et cetera, who were, you know, imposing, if you will, on on that, those residential neighborhoods. And for the most part, zoning was a way to preserve property values. And by, by wealthy, mostly white business people. I mean, that's just, that's the history. I'm not, I'm making this up. And so of course, we're not advocating for the lack of segregation of uses, right? Cause there clearly are uses that do not belong together. So you don't wanna swine rendering plant in the middle of a residential area, but neither do you want to exclude other uses that could in other situations be compatible. And so traditionally, the, it was not the province of local governments. Let's be clear about that. It was only until the Supreme Court in a case called Euclid allowed the local governments almost exclusive, uh, jurisdiction over landers. Herbert Hoover was actually Calvin Cool's Secretary of Commerce before he became president. And everybody know, if you know a little bit of history, you know, Herbert Hoover, who was an, what we call an enthusiastic technocrat. And he was not really all that enthralled with Calvin Cool's Lae fair philosophy. And he really saw planning as an improvement over free market urban development, and then convened a panel of experts to write the first standardized state zoning enabling act. And then it grew rapidly and, and was widely adopted throughout the United States after that. And so, one could argue, I think, that in the intervening century, zoning has grown far more intrusive. And then even the br the, the early visions of it from the 1920s. So I think there was a growing consensus that zoning I is an impediment to the development of additional needed housing. And so those are the kinds of topics we're gonna be exploring today. So Councilman Dorsey, first of all, what did I get wrong? What did I get right? And, and tell us a little bit about what your vision is on those kinds of issues.
Speaker 3:Thanks, Chuck. Well, I appreciate you making the references to these really great books. I actually have the arbitrary lines book, but haven't read it yet. But, uh, big follower of Nolan m Gray on social media. And, uh, you know, he's, he's spot on in the positions that he takes. And, and I mean, absolutely cast and rothsteins book, uh, color of Law are absolutely essential for understanding the social constructs of, um, segregation, um, along class and race lines. Um, but, but first and foremost, along racial lines and the extent to which our government has been complicit for, you know, more than a hundred years in establishing laws that segregate. Yeah, you mentioned Calvin. Cool. And, and Hoover really, these, uh, this era of the, the late twenties and 1930s, these men were putting forth pamphlets to local governments who were essentially reeling, you know, white led, white supremacist led governments reeling from being told by the Supreme Court, no, you cannot write zoning laws that explicitly segregate on the basis of race. And, uh, Coolic and Hoover were distributing pamphlets on, uh, as how two pamphlets to local governments all across the country on exactly how to use economic quantifiers in zoning laws to achieve through constitutionally acceptable race neutral language, the exact same outcomes that had been, been sought through explicitly race based zoning codes. So zoning at its core is about segregation on the basis of race and creating economic opportunity for white people and segregating black people out from that opportunity to advance socially and economically. As you mentioned, Rothstein really covers this in detail in the color of law. And we are today still living under this same exact banner of basically, Hey, as long as it's race neutral and constitutionally acceptable language, you know, what's the problem? Well, the problem is in exactly what it was intended for in the first place. And exactly what it has brought about is what was intended. We remain a, an economically and racially stratified society. And the way that zoning has achieved this, uh, I would say most inly or most plainly, is through turning basically 75% of residential zoned property throughout cities all across the country into places where you can only do one thing. Lisa and I were at a symposium a couple weeks ago where one person put it really succinctly. They said, it's, it's as if you were to create a law that said farmers can grow only corn<laugh>. That's essentially what we've done with the land that we've designated for residential purposes, said, you can only grow one crop on this land. Single dwelling structures that make essentially the least sustainable, least economical, least valuable residential use of any given parcel. And, you know, this, this is, has essentially created, uh, manufactured scarcity that, as you said, drives up the cost of housing for all. And, and the benefits are dubious, right? Adherence to the idea of single family zoning as this grand ideal and this like sanctuary of residential life. I feel like forget about all of the other costs of such low density use over such vast swaves of land. Uh, it it means that you have essentially no choice. Um, but to have to rely on ownership of an automobile, um, which comes at a cost of eight to$9,000 per year per vehicle. That means that if you are a, uh, two adult household, you're incurring costs of 16 to$18,000 a year just for your two cars, as opposed to maybe just having one of those cars and being eight or$9,000 ahead of the game game because you live in a community where things are dense enough that it can support the creation and sustaining of businesses in your neighborhood as well. Cause we've created space for those businesses to exist as well. We've created space for more population to support those businesses. And so you're able to walk to have your needs met. And those businesses really can't survive at the level of low density population that exists in sprawling, sprawling neighborhoods, which is why ubiquitously through for all communities, the only sort of commerce that tends to exist is auto oriented destinations concentrated on massive, massive lots full of, you know, thousands of parking spaces. That's the only way you're locked into. And I just don't, I feel like fundamentally what's really important about that also is that there's a loss of freedom that exists in locking people into a car oriented existence that is absolutely part of the core, the foundation of the idea of single family housing. That it literally is a concept that exists and was promoted by the government to, to, to make sure that people who could not afford both a down payment or a mortgage and ownership of a car could not live in suburban post-war development communities as means of keeping black people from having opportunity that was being created explicitly for white people.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I'm gonna jump ahead because there was you, you left me a couple openings. We have a lot of, uh, to, to unpack in, in what you just said, but I wanna jump to one issue and, and you know, here, none of this is original. And, and I love it when, when I'm thinking about this stuff and I was like, oh man, we have a lot in common with the libertarians on this, right?<laugh>. And, and so I did a little search, and of course I'm not the first to think of that. I wouldn't pretend to to be that original, but I've done a little bit of, of additional digging and actually where you hit the nail on the head. I mean, this is, this is government control of private property. And like I said in the opening and, and you repeated it, exclusionary zoning is, is redundant. I mean, zoning is way more about what I cannot do on my property versus what I can do. And so it, it occurred to me as, and we, because as political people, Lisa and I have talked a lot about this, we're building a coalition, and I'll ask your opinion on this as far as, as your bill goes, we're building a coalition to support some of these positions. It seems to me that there is a conservative case<laugh> to be made because there seems to be a paradox within conservative thinking. And even the people, the ar some of the articles that I've read, they're, they're, they keep holding up the suburbs as a sacred symbol of local control. On the other hand, the entire suburban experiment runs on federal subsidies, right? And even though the mortgage interest deduction isn't as robust as it used to be after the, the recent tax bill for, for generations, that was how it came to be. And, um, and we're proud of that. The realtors, obviously, mortgage interest deduction was the third rail of our political advocacy for decades and decades. And so it seems to me that, that there is a potential here for a coalition building a across ideological lines to, to see whether the amount of government control on our private property rights is, is really still meeting our needs. And is there an opportunity there to reach across, uh, ideological lines again? And I know you've, I'm sure you've given us some thoughts. So before we get into the details of your belt, what, what have kind of thought have you given to that?
Speaker 3:I think that you're absolutely right. And look, in general, I find that good public policy is stuff that is supported by a coalition that crosses common lines. Yeah. And, and look, if if we, if we think of these kind of three kind of realms of like kind of republicanism Democrat ideals or, and then like this libertarian as this something else, right? Uh, it really is, you know, if I think about it in like purely like ideologically based terms that, you know, and the, and the polar in the most polarizing way, it's like, I'm gonna put republicanism and like conservatism over here and associate that with capitalism, right? And then I'm gonna put Democrats over here and I'm gonna associate that with socialistic tendencies, right? And, and then the libertarian ideology is basically like, I don't care about any of that. I just don't want to be told what I can't do. Right? And, and that's kind of, that's the nexus where these policies meet. It's like housing production makes people money, you know, whether that's through being landlords or whether that in, you know, the realtor's perspective is about selling real estate. And then on the the other side there's this socialism, well, we have to fight for things to support the common good. Well, we need a lot more housing than we have. There are a whole lot of people who are under housed or overburdened cost burden by the, the shortage of housing and the high cost of housing whose, you know, need for housing that we need to, uh, kinda meet. And then there's libertarian folks like, what are you doing telling me that I can't use my property to do something that's more valuable with it? And that's really where all of this comes from, uh, comes together with, with zoning changes that allow us to do more, to meet more people's needs and desires. It's absolutely a nexus for these kind of different ideologies. Absolutely. It's a perfect place for us to, to coalition build, to meet a broad, broad range of needs.
Speaker 1:Lisa, what are your thoughts on
Speaker 2:That? Well, it's really interesting. In my job, of course, it, it's apparent to get information from a lot of different sources. And so I get emails from places like the American Enterprise Institute and Reason Who are libertarian and Little Sea Conservative, and they're touting California as a model of zoning reform. And there's always this disconnect of trying to put those two things together. When I receive those emails, it's a little jarring. The
Speaker 1:Hido Institute has a whole, has a whole section on
Speaker 2:This. Yes. So, but if you think about it, um, as you mentioned, these types of reforms are pro private property rights. They are pro-free market. They are about removing regulation and in turn, perhaps reducing the need for government subsidies of affordable housing or, or needing to provide funding so that we make what housing stock there is affordable for the population. So yes, there is, there is a little c conservative argument that can be made in favor of this along with some of the more traditional liberal arguments in favor of greater equality or, or more progress in terms of getting away from the traditional suburban development.
Speaker 3:And let me just say, whether you're a conservative, a liberal, or anywhere else on this spectrum, you're gonna get old. That's a, you know, like you are not gonna stop. And, and if you've lived in a neighborhood for 20, 30, 40 years, raised your kids in some cases, raised your grandkids house, you know, lived in a multi-generational household, but now you're 70 years old and you don't need a three bedroom house, I don't care what your political ideology is, you likely want to downsize and you likely want to stay in the same place where you have enjoyed living for the last three decades, but you likely live in a neighborhood that prohibits the construction of anything smaller than the structure that you raised your children in. Right? And, and the only way to create opportunity for these, these individuals, all of us aging to, to age in place, is to create more opportunity for us to continue to live in our neighborhoods in smaller dwellings. And whether that means you yourself are converting your house into multiple units, whether that means you yourself are building an accessory dwelling unit that is either attached or detached from your prop, your existing primary structure, or whether that means somebody else in your neighborhood is building these things, you know, it creates the opportunity for you to move into that adu and rent your house out to another family that wants to move to your neighborhood, for you to live in one apartment and somebody else, another tenant to live in another apartment in your house, or for you to reap the benefit of the equity that you have built in your home over those 30 and 40 years. Take that equity and into your retirement and move into an apartment that somebody else invested in, in creating multiple units on their property. The, the benefit of allowing just one more dwelling unit, let alone two or three, you know, the national trend is toward the idea of duplexes, plexes and fourplexes being allowed ubiquitously on residential zone property. We just cannot meet the needs of our population in general without greater housing production, let alone the population of any subset, including the aging population, which again, is all of us.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And, and including rentals as you, as you mentioned, cuz not everyone wants to be a homeowner. Sometimes we forget that. One
Speaker 3:Other thing on this is, I think it's real, so important to recognize, again from like the, the, the liberal kind of side of things is we do have an opp, we do have an obligation, we have a moral obligation to help to affirmatively further fair housing, to create opportunity for people to move and live, move to, and live in areas of high opportunity through essentially desegregation along traditionally race, but also class lines. Right? And I'm personally not an adherent of the belief that like strong neighborhoods are made through home ownership, right? You know, this kind of idea, right? Mm-hmm.<affirmative>, there are plenty of strong neighborhoods that are overwhelmingly renter based all across the country, all throughout the world. And even here in Baltimore City, you can see different neighborhoods that are structured differently. But even if you are an adherent of the belief that home ownership is like the sacred cow of like strong neighborhoods creating opportunity for people to move up a social ladder from neighborhoods of low opportunity to neighborhoods of high opportunity as renters helps people to move along the ladder from being renters to potentially more likely becoming owners at some future date. We need to help people to move through a social ladder if we're ever going to get to the, the potential for home ownership. And so, you know, I think that that's important for the kind of the realtor perspective.
Speaker 1:Oh, absolutely. And, and so we're working through that too because we we're working to harmonize the notion of, of a house as a significant investment. And like you said, generational wealth and the issue of affordability. Because if we bring the market to balance, if we bring supply and demand back into balance by necessity according to the, I don't wanna say immutable laws of economics, but<laugh> as we know them, prices are gonna come down and values are gonna come down a little bit if the market is more in balance and we're kind of working toward harmonizing the need for additional housing. And then the consequence of that, which would be a deceleration of the appreciation that we have seen, and, and it's unsustainable double digit appreciation of housing is, is unsustainable. And so we we're working towards harmonizing that. But, so let's switch gears a little bit. Tell us about your bill. What is it that it does? And you can get a little wonky with this group likes that kind of stuff, and especially in terms of what we, as we talked about it at the, before we, we came on to record the episode, this notion that people are going to read about. And, and a lot of people, I know I followed the letters to the editor of the sun after, you know, you had a, you got a lot of press with when the bill was dropped, and a lot of comments and a lot of, uh, pushback and not, not, and not all positive as you, as you saw, I'm sure, you know, we're eliminating family, single family zoning and, and that scares people, whether it is or it isn't. So talk about the bill, talk about it in terms that puts that whole notion of the future of single family zoning into context for us.
Speaker 3:Yeah. That the phrase of like eliminating or abolishing single family zone is like the, the most controversial and misleading way of characterizing this, this subject. It what, what it really is better described as his dismantling, exclusionary zoning and creating, uh, more abundant opportunity for housing. So I've introduced a bill that's called the Abundant Housing Act, that in short says that if you've got room to house people, we shouldn't be stopping you. So Baltimore City right now basically divides housing into two buckets, single family and multi-family. And what my bill does is it splits multi-family into two different categories, low density and high density. And what the bill focuses on is that low density area, this missing middle housing kind of category of two to four units as this definition of low density multifamily. And, you know, it's, it's helpful, uh, to get a little wonky to recognize that right now, Baltimore City says that there are certain categor zoning categories, R seven and R eight, which are these row home categories that allow single family to multi-family conversion. And it sets a threshold of 1500 square feet as the minimum you have to have in order to be able to create more than one unit. Further, it goes into dictating the size that a unit must be at minimum designating 750 square feet for a single, for a one bedroom. And then I think it's 1250 for a two bedroom and something else for a three bedroom. Right? Meanwhile, the international building code says that you can fit a dwelling into as little as 350 square feet. And in fact, in other multifamily categories, when we're talking about something other than single family to multifamily conversion, we permit things that are lower than that 750 square foot single, right? You don't have to, not all dwelling units are that size. And so what this bill of mind does is it retains that 1500 square foot threshold for conversion, but it stops dictating how big a unit has to be beyond what the building code already says. Because I believe that it's, it's important for us to separate the purpose of these laws, right? The building code exists so that we know that the housing is sound safe and healthy to meet human needs adequately. But beyond that, you know, if you've got 1500 square feet, my bill would say that you can have two units, but they could be 500 and a thousand or 600 and 900. They don't both have to be 750 square feet, but we do use that as kind of our benchmark. So if you want a third unit under my bill, you would have to have an additional 700 square feet, a 750 square feet. So, so 2,250 square feet would allow you a third unit and anywhere from there up to 3000 would allow you a third unit. And if you hit that 3000 mark, then you can have a fourth unit. And so that's the, that's the, the upper end of the, the kind of the basic framework that my bill creates. I'll get, there's an advanced framework, but I'll get to that. It's like the basic framework is, you know, if you got 3000 square feet, you can have four units. And, and I think it's really also important to recognize, again, we already allow multifamily usage and we already allow multifamily conversion from single family in some places, right now in Baltimore City, in one neighborhood, in one structure you can have a 2000 square foot place and have two units in it. Yes. And in another neighborhood in a different structure, you can have a structure that is twice the size and not be allowed even two units. So the other aspect of this bill is also recognizing that there are other common barriers to creating housing. And and the most notable, I would say of them is parking minimums. And we're seeing parking minimums, they're just dropping like flies. They are all across the country. I think I saw two jurisdictions in the country that got rid of'em literally this week. Like, oh, is that okay? Yeah. There are just, there is no arguable defense for parking minimums at this point. Yeah. Very arbitrary, even from the most developer oriented, market driven perspective. Nobody's gonna invest in, in creating housing that they won't be able to fill with tenants. Right. Or that they won't be able to sell to the own the prospective owners that they are building on spec for. And, and if the investing partners or whomever the underwriting financers think that you can't meet the market demand without a parking space, then you are going to build a parking space. Right? But if you can meet market demand without the addition of a parking space, then we shouldn't be forcing you to create a parking space. Especially when, particularly when we're talking about larger multi-family structures, an off street parking space costs 30 or$35,000 to build, like, that's getting rolled into somebody's rent. That's getting rolled into somebody's overall cost of living, whether or not they own a car. And that's half the population in Baltimore City. Mm-hmm.<affirmative>. And if we want to create opportunity for people, you know, again, to use this point of two adult households, to even just be one household. I'm, look, I I, I don't want anybody to drive, I want us to get rid of automobiles. Cause I think that they destroy cities, right? But, but like, just going from two cars to one car is a huge, huge economic benefit. And we can create neighborhoods that support that and we can better create neighborhoods that support that if we aren't forcing a parking space onto every dwelling unit that needs to be created or forcing people to go through hurdles like going before the zoning board to appeal for a, a, a, uh, not a variance to to do that
Speaker 1:For that. But
Speaker 3:So, so I've got this framework that's a basic, you know, square footage kind of formula for how many units you can have. Um, the second part is a takeaway of the parking minimums that are associated with residential use. And the third part is because this really is for me about affirmatively furthering fair housing and creating more opportunity for people to move to areas of greater opportunity. I wanna incentivize that. I wanna encourage greater density close to transit, close to main street walkable districts, and importantly close to high quality grocery stores. So what my bill says is that if the property is within 750 feet of a high quality transit line, a main street district or grocery store of 10,000 square feet or more, that whatever that underlying square footage formula allows you in terms of number of units, we're also gonna allow you a bonus unit even up to a fifth unit. Beyond that basic definition of low density multifamily being two to four units. You could even have a fifth unit if you meet that, if you meet that criteria.
Speaker 1:Lisa, that probably has a couple questions.
Speaker 2:Well, since you mentioned investors, let's, let's take that because one of the criticisms of this approach, not yours specifically, but in general, is that making this type of change is just going to speed up gentrification of neighborhoods or that it's gonna open up the floodgates for institutional investors to come in, compete with either existing occupants of these neighborhoods or with first time home buyers. And, and it really isn't going to level the playing field in terms of housing. Do you have any concerns about that at all when it comes to this proposal?
Speaker 3:I think my greater concern is how much worse will things get if we continue prohibiting housing creation? Are we better off by maintaining rules that assure scarcity of housing? When we talk about gentrification, really implicit in the conversations about gentrification, what we really mean is displacement. You know, people don't want to be displaced from their communities by rising costs. There is no way that rising costs come anywhere close to being under control by housing, maintaining its current level of scarcity, I should say. And so, and we have been under producing housing in this country and in this state for many, many years. The other piece of, uh, reading that I would mention is a recent report from the organization up for growth that is a month, a years long study of metropolitan areas all across the country that shows that almost entirely, I think all but two metropolitan areas in the whole country, not only have been under producing housing for years to meet current and anticipated future demands, but that the rate of under production has worsened in recent years. And so I just, I just have to believe that people are worse off if we continue to prohibit housing from being created.
Speaker 2:Well, I fully agree with that, but you know, even, even if people understand that part change is still really hard, even if you understand the greater goal change is still really hard. You know, Gainesville, Florida just voted to make a similar change to their zoning regulations. Two weeks ago it only passed by a four re vote and already you have incoming city councilman vowing to overturn this once, once the new council takes office in January. How do you see
Speaker 3:Any, there's nothing that's more politicized, right? There's almost nothing that's more politicized than the idea of change of where people live, right?<laugh>, there's a woman named Julie Day who has worked for the city of Baltimore for a long time, and I'm pretty sure this was a Judaism. She said, there's only two things people hate change and the way things are<laugh>. And, um, but the, but in truth, I think that we, what we find, look, we already know that none of the race based opposition to integrated housing that was put forth in the early 20th century was true, right? Proximity to black people have never caused property values to go down. That is just like racism fabricated out of whole cloth. And it's no truer today that multifamily housing is detrimental to property values or overall quality of life, literally anywhere. It's just discriminatory ideology that keeps people putting forth this idea. And part and parcel is the idea of blowing the potential and the likelihood of change way out of proportion, even beyond the fact that it's a lie in the first place. And so I, you know, I think of it this way, what is like, say the anticipated scale in Baltimore City of Change if we were to enact my law, right? My bill, I've already mentioned that we allow single family to multi-family conversion in the city in certain zoning districts, right? And that's our seven and R eight properties that are at least 1500 square feet. There are 15,000 of these properties in the city, not just R seven and R eight, but R seven and R eight that are at least 1500 square feet eligible for conversion, 15,000 properties. Now, the city of Baltimore also makes it arduous to do the conversion. It requires you to get an ordinance passed, which typically means you've gotta spend a year and thousands of dollars on a land use attorney to make it happen at all. And I would say that because of the, because of that, as much as the limited number of properties, if not more than the num, the limited number of properties, it happens very rarely in the last decade, out of 15,000 eligible properties, only 80 have gone through this process. Wow. 80 out of 15,000. Wow. And, um, and, and so what my bill would do is make it so that you don't have to get an ordinance anymore. So we're stripping away that barrier, making it a buy right property use, um, and expanding the number of properties from roughly 15,000 to roughly 45,000. So we're tripling the number and we're stripping away this barrier. So let's just do some math, right. And make some blind speculation. If we're tripling the number of eligible properties, then let's just assume we go from 80 in a decade or eight in one year to 240 in a decade, or 24 in a year. And let's just say that by taking away that barrier of the ordinance, we increase the rate of conversion, let's say tenfold. I would do wanna say 20, let's say tenfold,
Speaker 1:No second<laugh>
Speaker 3:One, 240 conversions in a year. In a city of 250,000 households, that's a 10th of a percent. Mm-hmm.<affirmative>, that's the likelihood that any one property on any one block in in the city will have a conversion. There is just no basis in reality behind the fear mongering and scare that is brought up by the idea that neighborhood character will be changed. There's just no reality in which that happens.
Speaker 1:That's a little bit of a segue to another question about how this, this approach can be transferred to other parts of the state of Maryland. Do you have any sense of that? And, and it may be an unfair question, but I'm gonna ask it anyway,<laugh>.
Speaker 3:Yeah. You know, I think, look it, it's not right in Baltimore and it's not right anywhere else. Yeah. Then it's, it's Baltimore is, is not unique, right? The, the research shows us that 75% of all residential zoned land across the entire country is segregated into this one, use single family housing. It's not right anywhere. And it's not doing any city or any metropolitan area any good. Everybody is under producing housing and everybody is facing the same constraint on the capacity to produce more housing. We need more housing everywhere, and we need to strip away these arbitrary barriers rooted in discrimination everywhere. And Vaughn Stewart put filler forth a bill very similar to mine a couple of years ago, I think in 2019. He put forth a bill that made for BuyRight uses for, I think up to three dwellings on any property, and also created these same kind of bonus concepts rooted in proximity to other factors like transit and groceries and things like that.
Speaker 1:I, I remember that. I remember that. That's all the time we have. We really do. To appreciate your time. Councilman Dorsey,
Speaker 3:Thanks so much for
Speaker 1:Having me. To our listeners, thank you for the privilege of your time. This is Get Real Estate, the Maryland Realtors podcast. I'm Chuck Caskey, Maryland Realtors ceo. Thanks as always. To our esteemed producer, Joshua Woodson, please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Like us, share us, give us five stars if we've earned them and give us feedback, most importantly, including guests you'd like us to invite or topics to explore, be kind, stay safe, and before expressing your next opinion, please remember what Edgar Allen PO said,
Speaker 4:The
Speaker 1:True genius shutters at incompleteness and usually prefers silence to saying something that is not everything it should be.