Pittman and Friends Podcast
Welcome to Pittman and Friends, the curiously probing, sometimes awkward, but always revealing conversations between your host, Anne Arundel County Executive Steuart Pittman - that’s me - and whatever brave and willing public servant, community leader, or elected official I can find who has something to say that you should hear.
This podcast is provided as a public service of Anne Arundel County Government, so don’t expect me to get all partisan here. This is about the age-old art of government - of, by, and for the people.
Pittman and Friends Podcast
Housing, Land, and Regulation with Secretary Jake Day
Housing is at a crisis point in Maryland, with a shortage of nearly 100,000 units driving up costs and leaving communities struggling. In this eye-opening conversation, County Executive Steuart Pittman sits down with Maryland Housing Secretary Jake Day to unpack not just the problems, but the potential solutions.
Secretary Day brings a fascinating background to his role—from small-town Eastern Shore kid to Salisbury mayor to state cabinet secretary. His journey through architecture school, military service, and local government has shaped his perspective on how housing connects to every aspect of community well-being. "I never sought to become the housing mayor," Day explains, "but it became a thing that happened" as he witnessed firsthand how the pandemic accelerated existing housing challenges.
What makes this conversation particularly valuable is the candid discussion of policy approaches. Day outlines his "three-legged stool" framework—increasing housing supply through reduced regulations, ensuring affordability through targeted interventions, and implementing renter protections for vulnerable populations.
Beyond policy mechanics, the conversation delves into the philosophy of community building. Day reflects on his early work with a land conservation organization, where he learned that thriving towns need both environmental protection and smart development. This balanced approach, respecting local character while acknowledging the urgent need for more housing, offers a distinctly "Maryland solution" to a problem facing communities nationwide.
Whether you're a policy wonk, a community advocate, or simply someone concerned about housing affordability, this episode provides valuable insights into one of the most pressing challenges facing our communities today. How can we build more housing without sacrificing the character that makes our neighborhoods special? The answers might surprise you.
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Welcome to Pittman and Friends. The curiously probing, sometimes awkward but always revealing conversations between your host, Anne Arundel County Executive Steuart Pittman - that's me - and whatever brave and willing public servant, community leader, or elected official I can find who has something to say that you should hear. This podcast is provided as a public service of Anne Arundel County, so don't expect me to get all partisan here. This is about the age-old art of government of, by, and for the people. Welcome, everybody. I have got a pretty cool friend with me this time. I've got the Secretary of the Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development, Jake Day Welcome.
Secretary Jake Day :Steuart, thank you so much for having me. It's going to be fun. It's going to be a lot of fun. I love any time we get the opportunity to talk. We've done a couple of things like this in front of an audience, but this is a new format. I like it and I'm excited.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:Yeah, yeah, and I think in some of those I've mentioned that the first time I ever met you, you were up on stage. You were at a Smart Growth America conference that Governor Glenn Denning had put together, and you were the mayor of Salisbury and you were talking about smart growth and housing in ways I had never heard and I realized that it's good politics and it's good policy.
Secretary Jake Day :So we'll get into some of that, but first tell us what DHCD is, the scope of it within state government yeah, so I'll start off by saying I come from local government and proud part of my experience and background, but I now run Maryland State Housing Agency. Not every state has a department of housing. Most states have some analog, but the structures kind of exist on a continuum where they're deeply integrated in state government. The housing finance work is deeply integrated in state government and in other cases they've kind of built a quasi-government or quasi-independent agency to do that work. Maryland's is sort of on the deeply integrated end of the spectrum and so DHCD is not only kind of the governor's primary advisor on housing or advisory body on housing policy, we're also the finance agency. So we issue mortgages, we issue bonds to finance housing development usually affordable housing development that goes along with federal low-income housing tax credits and we also we may get into that.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:I know there've been some scandals on that, but we'll see.
Secretary Jake Day :We should talk about all of that because the landscape is shifting under our feet. So I think it's worth getting into.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:Tax credits are important for low-income housing right now yeah.
Secretary Jake Day :We're the issuer of many housing vouchers, particularly the rural areas around the state and other jurisdictions. They pass through the local government and then we do things beyond housing too. So in addition to mortgages and housing finance, we're the state's place-based economic development agency. So we do business lending, we do grants a significant round of grants every year, all focused on revitalizing Main Street's, downtown's core communities, usually core disinvested communities.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:I know that is some of the stuff that excites you the most, because I've been with you on some tours in the county Glen Burnie, in particular Glen Burnie Town Center and the B&A Boulevard up to the train station and all of that.
Secretary Jake Day :So we had a nice walk, we did.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:We did, and now we're doing some nice work too. And that's exactly where we need to be Right Now, just walk.
Secretary Jake Day :Turn it from walk to work. Yeah, and then we are also the state's broadband agency, so we are responsible for the delivery of, by 2030, the delivery of high-speed broadband service to every single location in the state of Maryland, and location being every farmhouse, house, business, outhouse et cetera.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:Right and the rural communities are the ones that have the most catching up to do.
Secretary Jake Day :That's correct, that's correct.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:And I understand the feds want to end some of that, but we've got the money already on some of that right. On some of that we're in really good shape.
Secretary Jake Day :Other things are dicey but we can get into that too. So bottom line there is we've got a relatively small lean agency that depends relatively little on state general funds for operations but that delivers $2.5 billion in financing and funding a year out into the economy. So a relatively small agency that pushes a lot of resources out to local governments.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:How many people work About 500, 500 and change. And I know we've stolen a few, but not too many, we won't get into that.
Secretary Jake Day :Man, we're not on camera, are we?
County Executive Steuart Pittman:We call her our housing czar and all of the nonprofit housing developers were so concerned when she left your agency because she was putting all the deals together and now she's working for us, which means we're going to have a lot of really good deals in Anne Arundel.
Secretary Jake Day :Yes you are, yes you are, and look, we'll be your partner.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:Of course you will Stop stealing the good people.
Secretary Jake Day :We'll be your partner all the way through.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:Okay, okay. So that gives us a sense of the agency and I will tell you that our agencies, our ACDS, rural Community Development Services, are really almost tied at the hip to what you do. Every project y'all talk about and do the really complicated work of getting the housing built and improving the communities. But you, you have an interesting background, so tell us how you went from being a little kid on the Eastern Shore to this.
Secretary Jake Day :I grew up and into this job. Well, thanks for saying that. And you know I love when you mentioned the fact that we met around smart growth, because that's, you know, that's near and dear to my heart and still to this day, placemaking is critical. You know, it's the lens through which I look at everything that we do. You know, making places that are going to be competitive in the global landscape where we're fighting for talent. And you know we're not just in a competition with Virginia or Pennsylvania, you know.
Secretary Jake Day :Or, when I was mayor in Salisbury, not just in a competition with Delaware, but we're in a competition for global talent that can be anywhere, they can be in another country, they can be in Austin, they can be in, you know, san Francisco. And so, as a small town kid who grew up in Salisbury, born and raised, you know I had a vision of making my city better and went away, traveled the world, went to school, tried to avoid the real world for as long as I could, came back home, and when I came home, I found a city that was mired in personality politics. Every story about our town was, you know, on the front page of the papers, was about the people, the elected people, fighting with one another, not about the things they were working on, and so I thought Let me just say that it's funny that you say your city is where your heart was, because I also know that your family very agricultural.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:You were just talking about your brother's grain farmer on the Eastern Shore.
Secretary Jake Day :Yeah, I grew up in an agriculturally connected family. We weren't farmers, you know, we weren't landowners. My dad was the son of a preacher, so we didn't have money or anything like that. But he went to work for a small chicken company on the Eastern Shore called Purdue and spent 45 years there and retired. And my brother decided to do the hard work of becoming a farmer Not easy, but he's still there. My sister's still there as a guidance counselor and occupational therapist and my mom's a retired school teacher still there. So everybody's close, we're all close, and I'm raising my two little girls there now. So I'm still in Salisbury. That's. The key takeaway here is that I commute all over the state every day, but start my day and end my day in Salisbury. And so, yeah, I decided to get involved. And you know something about this story. You see something. You go, try to fix it. So I ran for city council, became city council president, then mayor Two. So I ran for city council, became city council president, then mayor, two terms.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:Two terms as mayor, two terms as mayor.
Secretary Jake Day :One term as council president, two terms as mayor, before the governor asked me to come join his team. And I often say like I sought this job. I sought to become the housing secretary.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:I wanted it.
Secretary Jake Day :It wasn't a lifelong dream but it was right before the governor was sworn in.
Secretary Jake Day :It became a dream, but I never sought to become the housing mayor. That was a thing that happened. I became very focused on housing and multiple facets of that in 2017, 2018, 2019. But even more so post-pandemic. In those few years after that I was mayor. I came home, I was overseas. I was deployed in East Africa in my army job and I came home expecting to find certain crises right, like a public health crisis still and yeah, that was still a thing I expected shuttered businesses in downtown, all the small businesses I thought would be broken and I came home shocked to see that they weren't. Some of the programs of the federal government at the time. The PPP loans, even some of the things the state and localities did helped those businesses keep their doors open. But the housing crisis had only worsened. People were struggling. More Rents had risen. There were more buyers on the market, fewer sellers. People were holding on to their homes, values were rising, appraisals were rising.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:Some of that's good news. When the economy is good, that happens sometimes, but then the folks get left behind. People get left behind.
Secretary Jake Day :People get left behind, and so we became focused on production. So what could we do to address housing production, recognizing that we can't control every aspect of housing costs as local officials, nor as state officials, but there are some things we could and then very focused on homelessness as well. So we spent a lot of energy and effort trying to address homelessness in Salisbury. Wow, I didn't realize that was an issue in Salisbury. Yeah, yeah, you know it's an area with. I was just looking yesterday at. The. One of my jobs today is to work as the vice chair of the Maryland Community Investment Corporation, a new entity that was stood up last year. So we're looking at a map of low-income communities across the state as designated by the federal government for purposes of new markets tax credits, and the Eastern Shore is awash in low-income communities. The census tracts are majority low-income, and so Salisbury is no different. We have a high concentration of poverty. Rural Maryland kind of looks like that. Yeah.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:People don't realize that.
Secretary Jake Day :Baltimore City, prince George's County, 30% of Montgomery County, by the way, and then the Eastern Shore and Western Maryland.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:Yeah, I mean all these federal cuts like the I was just reading about LIHEAP, the heating assistance, rural Maryland is going to be well and Medicaid and if the rural hospitals close and rural clinics, they're going to hit the hardest. You're 100% right. Yeah, you're 100% right. But you also learned you're a planner, right? Didn't you get a degree in planning? And then you worked for a land preservation organization as well?
Secretary Jake Day :I did.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:I went to architecture school, that was my dream I used to play with Legos and went to architecture school and then urban design school after that, and so yeah, planning placemaking. In fact, one of your professors happens to be the Secretary of Planning right.
Secretary Jake Day :I mean talk about small world. She's not from Maryland, she's from Pennsylvania. She moved to Maryland, moved to Chestertown. But yeah, just a quick story. When you get these jobs I learned they don't tell you who you're joining. They don't tell you who else is on the cabinet. You find out through reading the newspaper. And so we didn't know we had not all been announced when we had our first kind of secret retreat. So we had this retreat in College Park, incidentally in the hotel in conference happening on the ground floor. So I walked through the conference floor on my way up to the elevator and ran into like five people who were like what are you doing here?
Secretary Jake Day :And you know, hey, mayor what are you doing? And you know, my eyes are as big as sauce. I didn't expect to run into anybody so I had no answer. I had no good answer so I had to think on the fly Some sort of conference, and got to the elevator, rode up and standing by the table with our name tags is Secretary Flora, wow, and she's jumping up and down. She's like my student, my student. So we hugged yeah.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:So that was the way we found out and that's so important for the Secretary of Planning and DHCD to be.
Secretary Jake Day :Tied at the hip.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:Think along the same lines.
Secretary Jake Day :We are tied at the hip so much that we do and they do we do it together. You're so right about that. So, yeah, I have a planning background. My first job after grad school was working for a land conservation organization on the Eastern Shore. I remain so impressed with the leadership of that organization. They had a vision for preserving more than 50% of the land on the Eastern shore and they're continuing to march toward that and realize at some point that they had to approach towns with an interest in their vibrancy, because these towns, you know, we're looking at life and death. They had an existential question before them of you know, are we going to survive? And if the only thing being offered to us as an answer to survival is development, in whatever form it comes, then we'll accept bad. We'll accept bad because it's better than death. And so we saw this series in the early 2000s of massive annexations Hebron, preston, east New Market, denton, cambridge very large annexations for cookie cutter sprawl.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:Do you want it to be close?
Secretary Jake Day :to municipalities, sure, but should it be low density garbage? No, it should be good. It should draw something from the DNA of the place that it's being added to and also not stress the system from a scale standpoint. And it was doing all the wrong things and it was happening all over the place. So our job, rather than just fighting it from an advocacy standpoint, which we were doing, they had been doing for a decade. But we also said well, we're going to dive into the politics of that town, we're going to try to help them envision better and actually grow what they want and ask for what they want and say, hey, this is what we like about the character of our place. If you can match that, then we might have a reasonable conversation.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:That is awesome to hear because in Anne Arundel County one of the things that I've noticed is that and I think it started when we came in and we actually brought Smart Growth America to the county and Governor Glenn Denning to educate two or 300 people at a meeting on a Saturday in May the first year we were in and it was all the advocates for good land use and a lot of the environmental ones, and they have evolved to the point where they're allies on affordable housing legislation. That's amazing and all the environmental organizations say they're for smart growth. So it's been an amazing evolution. It's the only way we can move forward.
Secretary Jake Day :That's huge. Yeah, sierra Club has been a great partner in the last two years on our housing bills. They could craft an argument to stand in opposition to any sort of legislation that would enable more housing, building anything, but they don't they don't? They're more nuanced, smarter than that. They've had the conversations, they've been willing to engage, and I credit them for that Awesome.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:Well, let's talk about the housing crisis. I mean, you said you came back and you saw in your town what it was. Now that you're overseeing the solving the problem in the state, how bad is it?
Secretary Jake Day :It's pretty bad. I think it's a national problem. It's been getting worse since the pandemic, but it started in 2008. They started post Great Recession and it's not.
Secretary Jake Day :I don't think we should be surprised that a financially excuse me a real estate driven financial crisis, a housing driven financial crisis, led to less housing construction. Maybe that needed to happen for a brief period, but the problem is we've never caught up, and so now Maryland is a contributor to that significant deficit of housing that we have, and Maryland's crisis is a shortage of 96,000 units estimated. There are some studies that have less conservative figures 120,000, 150,000, but we use the up for growth model thousand 150,000, but we use the up for growth model 96,000 unit shortage. It is housing affordability crisis, too right. The consequence for your constituents and for you and I, for all of us, is that every house value is rising and there's less on the market, and so a market with scarce product means the prices are going to rise. Demand's not declining, and I know we can have a conversation about population patterns and in-migration into Maryland, but let's admit, we want to be a place that people want to be, and so we don't want to see population decline. Population decline equals economic decline.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:And I will say we are that when we have a good quality of life and great parks and good transportation and good jobs, but also good housing, good health care and good education system.
Secretary Jake Day :And Anne. Arundel County is a place that has all of those things we're the best place for all.
Secretary Jake Day :Obviously, that's a given, other than the work that we have to do on housing, and not that you don't have other work to do. I'm sure you've got a long list. If I know you, you've got a long list of things that still need to be worked on, but you've got all the things you just mentioned. You do have great places and you have great schools and you have great parks and you have places that people want to be, and the problem that that creates is that demand doesn't decline, and so, while demand is strong, supply is not increasing at a rate that matches the growth in demand. Prices are going to increase, and that's true across the board.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:That's true for rental products and that's true for for-sale products, and I have argued often and your job is the whole state and certainly in rural communities across the state. In general, supply does affect affordability. You get more supply and things become more affordable. I think in our county and this is probably true of wealthier areas all over the country is that developers do want to build and they build what is most profitable unless they are asked to do something in the public interest, which is like we have now our moderately priced dwelling units set aside and things like that. But it's been very frustrating to me to see, even when we do Dunn City, like on Reaver Road with the apartments that are going up right now, we're not getting affordability. The market is so strong for people to move in here close to the Bay. They probably have a government job or maybe they don't have government jobs anymore, but they have some kind of a job.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:It might be government connected, yeah, even state and local government connected, yeah, so that part has been frustrating and there is a bit of a debate. I think. If you're in the job of building housing and you want freedom to build deregulation, freedom to build what you want where you want maximum profit, then you're going to say that it's all about supply. And then if you're dealing with the crisis of affordability and we don't have a workforce that can work in our small businesses because there's nothing affordable, or our teachers, or our firefighters, we have to do affordable because we can't wait the 10 years that it'll take for that expensive stuff to come down because the supply grew. So it's both.
Secretary Jake Day :I think it's a three-legged stool. I would add to that renter protections are really critical, because I think so. Yes, I think the market will not naturally produce certain things right. So I think supply is an area where we can spend a lot of time, because the obstacles to production are not improving significantly. Writ large, there are jurisdictions that are doing great work I think we're seeing lots of good examples but writ large, there are jurisdictions that are doing great work. I think we're seeing lots of good examples, but writ large, the regulatory barriers to production still remains a category of hurdle. There aren't a lot of good examples, even nationally where results are being produced. There's a couple Montana's, one California's made a lot of progress. Although they're producing the same number of housing units they were 20, 30 years ago per year and they need to be producing a lot more than that. But I think they would be producing even fewer if it weren't for the progress that they've made on reducing regulatory obstacles.
Secretary Jake Day :The other leg of the stool you mentioned is affordability.
Secretary Jake Day :The market's not going to produce certain things, and not only do we have to subsidize and incentivize and require affordability at certain levels. I think in certain jurisdictions, like in Toronto County, your MPDU ordinance is really critical because it acknowledges that there's a middle tier of housing and a middle tier of incomes that are going to be left behind. There's going to be a gap if not addressed, because it's an expensive place to live, because it's a high demand place to live, and that's different from, say, a Worcester County or a Wicomico County or a Kent County or a Washington County. And then the other leg of the stool is renter protections. I think no matter what we do to produce enough housing, there will be vulnerable populations that are subject to a really turbulent rental market and a power imbalance with property owners and that has to be addressed and I think we've done some things statewide to address that and I see lots of good examples again around the state of local governments working to address that state of local governments working to address that.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:So you, in your first legislative session, you got some things done that are being implemented, that are, I think, going to be particularly effective in counties where politicians have kind of fallen into the NIMBY movement and they think it's easier politically to get reelected by saying no to any kind of housing development, and so you've made it a little harder in some cases. You know, some people call it preemption, where the higher level of government, the state, tells the counties that you can't do certain things because it's not in the public interest. You can't block, you can't stop housing development when we have a housing crisis, because that is really bad for the state of Maryland. And so you made some progress on that this year. You introduced some legislation that kind of got watered down and ended up not really going anywhere. That's right. And now you're looking at next year. I mean, what are the lessons learned? What's the strategy? How do you, as a state, do something.
Secretary Jake Day :So I think we can color the first year of the Moore-Miller agenda on housing in two ways. Number one it was aggressive in that we had three bills, three housing bills. The governor put his name to them and led on them, and I think that's part of why they were successful. Dynamics between general assemblies and governors shift over time. We can see that happening in real time.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:It's set up to be like a system where you negotiate. The governor of Maryland does not have all the power. People think that's right, Certainly on the budget and yeah.
Secretary Jake Day :And less power than they did even a few years ago, right with more recent changes. And look, this is also just kind of the dynamic between executives and legislatures. You know something about this. I know something about this from my time as mayor and council president, so I kind of sat on both sides of that. I have a really good council, I know you do and I know you've got a great relationship and you work really hard on that and that's important and I say that, even when it's not good.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:That's smart politics, right?
Secretary Jake Day :That's smart politics, that's smart politics.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:One big happy family.
Secretary Jake Day :That goes back to one of the first things I said about my experience was, I think, when the story is the officials not getting along, you're not making progress and you're also making it about you and so trying to bury those things and be outwardly one big, happy family, even when there's tough negotiations happening. I think it has value for the citizens. It's not hiding anything.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:I think it's got value for your voters and for your people and I'll just jump in and say that on the budget this year, of course the governor gets beat up because it was a year where they had to solve a $3.5 billion deficit that they knew was coming for years and years. That's right, but this was the year it had to be fixed and so nobody got everything they wanted and some people really were upset about what they didn't get funded. And then other people wanted to make political hay of some of the revenue enhancements that they knew were coming. But it was a pretty balanced approach. I mean, I liked what the governor introduced initially better than what came out. But I'm not going to complain because the great news is that the Senate president and the speaker and the governor and all the committees, they actually negotiated and they made government frickin' work for a change and solved the problem.
Secretary Jake Day :Washington could take a lesson right.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:Washington could take a lesson. So at least we have adults in Maryland? Yes, we do.
Secretary Jake Day :But getting back to housing policy, so I think you could color the first year in the first way I mentioned, which is as a bold year. It's also an incremental approach. We were very clear that our intention was to make it the opening salvo on a multi-year effort. We had looked at states like New York and Colorado where the governors had essentially gone for broke and said let's create giant omnibus bills that have everything you can imagine on housing, and they failed. Now I'm also speaking to you as a guy who led on a bill this past year and it wasn't successful either.
Secretary Jake Day :So our incremental approach, which attempted to address each of the three legs of the stool that I was mentioning renter protections, housing affordability, as well as production. The second year we really narrowed in on production and I think that was the second year we really narrowed in on production and I think that was uncomfortable and it led to some strong debates. But I'm a firm believer, having been privy to all the arguments, listened to everything, I heard that the bill itself was less the problem than the broader political fight that was happening and those negotiations, and so it feels a bit frustrating that substantive policy direction, such as addressing housing regulatory obstacles, became victim of a really tough negotiating cycle, but at the same time, I think what it tells us is it was a tough bill. It was a bill that I think would have passed had it happened in any other year, and so do we just bring it back or do we sit down and have more conversation? I think the answer is more conversation.
Secretary Jake Day :So we're going to sit down with our local government partners, especially leaders of big counties like yourself, and sit down and have conversations about what worked in that bill in your mind and what didn't, and what else is missing. I'm talking to every expert around the country that I can. I'm reading every book I can. I'm finding examples. There's a whole suite of tools that we could bring to bear and we've only scratched the surface. California I mentioned. California has 35 plus years of legacy of trying to incentivize more production and reduce the regulatory obstacles.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:And again, 35 years later, housing is incredibly expensive and they're only producing as many housing units as they were 30 years ago and the governor's so frustrated he's basically, you might say, giving the middle finger to the local jurisdictions and saying he's talking homelessness in particular, but I'm going to stop funding your work because you're not getting it done and we don't want to be in that position.
Secretary Jake Day :We don't want to be there, maryland. We don't want to be, I'd much rather be like a Montana. Let's be bold, be swift and address the problem. And oh, by the way, let's acknowledge we don't want to be California for a lot of reasons. We've got let's be Maryland. Let's be Maryland and have a Maryland solution, which I think, yes, it requires taking a careful approach and a collegial approach with our local elected partners, but, at the same time, let's be bold, let's be swift, let's get the job done. Results matter. I want us to all be looking at each other and saying, yeah, we produced more housing units in the right way, in the right places and we feel good about it.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:And the funny thing is there's so much common ground. I mean I will say that some of the opposite, a lot of the opposition, came from county leaders. Their residents spoke through their leaders, I think to some degree. And then the Maryland Association of Counties, which is their lobbying organization, and I'm on the board of that, in fact I'm the treasurer of that. So I sat through the meetings throughout the process and I know that local leaders don't like the higher level of government telling them how to do, or particularly land use. But I also know that local leaders are not boldly confronting this crisis and this problem.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:And I have said at MAKO, you know what, maybe we need some damn preemption from the state because we're too chicken to actually solve the problem. So tell us we have to. That doesn't always go over all that well at that table, but I believe that. But I also believe that, like you say, let Maryland solve its problem Maryland's way, their housing plans. Well, development plans are done county by county so that every county and every county's residents have a voice and they do it their way. And I think every county needs a serious housing plan and there needs to be some guidelines for that so that you can't wimp out of it, I think you're right, and then we can figure out the best way to solve our local problem, and so I'm very confident that there's a way forward that can be more effective than what's been proposed.
Secretary Jake Day :And let me just say I 100% agree that it is not comfortable to have any higher level of government dictate solutions. Right, we don't want that. What I will say is, in this space, Maryland has a really proud legacy of statewide leadership on telling us where not to build, and for good reason, right On saying statewide we're going to protect certain things because they're a value beyond any jurisdictional boundary right, Whether it's our water quality, whether it's protecting natural habitat for animals, all of those things have value, even our ag economy, right.
Secretary Jake Day :But what we haven't done is the flip side of the coin and said you know, let's incentivize and address our housing affordability crisis, which addresses families all across the state, and this is a statewide problem. And we're not, you know, we collectively are not getting better. And so I think there is some imperative then for us to say what is the flip side of that coin, what is the analog on the housing production side, on the housing affordability crisis response side, and we need to negotiate with that in mind. I think.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:Yeah, I agree, and I know that even the Republicans at the table most of the smaller counties are actually Republican-led they acknowledge that there's a housing crisis and they feel it too and they care. They care just as much as we do, I think, on this issue. I believe it, yeah, and when some of the solutions are for government to step back and deregulate, there's a lot of common ground there.
Secretary Jake Day :There ought to be.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:Yeah, I mean we all read the book. You know, abundance and Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson about ways that Democrats have gotten a little bit too kind of maybe high on deregulation, I don't know. On regulation, on regulation. And removing some of those things is good politics, and good policy on both sides of the aisle.
Secretary Jake Day :I couldn't agree more.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:Yeah, so well, this is really cool. I know we're running past our. We try to keep these things at 30 minutes, but it's really hard when I'm talking to somebody like you, and, of course, I like to talk to you.
Secretary Jake Day :We could do this for hours.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:We could. But what I'm really looking forward to is sitting down with and I will say that you all have been careful about sitting down with counties and sitting down with you as we prepare for what's coming next, and I believe and I know you believe, and both of us see this vision where you can grow. You can grow the economy, you can house people. You can do all these things without violating people's basic principles and their love for their communities. Some people don't want change in some places. That doesn't mean we can't get this done, so thank you for your work.
Secretary Jake Day :Thank you.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:Thank you for joining. Thanks for hosting us I appreciate it. All right, and if you're listening, of course we want you to hit the subscribe button. But I also want you to know that this is the final episode of season one. We're going to take a little bit of a break and we'll be back in August with season two with some more wonderful guests. Thanks, everybody.
