Three zoning bills with far-reaching implications for Baltimore – considered by some as transformative and by others as destructive – drew a standing-room-only crowd at Baltimore’s Planning Commission meeting last week.

One bill eliminates the requirement for apartment developers to provide off-street parking.

Another allows property owners to build closer to their rear and side property lines and ups the amount of land that structures can occupy on a parcel.

The third measure gets rid of the requirement that new residential buildings taller than three stories have two internal staircases and a passageway connecting them.

All are part of a legislative package recently announced by Mayor Brandon Scott and Council President Zeke Cohen that appears to have significant support in the Council.

The current two-staircase requirement is outdated and excessively costly for builders, declared Councilman Ryan Dorsey, noting that such a restriction doesn’t exist in Europe and has been dropped in U.S. cities like New York and Seattle.

“If you want a really good 12-minute overview on what this bill and the policy is all about, you can Google ‘why North America can’t build nice apartments because of one rule,’” Dorsey enthused last Thursday, at one point illustrating his argument with a shot of a grim hotel hallway from the horror movie “The Shining.”

Dorsey and others in Baltimore and beyond are passionate about ending the two-staircase rule, which they say results in generic large, bulky apartment buildings with no cross ventilation.

Permitting single-stair construction, they argue, could spur more attractive and much-needed small-lot affordable housing, increase population density and lure new people to the city.

“I’m a software developer, so I don’t usually brag. But I’m kind of, like, the income you want to probably see more of in Baltimore City,” said Chris Guinnup, who wore a tee shirt for the YIMBY advocacy group BaltPOP (Baltimoreans for People-Oriented Places).

Guinnup said he favored apartment buildings like those in Seattle and New York designed with a single staircase that were presented in a slide show by the Planning Department.

“Our lack of buildings like this really makes [Baltimore] a much more unpleasant city than cities that allow them,” Guinnup, a Hampden resident, observed.

Also supporting the single-staircase bill was a representative of the Maryland Building Industry Association and developer Christopher Mfume.

Permission by the city fire marshal to put upscale apartment units in a single-stair historic building on Howard Street, Mfume said, was a major reason for the project’s success.

“When you look at having to add in a second stairwell, it makes a ton of buildings economically infeasible,” he asserted.

How Safe is It?

With only one way to descend from and exit a multistory building under this configuration, what about the issue of safety?

The Baltimore Fire Department has taken no position on the bill, and there was no representative present at the hearing. Likewise, no reports are on file yet for this bill (or the others in the administration’s package) from Housing, Finance, Law and other departments.

Dorsey said Bill 25-0062 ensures safety by mandating extra protective features, including sprinkler systems throughout the building and a fully pressurized single stairway enclosed by two-hour, fire-rated walls.

He pointed to a study that found “only four fire-related deaths in 12 years” in Seattle and New York, “none of which were in any way related to the fact that there was only a single point of egress.”

His remarks didn’t reassure Carson Ward, of the Reservoir Hill Association, who informed the commission that the single-stair idea is strongly opposed by the International Association of Fire Chiefs (IAFC).

“Dual stairwells enhance safety by separating evacuation firefighting paths, reducing counter-flow risk and allowing for staged attack strategies,” Ward said. “Single exits significantly jeopardize the safety of both responders and occupants.”

“Fire service leaders should vehemently oppose legislative attempts to amend out the second-stairway requirement” – International Association of Fire Chiefs.

The IAFC website urges fire service leaders to “vehemently oppose legislative attempts to amend out the second-stairway requirement.”

Ward predicted that housing, fire and other agencies would fail to enforce rules needed to ensure the changes wouldn’t harm neighborhoods and endanger the public.

“The city cannot even keep up with the pace of the current code enforcement demands,” she declared.

Also opposing the single-staircase bill was Betty Bland-Thomas, president of Historic Sharp Leadenhall, which represents one of the city’s oldest Black neighborhoods.

“There’s been no community engagement. How do you expect us to agree to something we know nothing about?” she said. “I think what has been shared is pretty much a middle-class, white impression on what’s best for the city.”

“I think what has been shared is pretty much a middle-class, white impression on what’s best for the city”  – Betty Bland-Thomas of Historic Sharp Leadenhall.

“I’ve not been fortunate to have been in Chicago or in Europe,” she added drily. “I have lived most of my life in the inner city.”

Speaking with The Brew after the hearing, Bland-Thomas complained that her community had not been informed of the staircase measure and the other bills by the planning department, their councilman Zac Blanchard, or the mayor’s office.

“They used to tell us about things like this. But now they just go ahead and do them like our opinion doesn’t matter,” the longtime community leader observed.

Rezoning Single-Family Districts

The same sentiment – but louder and angrier – was expressed by former Councilman Jody Landers.

The Lauraville resident said he was “appalled” by what he saw as an attempt to rush complicated legislation through the planning board in August when community associations don’t meet and many residents are on vacation.

“Are you really serious about getting public input? Or is this just lip service?” Landers asked, denouncing the three bills – plus a fourth measure, the Housing Options and Opportunities Act (25-0066), that would permit multifamily housing with two to four units in residential communities that currently allow only single-family living.

“Are you really serious about getting public input? Or is this just lip service?” – Former Councilman Jody Landers.

In letters sent to the City Council, leaders of several neighborhoods, including Upton, Marble Hill and Reservoir Hill, also complained that they were left out of discussion of the staircase bill and others in the package.

“There has not been sufficient notification to all of the households potentially affected by these bills,” wrote Hanlon Park’s Linda Batts.

“There has not been sufficient analysis of the impact of these bills, neighborhood by neighborhood, from an environmental and public safety perspective,” she further noted.

Plea to go Slower

Mayor Scott has described the legislative package as an ambitious effort to “undo the legacy of racist zoning laws.”

By making multi-family housing more abundant and affordable, he said at a May press conference, the zoning changes would not only boost the city’s population, but benefit legacy residents who carry segregation’s “deep inter-generational trauma.”

Keondra Prier, of the Reservoir Hill Association, disputed the mayor’s rationale.

Framing the bills as a way to correct exclusionary zoning practices, Prier wrote in an opposition letter, “is a misnomer that serves speculative interests for known bad actors, namely developers, who have profit as their only motive.”

Landers complained that the commission gave the public less than two weeks’ notice of the hearing and said a promised informational briefing session on one of the bills was never held.

“There have been no public briefings on any of the bills that were heard today,” he said, calling for the body to defer action in order to give residents more time to learn about their impact on their neighborhoods.

Bland-Thomas rose a second time to make this point during discussion of the bill to reduce setback distances in city zoning districts.

“You are eliminating the community process of hearing these bills prior to it getting to this audience so that we can understand and deliver our concerns,” she said, expressing concern about the measure’s potential to reduce green space and increase paved surfaces and runoff.

“Inner Harbor storm drains come right into my community and when there is a heavy rain and high tide, we flood,” she said, noting the proximity of big parking lots at M&T Bank Stadium and Top Golf. “We do not have enough green space.”

Remington’s Joan Floyd said she found the zoning tables accompanying the bill “very difficult to make out.”

“People shouldn’t have to work that hard to understand what’s being proposed,” she said.

Second Hearing Scheduled

When it came time for commission members to opine on the single-staircase bill, Vice Chair Eric Stephenson was enthusiastic, observing that he would feel “much more comfortable living in a fully sprinklered building with a single pressurized stair as opposed to some other arrangements available under the current code.”

The mayor’s representative on the panel, Deputy Mayor Justin Williams, dismissed the International Building Code, which established the national two-staircase rule, as “coming from a process that is not fully scientific.”

He said some of the single-stair criticism was coming from “lobbying by the providers for fire equipment.”

But Chair Jon Laria clearly had some reservations.

“I would like to get some input from someone from the local American Institute of Architects,” Laria began. “I also think we should hear, I’d like to hear directly, from the fire department.”

“I’d like to hear directly from the fire department”  – Commission Chair Jon Laria.

Noting that he has disagreed with the fire department on code issues in the past, he said “I still think it would be useful for us to just hear what they have to say.”

Laria also said that Commissioner Doug McCoach made a valid point that, with residents evacuating a building and first responders entering it through the same doorway, “there could be potentially a real conflict.”

Addressing BaltPOP Co-president Michael Scepaniak, Laria asked, “Just for my edification, what is your organization specifically, and what does it do?”

“We are an organization that is focused on the intersection of land use and transportation,” the Cockeysville resident said. “We’ve been around for about three years, and we are composed of residents of both Baltimore City and the surrounding counties.”

The bills will undergo additional discussion and public comment at the commission’s next meeting on August 28.

“I thought we were doing a good thing by having two hearings like this,” Laria told the crowded room. “I’m surprised that people think this is somehow rushing it. I think actually we’re being very deliberate.”