Ignite Annapolis! (2025)

I hope you enjoyed my 2025 Ignite Annapolis talk “Need or Greed” about the competing priorities in the housing market as to whether housing is considered a fundamental human need (so we want costs to go down) or as an investment product (so we want values to go up). Unfortunately, you can’t really have it both ways. This is the current housing crisis we find ourselves in. Most of this is driven by national housing and finance policy which individuals and local governments have very little control over. However, there are some actions municipal governments like Annapolis can take that can have an effect on housing supply and cost. This was the main thrust of my talk. It was essentially a “Phase 2” of my 2019 Ignite talk which was a really brief – but cheeky – overview of how choices we make in our zoning code and regulations often have unintended results that we really don’t appreciate until much later. Here’s the talk in the Ignite format (5 minutes, 20 visuals at 15 seconds each):

Watch the entire Ignite Annapolis program here.

As I mentioned at the beginning of the talk, this topic is a very, very nuanced issue. It is complex with many competing forces contributing to the crisis. Ultimately, there is no single, simple answer to solve it. Despite what any politician, housing advocate or other special interest says, there is no “5 point plan” that governments (at any level) can dogmatically follow to fix it. Every place is different and is affected by different forces, but they all have the similar result that housing is hard to build and expensive. For example the forces that make housing difficult or expensive to build in a city in rural Kansas and a city like Annapolis are very different, so no set plan will have the same effect. However, there are aspects – such as zoning policy and national finance – that do rhyme everywhere and I’ve attempted to highlight them and their effect in this talk. Of course how a municipality chooses to change zoning policy might take a very different form depending on the local context.

For the rest of this article, I will highlight in some additional detail the suggestions I make and how Annapolis can implement them and what the likely outcomes are.

Caveats

First, I have a few caveats to explicitly state here:

  1. Everything I discuss here is my personal opinion. While I do link to others’ personal and professional work, I do not represent them in any way and while I am a member of the Annapolis Planning Commission, I do not speak for the commission or any of the other members.
  2. In no way am I making value judgements on what is good or bad housing from a personal choice standpoint. The arguments I make here are essentially just cause and effect. I know many people do not like any housing development that is not single family or find any change to single family zoning undesirable. If that is your personal choice, fine. Just remember that there are effects of that choice that may conflict with other personal goals. That is the idea of this talk to provoke deeper thought on these subjects.
  3. I am no smarter than anyone else opining on this subject and I recognize that fact explicitly, so it’s important to say that implementing anything I discuss at a large scale without smaller and incremental steps is a crap shoot; it may work, it may not. We have to start small, see what the results are and if they meet our goals, do more of it; if not do something else. This only works if the failures are small. This is a major take-away from both of my Ignite talks: places (cities, towns etc) are complex, chaotic (in the physical sciences sense) and adaptive systems that often respond in unintended ways. So we must work incrementally, get feedback on those efforts and make adjustments as we go.
  4. I think it’s important to define “affordable” for this discussion. The word has both strict and loose definitions. The strict definition – I’ll call this affordable with an “upper case A” – is typically something that a family making 80-100% of the Area Median Income (AMI) could afford. For reference the AMI for this area is approximately 100 $k/yr, meaning house prices in the 250-400 $k range. They exist but there are not many. For rental housing to be available in this range, it is almost certainly subsidized with things like low income tax credits (LITC) or federal housing subsidies (Section 8 vouchers), both part of the “national housing machine”. The loose definition – I’ll call this affordable with a “lower case a” – is something that is not “top dollar”, ie at the lower end of market rate. For this area, that might be a house in the 400-500 $k range, as opposed to “luxury” housing (as in my examples in the talk) at 900+ $k and a similar ratio for rental properties. So when people insist that duplexes are not “affordable” I think they are using that word in the strict sense which is true, but in the loose sense, duplexes are less money than a single family house when you factor in rental income from the second unit, thus more “affordable” than luxury housing. These distinctions are important because the validity of an affordability argument very much depends on how the term is used.
  5. I used ChatGPT-5 to create most of the cartoon visuals. It was amusing that there was a talk on ChatGPT in the college context and used similarly generated cartoons and unsurprisingly, they look like the same artist did them, because of course even AI generated images by the same model have the same style!

OK, with that out of the way, here is additional information about the topics!

Incrementalism

Incrementalism is really a thought process as described above. A way to take small chances and learn by failure or success. It can be used in many different contexts, not just planning, development and architecture but also things like software development! Incrementalism does not mean doing things slowly: incremental development can be rapid and up to the task of reacting to pressing needs and dramatic societal changes. Incrementalism looks like experimenting, rapid prototyping, iteratively improving, and reducing the risks of bad decisions. To better understand this, see the Strong Towns primer on incrementalism.

So often in the context of planning exercises in Annapolis, I hear the phrase “we have to get it right”. Given the complexity of cities, competing priorities and our lessons from hindsight, it is very risky to believe anyone can learn or study enough to know all the right answers before doing anything and that if they are followed we can predetermine outcomes perfectly. It’s just not possible. It’s fine to set a long term vision as we do in our comprehensive plans, but we should take incremental steps to get there. As I mentioned in the talk, smaller steps are not only more palatable for people who are resistant to change, which is coming whether we like it or not, but it’s also a more resilient strategy. If we make missteps, which we inevitably will, we can correct them to minimize their effect. If we make big expensive and expansive changes, the risk is much larger and the mistakes much harder to correct. For example policies like urban renewal had wide ranging effects on cities because they were done at such large increments. No one wants to go through that again!

The goal is not to disrupt neighborhoods or freeze them in amber, but allow them to evolve and aims to provide all families the dream of home ownership, not just people who already own homes, who already have lots of money, or a select few who hit the lottery and get some sort of subsidized housing. Going from single family houses to duplexes or triplexes that exist all over the city, is known as incremental development and that is done very much at the local level.

Policy suggestions like allowing duplexes and triplexes by right are such a step. As we know – and @missingmiddleannapolis on Instagram demonstrates – there are many, many of these in the city and often you can’t even tell they are multi dwelling units. Many of them are not legal because they existed before our current zoning code. Each example shown there – many of these are cherished places in the city – has a description of where it is, the underlying zoning and whether it is legal or not. It’s really informative to see these examples to understand how well they fit into Annapolis and should not be feared. I highly recommend checking these examples out to understand where the are and whether they could be built today.

I find it interesting that people view these in the same light as the 5 over 1s that are being developed along Riva Road in Parole (decidedly NOT incremental growth). Those are being developed as Wall Street investment products without much consideration for the local context. They are very different animals.

“Beacon Square” across from Parole Town Center on Riva Road. Rents are top dollar and considered “Luxury” and since commercial rents are also high, result in exclusively chain stores (yet another example of a Wall Street investment product).

Duplexes are most often built and owned by people who live in them, not large property managers. This is a very traditional pathway for wealth building. Having rental income allows you to afford a home that you might not be able to afford without the rental income. Of course not everyone wants to be a landlord, which brings me to the argument against duplexes that is often cited (and was prolific in the recent testimony on the current Duplex Bill in front of the City Council). While we technically have many lots that could be duplexes in the city, many (most?) people don’t want to be landlords, so it is unlikely that there would be a mass selloff and construction of duplexes. That’s just not going to happen. But if someone wants to do this because they are willing to make that trade of personal time for money, they can. That’s the point: to have the option of doing this if that is what it takes for them to be able to afford it.

Will “investors” buy all the available houses, tear them down and build duplexes for short term rentals? Not likely, at least any more likely that they are to do the same for single family houses. Furthermore, with reasonable regulation such as an owner occupancy rule for duplexes or assessing as commercial properties in order to short term rent (STR) them, the incentive for investors to buy or build them to short term rent is greatly reduced. I wrote about this STR issue in a 2021 article titled Housing, Not Lodging.

Local efforts at incremental development don’t replace the national game, that market will continue to function on it’s own even if it is perverse. These efforts will work alongside in a parallel game that can work for more people and it builds on a fabric of a neighborhood that already exists, iterating on what’s there already. This is the case in most neighborhoods in Annapolis.

Read more on Incremental Growth in the Power of Growing Incrementally series.

National Housing Finance

This topic is the “set up” for my Ignite talk. It is a complex topic but as I indicated, the end result is that housing is treated as an investment product. That’s all you really need to know. That said, there is a long history behind the reasons for it and much of it is driven by US federal policy dating back to the Great Depression. It’s a fascinating topic and brings into view the background and history for why we have things like 30 year mortgages. The Strong Towns book Escaping the Housing Trap is a great read that goes into significant detail on this history. If you have any interest in understanding the financial incentives in the national housing market and why housing is really considered an investment product, this is a comprehensive look at that.

Zoning and Other Economic Incentives

Another major thrust in the talk is around the incentives of a zoning code biased towards large lots and homes that are typical of a suburban development pattern, what our original zoning code was modeled after and continues to be in large part today, despite the fact that we are a “city” not a “suburb”. I mean this in terms of the original city development pattern, not the fact that we are considered by some to be a suburb or Washington or Baltimore (ie people commute there to work).

Let’s face it, Annapolis is a desirable place. People want to live here so there will pressure for more housing and will keep prices high because our available land is limited given we have almost no ability to expand horizontally. As a result, land is the key commodity in housing development and when lots are very expensive and have large minimum lot sizes, houses must be maximized in their size in order to command prices that are commensurate with the combination of the land and construction costs. This is why there are essentially no new modest sized (often called “starter homes”) – let’s define this as less than 1000 square feet – ever built here. What is interesting is there are many, many, many of these style houses in under valued parts of the city. But because they were built in a time when land was cheap, they sit on large lots. When they are sold (say an elderly resident dies or moves away), these are virtually always scraped and “biggered” with 4000-5000 square foot houses. The question is why? Some people have money and do want large houses, no doubt about that so there is always that demand. But if someone wanted to build a bunch of smaller houses and make the same amount of money, could they? Short answer is no because our code would not allow that tradeoff.

Andrew Burleson who writes on the future of cities, especially land use and transportation has some very concrete examples why this happens. The main drivers of cost are:

  1. Unit Count
  2. Minimum Lot Size
  3. Minimum Lot Width
  4. Setbacks and Maximum Lot Coverage
  5. Parking Requirements

In this article, he walks through a scenario in Denver – a city with many of the same pressures as Annapolis albeit larger – and demonstrates how these requirements drive the end result to the high end.

Click to read the article.

Another example of how lot size/house size influence cost I used in the talk compares the typical sized home of 3000-5000 square feet that are at Parkside Preserve off Forest Dr with a development of starter homes that was built in Fayetteville, Arkansas by a firm called Flintlock Lab.

Starter homes in Fayetteville, Arkansas
The layout for a group of starter homes.

These houses sit on lots as small as 1,500 square feet — a fraction of the lot minimum allowed under the previous zoning — and range in size from 500 square feet to 2,200 square feet. Two of them met federal affordability (with a capital A) standards without subsidy. This affordability is directly achieved by their small size and small lot — the price per square foot is high for the neighborhood and has caused many older neighboring homes to appreciate in value in response. Critically, these homes can be purchased outright with typical, federally backed 30-year mortgages because they’re on conforming, fee-simple platted lots.

Read the full details on how they accomplished this.

We have recent developments like this in the city such as Sailors Quay in Eastport. Note the design and layout is very similar so there shouldn’t be any objection about this not “fitting in”.

Sailors Quay on Bay Ridge Avenue in Eastport. Looks very similar to the smaller versions in Fayetteville.

The main difference is lot size and resulting house size. At Sailors Quay, the houses are 3000+ square feet which is needed on the larger minimum lot size, so naturally they are going to be more expensive.

If we would allow small lot sizes, houses couldn’t be scraped and “biggered” because the small lot size prevents anything larger from being built. This helps keep the cost down in perpetuity because those with more money looking for something larger will pass this over because it doesn’t meet their needs and can’t practically be changed to fit those needs. This is one of the goals of allowing much smaller minimum lot sizes in the Tyler Avenue overlay district.

And speaking of the Tyler Heights area, I’d say 75% of the houses are about 1000 square feet and are among the most affordable in the city. When they were built – 1950 to 1980 – the cost of land was low so it made sense to build these even on large lots. The only way it would be viable today is to allow smaller lot sizes. I know people want to have larger lots, but since land is so expensive, you can’t have it both ways. Either it’s lower cost with smaller lots/houses, or it’s larger lots/houses at much higher cost, that’s just the market reality in a place where people want to be. Furthermore, leaving things like they are (ie fighting any changes) might keep things the same for a while, but ultimately the pressure will build and eventually cause large displacement when change eventually happens. This is happening many Annapolis neighborhoods, one by one. This is one of the conclusions of this and the 2019 talk, we have to allow things to change incrementally or counter intuitively if we try and keep things from changing, we get massive change all at once, which no one likes. This rings very, very true in a short adage:

“No neighborhood should experience radical change and at the same time no neighborhood should be exempt from change.“

The graphic I used in the end of the talk is a great example of this. Incremental Intensification is what we see historically in Annapolis, and Sudden Intensification is what we see in Parole which people rant about all the time.

Furthermore, the results of the current Annapolis zoning code and economic incentives, scraping of smaller houses and construction of large (multi) million dollar houses, are what we see everywhere in Eastport, Murray Hill, West Annapolis, and is starting in Germantown/Homewood. This is soon to be seen in relatively undervalued neighborhoods in other parts of the city where there are many older small houses on very large lots. This “biggering” causes fast increases in area property values and as large new homes are built elevating surrounding land values faster than long time residents can afford, results in displacement with the only option to cash out and leave. That is not good for anyone. I believe changes to the city code mentioned here, as well as many others (but not all) in the recent Comprehensive Plan are necessary to provide a range of housing choices at wider income levels. That IS good for everyone.

Slide Visuals From The Talk

Ignite 6 – Pline – finalDownload

Related Articles I’ve Written

Leave a comment