Day Gives County Planners ‘Pre-Decisional' Look At 2026 Housing Priorities

By Danielle J. Brown, Maryland Matters

August 19, 2025

State housing officials are taking a lesson from the past legislative session and starting sooner, rather than later, to work out affordable housing priorities with county leaders.

While Gov. Wes Moore (D) announced a broad overview of his housing priorities Saturday at the annual Maryland Association of Counties summer conference in Ocean City, county leaders were briefed earlier in the week during a lunch discussion hosted by Housing Secretary Jake Day.

“We’re sharing those with you now, in August, so we can have a robust conversation,” he told two dozen county planning officials the Hilton Ocean City Oceanfront, “so that we can get feedback over the coming months as we go into the next legislative session.”

The discussion included what Day called a “pre-decisional” outline of housing bills the Moore administration is considering for the 2026 legislative session, which includes vesting rights for developers, streamlining development approval and facilitating the development of new starter homes.

Moore hints at coming effort to spur affordable housing construction

It’s months earlier to start on an affordable housing package than last year, when Day began pitching Moore’s 2025 housing legislation to county officials in December. That package, which aimed to tie housing development to areas with high job growth, immediately came under fire from MACo because it limited the county government's say over some housing decisions.

The bill did not get its first hearing until March, in the back half of Maryland’s 90-day legislative session. It was heavily rewritten, replacing the administration’s proposal with language that granted vesting rights for developers, among other measures. It ultimately died in the Senate Energy, Education and Environment Committee as time ran out on the session.

This year, the conversation is starting earlier.

“The keyword is ‘pre-decisional,’” Day told county planning officials Thursday. “We wanted to start making time for direct conversations with planners and housing officials in our counties and in our municipalities as well as across the state … [We] expect this to be the start of that relationship building, a start in that conversation.”

The current bill outline revamps last year’s effort to impose “vesting rights” so that a housing developer with an approved project proposal would retain the right to develop the property.

It also includes language aimed at facilitating the development of smaller homes by limiting a county’s ability to set dimension and square footage requirements, along with other prohibitions on specific architectural design requirements. There would also be limitations on lot sizes greater than 5,000 square feet in areas served by public water and sewers.

The priorities also include working to simplify the process of splitting larger lots into smaller ones, and ensuring that townhomes can be built in all areas that allow single-family detached housing.

Day said the focus on prioritizing development of “starter homes” and smaller single-family housing options across Maryland is intentional.

Residential and business units on the streets in Annapolis on March 24, 2025. (Photo by Danielle J. Brown/Maryland Matters).

“We have a generation of young people who can’t afford to buy a home of their own. We’ve got a generation of seniors and a growing population of seniors that can’t leave the home that they’re in because they have no alternative option to go to,” Day said, noting that the Moore administration wants “essentially a focus on startups and to try to build more, smaller products across our jurisdictions.”

The administration proposal also attempts to address the process of vesting rights, a debate that contributed to the failure of a bill in the 2025 legislative session. Day says that some projects get stuck in the approval process if local jurisdictions change building or zoning rules before they break ground. Vesting would protect a developer against changes once a project is approved.

“We are a late-vesting state,” Day said. “Meaning you can change zoning, you can change your building rules — you can change really anything after somebody submits an application for approval, essentially to deny something that once complied with the law at the point of application.”

Day also said the administration is considering legislation that would require jurisdictions to allow third-party permit approval to help speed the process of project approval by counties.

“Third-party approval offers an opportunity to say ‘hey, we have limited staff resources, we have limited capacity, and developers want things approved faster,’” Day said, though he anticipates that provision to generate some “consternation” at the county level as discussions continue.

Christopher Heyn, director of planning and land management for Carroll County, said his county has already looked into third-party permitting, and he is not sure how effective the process would be.

“We did look at that over the last couple years, and there were other jurisdictions that had enabled that,” Heyn said, “but when you talk to them, they said nobody’s using it.

“So you spent all this time setting up a program to allow third-party reviews for the development review process, but no developer was using it,” he said.

Day assured local officials that everything is still under discussion, and that the Department of Housing and Community Development will be reaching out to hear how different jurisdictions feel about the proposed legislative priorities, looking for where the administration and local officials can find common ground.

Moore’s remodeled housing bill approved by House; still needs Senate consideration

With several months before the next session, there could be several changes to these priorities as the Moore administration works with county officials to try to tackle the state’s 96,000-unit housing shortage.

“This is really important, we think, to share this now, that we discuss the conceptual framework around state legislation,” Day said, “So we can get ourselves to a place where we have something that everyone’s excited about and feels … has a meaningful impact on our housing shortage.”

Officials from MACo did not make an appearance at the Thursday meeting. Some MACo officials earlier voiced frustration, believing that the association was deliberately excluded from the event in response to its opposition to Moore’s housing legislation last session, among other concerns.

Day and other housing officials insisted that the Thursday meeting was open for all who were interested, though they did concede that MACo officials were not among the “target audience” for the discussion. The invites went out to specifically county planners and similar officials.

That said, Michael Sanderson, executive director for MACo, said it’s a good sign that “the conversation is getting started” now rather than right before the start of the next session.

“It’s a good sign for an open opportunity for some collaboration at a couple levels here,” Sanderson said. “Next step is to move past bullet point into bill language … I think we start sharing ideas about specifics.”