Chairing a hearing on the most controversial bill before his Land Use and Transportation Committee, Councilman Ryan Dorsey yesterday announced “we have no intention of voting this bill today” and it soon became clear why:

With four members signaling their opposition, he didn’t have the votes.

It was the culmination of grassroots opposition and community anger, simmering for months but ramping up sharply in recent weeks, against the mayor’s “Housing Options and Opportunities” suite of bills.

Normally circumspect lawmakers who had previously supported Mayor Brandon Scott’s six-bill zoning package – Dorsey’s passion project – were now daring to express doubts about its centerpiece, Bill 25-0066.

Introduced with the others in May with a goal of growing the city and increasing affordable housing by making apartment construction easier, the bill eliminates the single-family zoning requirement in residential districts and allows single-family houses and rowhouses to be replaced with four units “by right,” meaning by the owner without any Zoning Board approval.

“We just need to slow down ’cause at this moment right now with all the discourse [we] in good conscience cannot move forward with the bill,” said Councilman Paris Gray.

Constituents in his West Baltimore district were telling Gray that – with this measure and the already-passed other bills in the Scott-Dorsey package (one of which Gray himself had sponsored) – “they felt like things were rushed.”

“This is a question of process and not policy,” the 8th District councilman said, addressing a standing-room-only crowd composed primarily of opponents.

More directly critiquing the bill was Phylicia Porter, who represents far south and southwest Baltimore.

“There has to be more stakeholder engagement in the vast majority of communities that this will impact,” Porter said. “The conversation of how this impedes Black communities has to be elevated a lot more.”

“There has to be more stakeholder engagement in the vast majority of communities that this will impact”  – Councilwoman Phylicia Porter.

Speaking of homeownership, the 10th District representative called it “the pathway to wealth in Black communities,” adding, “it’s no disrespect to renters. I was a renter.”

Given “the lack of comprehensive code enforcement” by the city, Bill 25-0066 “would put an incredible strain” on city agencies, Porter said, pointing also to the “lack of oversight of substance abuse and recovery homes,” something she noted is currently under discussion by Maryland officials.

“I don’t feel comfortable with making a change . . . until we have respective, definitive guidance, updated guidance from the state level,” she said.

By the end of the three-hour hearing it was evident that Gray and Porter – like the 1st District’s Mark Parker, who has already begun drafting bill amendments – were not ready to vote for the bill as introduced.

Taken together with Council Vice President Sharon Green Middleton, already on record as strongly opposed that meant there were only two supporters on hand yesterday: Dorsey and the 11th District’s Zac Blanchard. (The 9th District’s John Bullock was absent.)

It was a far cry from the scenario some supporters had envisioned – that the bill would be voted out of committee and sent to the full council for its meeting on Thursday.

• SPECIAL BREW SERIES ON ZONING DEREGULATION BILLS

Instead, the hearing adjourned without a vote to bring the measure to the full Council, leaving a cloud of uncertainty around the capstone bill in a package strongly backed by Council President Zeke Cohen as well as Scott.

Dorsey yesterday did not announce next steps – or a new hearing date – for the bill.

Unsuccessful Lobbying

Council members were not the only ones acknowledging the neighborhood outcry against the Housing Options and Opportunities package. Gone was the previously assertive tone of the Scott administration’s quarterback for the bill, Ty’Lor Schnella.

The deputy director of the Mayor’s Office of Government Relations, Schnella had scolded Middleton at the last hearing for her reference to “an oversaturation of renters,” as she tried to explain her 6th District constituents’ objections to the measure.

“We look forward to continuing to hear some of the ways that you-all think that we could make the bill better,” Schnella said yesterday, noting that the administration has “engaged with residents” concerned about 25-0066.

One of those engagements – an invitation-only gathering of community leaders at a city elementary school organized by Faith Outreach Coordinator and Christian Community Liaison Tierra Tuggle of the Mayor’s Office of Community Affairs – did not go down well.

“Mr. Merrill was not conversant with the bill, was unable to respond to questions, was condescending to participants and ended the meeting abruptly,” an attendee said.

Chaired by J.D. Merrill, Scott’s new Chief of Staff, who arrived with Planning Director Timothy Keane and a slick PowerPoint presentation, the meeting at Robert W. Coleman Elementary School ended with attendees still expressing opposition.

“Mr. Merrill was not conversant with the bill, was unable to respond to questions, was condescending to participants and ended the meeting abruptly,” one attendee told The Brew.

In an emailed press release on November 28, the mayor pitched the legislation as “about lowering housing costs and giving homeowners the flexibility to make reasonable, safe upgrades to their property if they choose to.”

He further promised that “most homes will not be affected by the bill.”

Opponents say the mayor’s assertion and others made in the email are inaccurate and should be corrected.

“We demand that you immediately cease and desist instructing Baltimore citizens and homeowners – and in any way encouraging them to believe – that eligibility of properties for multi-family development under the bill is determined by the size of existing residential structures,” Remington resident Joan Floyd and eight other residents wrote to Scott in a letter delivered yesterday.

“As you know, Bill 25-0066 makes eligibility for multi-family development dependent on the size of existing lots,” the letter continued.

Nearly 60,000 lots would be eligible for multi-family development under Scott’s bill, Remington resident Joan Floyd says.

Under the bill,  almost 60,000 lots would be eligible for multi-family development in the rowhouse-rich R-5 through R-8 zoning districts, according to Floyd, who ran the numbers using city data for just those Baltimore zoning districts

“For those lots, there would be a size requirement for the planned multi-family structure,” she wrote in an email to The Brew. “The planned structure could be all-new, an expansion of an existing building, or in some cases an interior remodeling, what is now ‘a conversion’ in the code.”

“Taking their cue from Republicans”

Some of those details could change under bill amendments that have been floating around in recent days, including one proposed by the Planning Commission to study the impact of the legislation in three years’ time.

A more significant amendment would allow only two housing units by right, instead of four as specified in the current bill. Builders would have to get city approval if they wanted to create more.

“I’ll keep working to make this bill as as strong as possible until the point where it’s in its final form and we can discuss – I can decide – whether it’s worth passing or not,” Parker said. “But at the moment my goal is to make it better, so I’m going to keep offering amendments.”

After Dorsey spoke at length, decrying the current zoning (as he has before) as a product of racial segregation “that we should run from,” Parker pushed back on his chairman’s worldview.

“Underneath it all is this idea that all zoning is inherently discriminatory and bad and ought to be peeled back, as rapidly as possible,” he said, undergirded with another presumption – “that the market is somehow free of systemic racism.”

“That somehow the market, if left alone from racist government interference – which government has often done – will somehow result in non-disparate, non-racial, non-discriminatory, non-negative outcomes,” Parker went on, looking directly at Dorsey.

“I don’t believe or trust the market in the way that you seem to do,” he declared, as the hearing room audience loudly applauded.

“I don’t believe or trust the market in the way that you seem to do”  – Councilman Parker to Committee Chair Dorsey.

Parker’s points reflected what many residents said at the beginning of the hearing – during a public testimony period that almost didn’t happen.

People on both sides of the issue who came to City Hall planning to speak were surprised to find a message in red at the top of the sign-up sheet that said, “No Public Testimony at this Session.”

Some were irate about it. “You’re one of the four white men of the apocalypse,” one of the opponents called out to Dorsey before the hearing began.

“Scheduling this the day after we come back from Thanksgiving! And us not being able to speak!” declared Maraizu Onyenaka, president of CHM, which represents the Coldstream, Homestead and Montebello neighborhoods. “We all have jobs. We that took time out from to come here!”

“They know it’s a bad bill,” Onyenaka continued. “They’re taking their cue from Republicans. Just absolutely having no care about any of the rules, just doing whatever they would like to do.”

Dorsey at first held firm, telling The Brew that “we already took public testimony at the previous hearing.” But eventually, he allowed in-person, though not virtual, testimony.

“It’s not rushed. It’s efficiency”

What followed were dozens of speakers, all but three of them denouncing the bill.

Ashburton’s Michael Scott decried the inequity of a measure that would open up neighborhoods like his to multi-family development while leaving untouched the city’s affluent majority-white neighborhoods where single-family covenants are attached to deeds.

“Roland Park, Guilford, Homeland, Cedarcroft and other covenant communities are functionally isolated from the density, conversions, institutional uses and speculative pressure this bill unleashes,” Scott said.

“Their private covenants, architectural boards and enforcement mechanisms give them a protective shield that my neighborhood, and every Black middle-class neighborhood like ours simply do not have.” he continued.

Without some protective measure, Ian Mangum said, the bill will open the door to the kind of speculators who have already illegally carved up properties in his Forest Park neighborhood.

“You think just because you allow people to split houses up into multiple units that they’ll charge reasonable prices?” he asked.

“You think those people are paying, what, $400 a room? They are not. They are paying full price. They will have you living four floors, everyone on one floor with a shared kitchen, everyone paying $1,500 to $2,000,” Mangum continued.

“Doing this will reward the very type of people who this city, the citizens and the government, have said that we can’t stand. They’re the people who have sat and let our city turn to blight because entire neighborhoods have sat empty because non-Baltimorean investors are waiting to gouge every single bit of money out of a neighborhood.”

Speaking in favor of the bill, former Zoning Board Executive Director Rebecca Witt pushed back on the idea that the administration’s bills were pushed through too rapidly.

“It’s not rushed. It’s efficiency,” she said, praising, “a Council that sees a problem, takes steps to fix it and keep it moving. It shouldn’t take a decade to change the law.”

Dele Akinrinade, a local developer, said he sees the bill as a forward-thinking “opportunity for Baltimore to expand.”

The crowd listened to him in silence until he made the observation, “The majority of opposers here are quite elderly.”

The room then erupted into “boos.”

“I’m sorry, I meant no disrespect,” Akinrinade said. “I’m 32 years old.”