Maryland Gov. Wes Moore said he wants to build more housing to bring down costs, but researchers caution that even a significant increase in the state’s housing supply may not make homes affordable for its poorest residents.

Moore signed two executive orders Thursday aimed at speeding up permitting, expanding modular housing and creating more training opportunities for construction workers.

The orders come as housing affordability remains a growing challenge in Maryland. A Pew Charitable Trusts report released Tuesday found that high housing costs account for an estimated 21% of poverty among Maryland families and 17% among children.

Moore said factors beyond the state’s control, including rising mortgage rates, have made homeownership more difficult.

“While we all know that there are certain aspects that we do not control, like many of those things that these federal policies are making harder on us, the things that we can control here in the states, we will,” Moore said.

Speeding up permitting

One executive order focuses on shortening permitting and licensing timelines.

The effort will begin through partnerships with Baltimore City, Montgomery County, Wicomico County and the town of Thurmont.

In Baltimore, Mayor Brandon Scott said they have seen the impacts of work to make permitting faster over the last year.

“Last fall, the typical permit took 17 days to issue,” Scott said. “Last month, it took five.”

Scott Link, principal and president of Pax Development, said one of his company’s projects was selected last year as a council pilot project.

He said working with the council allowed his team to speak directly with agencies, understand their processes and identify potential problems before they became delays.

“Developers and investors can work with regulations and requirements,” Link said. “What’s much harder to work with is uncertainty. Uncertainty about how long the process will take, about where the project may get stuck.”

Lori Graf, CEO of the Maryland Building Industry Association, said the association is cautiously optimistic that Moore’s order could overcome building logjams that previous efforts have not.

“We’re excited about anything that has to do with making housing more affordable and making permitting easier,” Graf said. “I believe this executive order helps with that.”

But she said significant changes will require cooperation from county and municipal planning agencies.

A second executive order aims to increase the use of manufactured and modular housing and encourage new approaches to housing development.

Modular homes are built in sections in a factory before being transported to a site and assembled. Moore said the state will update building codes, explore financing options for modular homes and develop preapproved designs that could be used across Maryland.

The state also will create a Housing Innovation Incubator and advisory council to study ways to increase housing supply, identify potential funding sources and recommend strategies to improve affordability.

‘It won’t be solved overnight’

Maryland Housing Secretary Jake Day said Maryland’s housing shortage has been decades in the making.

“We’ve underproduced housing at a rate of 8,000 units a year for 20 years,” Day said. “Maryland’s housing shortage, obviously, was not created overnight, so it won’t be solved overnight.”

Maryland’s 2025 Housing Needs Assessment estimates the state will need about 590,000 additional housing units by 2045 to accommodate projected household growth. The assessment also found substantial shortages of housing affordable to lower-income households.

Pew researchers found the nation faces a housing shortage of 4 million to 7 million homes. Maryland’s shortage, which the report estimates at more than 100,000 units, ranks among the largest in the country.

Median rent in Maryland tops $1,800, compared with less than $1,400 nationally, Alex Horowitz, project director on housing policy for Pew, told Maryland Matters.

Pew’s analysis modeled what poverty would look like if Maryland’s housing costs were closer to the national average. It estimated that 21% of Maryland’s poverty is attributable to the gap between the state’s housing costs and the national average.

The report points to cities including Austin and Minneapolis, where regulatory reforms and increased housing production were followed by inflation-adjusted rent declines of about 20%.

Urban Institute researchers agree that increasing housing supply is important. But their research suggests that supply reforms alone are unlikely to quickly solve affordability problems for many low- and moderate-income households.

A 2025 Urban Institute report found that policies such as eliminating restrictive land-use regulations and speeding permitting can help increase housing production, but said those measures should be paired with financing and other incentives that reduce the cost of constructing and operating housing affordable to low- and moderate-income households. The researchers described the approach as “abundance-plus-affordability.”

That distinction is particularly important for Maryland’s lowest-income households. The Urban Institute notes that market-rate housing generally cannot be built and maintained at rents affordable to households with extremely low incomes without public subsidies or other financing assistance.

Graf said the building industry also supports changes to land-use rules and greater flexibility for redevelopment projects, in addition to simpler permitting.

Permitting is often treated as a linear process, with each step completed in sequence, she said. Allowing agencies to complete multiple steps simultaneously could reduce the time it takes for housing to reach the market.

“We want to follow all the laws. We want to protect the environment,” Graf said. “It’s a little bit of a balancing act between all of the regulations and still being able to build more affordable housing.”

________

©2026 The Baltimore Sun. Visit at baltimoresun.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.