An April 2025 press conference for the Baltimore Vacants Reinvestment Initiative. Speakers included Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott, Druid Heights Community Development Corporation Leader JohnDre Jennings, Department of Housing and Community Development Secretary Jake Day, and Maryland Comptroller Brooke Lierman. Image by Comptroller of Maryland Brooke Lierman licensed under Creative Commons.

Housing “abundance” is headed to Baltimore. The city is pushing five potentially transformative bills aimed at lowering the cost of housing development — and thereby lowering the cost of homeownership and renting — by removing regulatory barriers to construction, such as zoning restrictions, parking minimums, and cumbersome building codes.

Full passage appears to still be in the cards (four of the five bills have already been signed). This is encouraging. But if city leaders want to convince residents (some of whom are pushing back) that these programs are worthwhile, they shouldn’t be afraid to directly confront the challenges that will set Baltimore’s experience apart from other cities where housing abundance has succeeded.

The abundance movement took hold in cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York — all expensive cities with strikingly different developmental patterns than Baltimore. The traditional housing abundance playbook can and should be adapted to Baltimore in ways that speak to the city’s specific needs.

Baltimore’s over-abundance

Studies covering Houston, Minneapolis, and Tysons show a clear relationship between increased housing supply — promoted through flexible land use policies — and lower costs. In a city like Baltimore, where most renters struggle to afford their homes, policies with such a strong track record for affordability cannot be ignored.

But unlike other cities, Baltimore already has an over-abundance of housing in the form of thousands of vacant homes strewn throughout the city, the city’s pro-abundance rhetoric notwithstanding. That’s why Baltimore’s housing prices remain so affordable relative to its high-priced neighbors: There is already far more supply than demand.

In fact, it was for this exact reason that, in 1999, Baltimore eliminated the type of housing conversions that current legislation seeks to reinstate (e.g., the ability to convert single-family dwellings to duplexes or triplexes). As the City Council explained at the time, where “no demand for additional dwellings exists …the creation of additional dwellings in one neighborhood will create vacancies in other neighborhoods.”

But these concerns were, and still are, misplaced. What has stifled efforts to address the city’s vacancies isn’t an overabundance of housing, but is, instead, the lack of economically viable uses for those vacancies. Simply put, the math doesn’t math for many of Baltimore’s vacant homes (many of which are zoned as single family), as it would cost more to rehabilitate these buildings than they would garner from a sale.

The solution, then, is to find new uses for these homes in precisely the way that the city’s abundance agenda seeks to do. Homes that can be converted to multifamily use are worth more, and attract more buyers, than those with single-family restrictions.

The city’s abundance legislation, specifically the still-pending Bill 25-066, addresses this financial challenge by eliminating single-family zoning restrictions in many of the areas hardest hit by vacancies. With the enactment of this legislation, homeowners and developers will be able to utilize — and potentially monetize — these vacant buildings in ways currently impossible.

Instead of parroting the traditional abundance refrain, which emphasizes the way new housing supply can drive down housing costs, city leaders must make clear that eliminating zoning restrictions can also potentially increase real estate values in Baltimore’s most blighted neighborhoods.

Restrictive convenants impose limits

Another gap between the usual abundance rhetoric and Baltimore’s economic realities is in Mayor Brandon Scott’s claims that housing abundance policies would promote greater diversity in its wealthiest neighborhoods. As critics rightly note, unlike places where such policies have achieved these aims, many of Baltimore’s wealthiest enclaves will remain untouched by the proposed legislation.

Neighborhoods like Roland Park, Guilford, and Homeland are each governed by private local agreements known as restrictive covenants that expressly prohibit the type of multifamily housing arrangements envisioned by the city. As a legal matter, these private restrictions are untouchable through local zoning laws and, as such, those neighborhoods will remain just as exclusive if the legislation is enacted as they are today.

Curiously, none of the reports prepared by the city in support of its legislation speak directly to this concern. This is a missed opportunity. Restrictive covenants, which follow a property in perpetuity irrespective of the owner, don’t simply stifle neighborhood diversity. They undermine democratically-enacted land-use policies and restrict how owners can utilize their property for generations.

While the city’s formal powers may be limited, a strong denunciation of restrictive covenants would help shed light on the ways these deed restrictions impede both housing abundance and racial justice efforts.

Such a push would also serve to put the *state *on notice that there is additional work to be done here. The Maryland legislature, which has stronger legal authority to regulate these covenants than the city, already illustrated its willingness to do so earlier this year with the passage of th HB 1466. That law authorized the development of secondary housing units on the same parcel of land as a single-family home and, in doing so, expressly prohibited “unreasonable restrictions” on the development of such units by restrictive covenants. A push from the city against restrictive covenants — even if purely symbolic — could therefore compel state officials to further regulate these agreements in the future.

An expanded abundance vision

These are just two examples of how Baltimore’s development experience is distinct from many of the earliest YIMBY cities. But they are far from the only ones. From Baltimore’s frustrating permitting backlog to its many recent high-profile proposed developments that have failed to materialize (e.g., Poppleton, Chasen apartments, and Baltimore Peninsula), it is perhaps unsurprising that some residents have expressed skepticism about the proposed legislation.

If the city is going to succeed in both passing this legislation and convincing the public of its merits, policymakers will have to find points of departure from the traditional abundance playbook and speak to Baltimore’s specific development challenges directly. In so doing, Baltimore may serve as a model for a different kind of abundance: one that expands the YIMBY movement beyond the high-cost locales where it first took hold, to a broader swath of American cities in need of quality, affordable housing.