The Baltimore County Council convened a public meeting on December 24, 2025, beginning with a presentation from the Department of Housing and Community Development on the county's first-ever housing needs assessment, followed by a regular legislative session. The council heard public comments, debated multiple bills, and voted on fiscal matters.
Do I need to repeat all that? You gotta make me do that, right? The council is h okay, I will do it. Council is holding this public meeting to give the county's Department of Housing and Community Development an opportunity to provide the council and the public information related to housing needs in Baltimore County. We are joined today by housing and community development director Terry Hickey. Mr. Hickey, we are pleased to have you and your staff before us today and hear your presentation. The floor is yours. Thank you, sir. We're gonna give you I know you can see it myself. We're gonna give you paper copies that uh in an effort to save county funds. We ran off at black and white. So when we talk about colors on the slides, you'll want to look at the screens. But that'll give you a chance to play along cliff. Tom printed in color. So I do want to let you know, we save several dollars of coffee. Except some of the graphics we won't be able to understand. Right. We're off to a good start. Um and I do just want to acknowledge Joel Beller uh is here with us, our deputy policy chief, uh, who's gonna keep us moving forward, and Rex McGrother, who is our data analyst, who when you start asking really deep, weedy statistical questions, we're gonna defer to him. So we'll start with the beginning. Um again, just want to thank you for having us here. This long time coming, actually exciting discussions. The county's first ever official housing needs assessment. You know that the topic of housing is a growing public concern around the country. It's something we talk about in this room and in county government often, but too frequently in these conversations, we've relied upon national or regional studies or anecdotes, and we thought that for a problem of this scope and magnitude, we want to have a chance to look closely at our own numbers. We want to be able to talk and lead with facts, and really what we hope to do here is to put the numbers out front, let that drive a public conversation. We really thank you, giving us the opportunity to do it here. Hopefully, folks are um listening in. We want to make this data public and hopefully generate positive collaborative discussions about housing and the need in the county. So a little bit of framing. Um, what is the housing needs assessment? If you have the whole version, it's a little over a hundred different slides, so it's fairly weighty. When we do release this on the county website, we'll have a short executive summary to go along with it. And obviously, don't get too worried. What we're gonna show you tonight is a hyper-condensed version. We won't go through all a hundred slides, I promise. It's an analysis of the county's current population and housing stock. It's a projection of how the county's population will likely change over the next 10 to 15 years. It's an assessment of the current housing stock's ability to meet the needs of current residents, and it's an overview of potential changes that may be needed for the county's housing stock to meet the needs of current and future residents. To get this done, we collaborated with Guide House Consulting and prominently the University of Pennsylvania's housing initiative at Penn to conduct the assessment over the last several months. I think you all know this, but just to say for the public, DHCD largely has framed the housing discussion around the VCA, for better or worse, which we know is not a housing strategy. While work remains ongoing to ensure that the terms of the agreement are met, the agency recognizes that a comprehensive collaborative strategy is necessary to guide housing production efforts beyond our March 2028 deadline. We have to have a real plan. We have to have real numbers. I'll bottom line it up front, and then we're gonna hit on some key findings in the report. I'm not gonna shock anybody by telling you that the assessment shows the county faces a housing challenge. There are some things in here though that I think give a lot of context, make these numbers more relatable, uh may even be a little surprising, but we know there's not enough housing to meet current need, nonetheless, future projected needs in the county. And even maybe more interesting when you dig into the numbers is our existing housing stock is not necessarily aligned with the current population and households living in the county and specifically not where we're going. So it's easy to say we have a shortage, but we may also have a misalignment.