Housing Affordability, Rent Stability, and Homeownership
Housing stability forms the bedrock of strong families, successful students, and resilient communities. Across District 4, skyrocketing home prices and escalating rents price out teachers, firefighters, nurses, and service workers from the very neighborhoods they serve. This crisis is personal for me. As a private landlord myself with several properties in different states that I acquired over my twenty-year career in the Army, I know firsthand the operational challenges that small, individual housing providers face. I understand maintenance costs, tax burdens, and the necessity of dependable tenants. At the same time, all five of my adult children are renters who confront devastating affordability barriers every single month. It takes three of my adult children, sharing a single house while all working full-time jobs, just to afford one home in Frederick County. That is unconscionable.
When full-time working adults must combine three incomes under one roof just to secure basic shelter, our housing market is broken. We must address this emergency from the bottom up by expanding inventory, defending tenants, and creating attainable pathways to homeownership. I support a balanced statewide rent stabilization framework that establishes reasonable annual caps to shield working families from predatory price gouging. Geography must not dictate whether a family keeps their home. We must pair rent stabilization with statewide Just Cause eviction protections so landlords cannot arbitrarily displace tenants who pay rent on time and follow lease terms. To maintain healthy investment, our legislation must include common-sense exemptions for new construction and protect small, individual landlords like myself from burdensome red tape. Furthermore, we must outlaw predatory rental fees, eliminate discriminatory breed-based pet bans, and ban algorithmic pricing software that corporate landlords use to collude and artificially inflate regional rents.
To expand homeownership, I will reform our real estate transfer tax structure into progressive, tiered brackets that drastically reduce closing costs for first-time buyers while shifting the fiscal burden onto luxury purchases and Wall Street private equity firms. We must expand the Maryland Mortgage Program and SmartBuy initiatives by raising grant caps to match regional housing costs so young families can build generational wealth.
At the same time, we must reform restrictive zoning to allow missing-middle housing, including duplexes, triplexes, and accessory dwelling units near transit hubs like our MARC stations. I advocate for state infrastructure grants to help municipalities modernize water and road capacity to accommodate smart infill development. We must also explore social housing models that use public land to build mixed-income residential communities, removing the speculative profit motive from basic shelter. Safe, stable, and attainable housing is a fundamental human right, and I will champion these balanced, practical solutions in the General Assembly.