Councilman Ryan Dorsey discusses good, bad and better in Baltimore City with Nestor Koco’s Pub

At the 40th Anniversary of Koco’s Pub in Lauraville, it was appropriate to welcome Councilman Ryan Dorsey from the 3rd District of Baltimore City onto Baltimore Positive to discuss the good, bad and better in Baltimore City. And about those bike lanes…

Councilman Ryan Dorsey discussed his journey and impact in Baltimore City. He highlighted his efforts to improve public infrastructure, agency operations, and ethics laws, including creating an Inspector General’s office and enhancing financial disclosure requirements. Dorsey emphasized the importance of housing and transportation, advocating for higher density housing along commercial corridors like Harford Road. He noted significant improvements in public safety and the city’s overall condition. Dorsey also addressed the challenges of implementing bike lanes and the need for interconnected bicycle facilities. He stressed the importance of community engagement and accountability in public service.

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Celebrating Koco’s Pub and Introducing Councilman Ryan Dorsey

• Nestor Aparicio introduces the show, celebrating 40 years of Coco’s Pub, and mentions his 27th anniversary.
• Nestor describes the delicious food at Koco’s, including crab cakes, corn, chowder, and cream of crab soup.
• Nestor introduces Councilman Ryan Dorsey, who represents District 3 in Baltimore City, and mentions his long-awaited appearance on the show.
• Ryan Dorsey joins the conversation, and Nestor reminisces about their shared history, including being nicknamed “Nasty Nestor” by Ryan’s siblings.

Ryan Dorsey’s Journey and Motivation to Run for Council

• Ryan Dorsey discusses his background, including his family business and his education in music composition.
• Ryan explains his decision to run for council, driven by a desire to make a positive impact on Baltimore and address the city’s challenges.
• Ryan shares his initial lack of political experience and the importance of local primary elections in Baltimore City.
• Nestor and Ryan discuss the impact of various events, including the Baltimore Uprising and the election of Mayor Brandon Scott, on Ryan’s decision to run for council.

Challenges and Initial Reactions to Ryan’s Campaign

• Ryan recounts the initial reactions to his campaign, including skepticism from some friends and family members.
• Ryan describes the process of finding a campaign treasurer and the importance of having a trusted person in that role.
• Nestor and Ryan discuss the challenges Ryan faced as a young, inexperienced candidate with no political background.
• Ryan shares the importance of community support and the role of local events in building his campaign momentum.

Ryan’s Vision for Baltimore and His Role as a Councilman

• Ryan outlines his vision for Baltimore, emphasizing the importance of housing, jobs, and transportation.
• Ryan discusses his efforts to improve public infrastructure, agency operations, and administrative processes.
• Ryan highlights his work on creating the Inspector General’s office and improving ethics laws to ensure accountability.
• Nestor and Ryan discuss the impact of these efforts on public trust and the overall improvement of city services.

Progress and Achievements in Ryan’s First Term

• Ryan reflects on his first term, including the passage of the Complete Streets law and the creation of the Inspector General’s office.
• Ryan discusses the importance of ethics laws and the need for transparency and accountability in city government.
• Nestor and Ryan talk about the challenges of implementing these changes and the resistance they faced from some city officials.
• Ryan emphasizes the importance of long-term trajectory and the need for consistent efforts to improve city services.

Addressing Baltimore’s Housing Crisis

• Ryan explains the housing crisis in Baltimore, including the mismatch between housing supply and demand.
• Ryan discusses the impact of outdated zoning laws and the need for new policies to allow for higher density housing.
• Nestor and Ryan talk about the importance of population density and the role of commercial corridors in supporting local businesses.
• Ryan shares his efforts to create the Harford Road overlay district to allow for higher density housing and improve the livability of the area.

Transportation and Mobility in Baltimore

• Ryan discusses the importance of transportation and mobility in Baltimore, including the need for safe and interconnected bicycle facilities.
• Nestor and Ryan talk about the challenges of implementing bike lanes and the resistance from some residents and drivers.
• Ryan explains the economic disparities related to car ownership and the need for alternative transportation options.
• Ryan shares his vision for a more equitable and livable city, including the potential for Baltimore to become more like Amsterdam in terms of bicycle infrastructure.

Ryan’s Personal Background and Commitment to Public Service

• Ryan shares his personal background, including his family and his work in the family business.
• Nestor and Ryan discuss the importance of public service and the need for responsible and caring individuals to step up and lead.
• Ryan reflects on his commitment to making a positive impact on Baltimore and the challenges he has faced in his role as a councilman.
• Nestor and Ryan talk about the importance of accountability and transparency in government and the need for continued efforts to improve city services.

Future Plans and Vision for Baltimore

• Ryan outlines his future plans and vision for Baltimore, including continued efforts to improve housing, transportation, and public infrastructure.
• Nestor and Ryan discuss the importance of community engagement and the need for collaboration between city officials and residents.
• Ryan shares his optimism for the future and his belief in the potential for Baltimore to become a healthier, more equitable, and livable city.
• Nestor and Ryan conclude the conversation with a discussion of the importance of maintaining momentum and continuing to work towards their shared goals.

Councilman Ryan Dorsey discuss…re City with Nestor Koco’s Pub

Thu, Aug 28, 2025 3:08AM • 59:05

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Baltimore City, Ryan Dorsey, Coco’s Pub, housing crisis, transportation, bike lanes, public infrastructure, ethics laws, Inspector General, financial disclosure, population density, Harford Road, public safety, community engagement, public service.

SPEAKERS

Speaker 1, Ryan Dorsey, Nestor Aparicio

Nestor Aparicio  00:00

Rocket. Welcome home. We are W, N, S, T. Am 1570 town. So Baltimore. We are Baltimore positive. We are positively here, one of my favorite places, celebrating 40 years of Koco’s pub. We’re here in Laravel, having a good time. It’s all brought to you by the Maryland lottery. I have the Lucky seven, so I’m gonna, I’m in a cuckoo mood because it’s my 27th anniversary. I am still hung over. I don’t even drink anything here on Sunday with the crab cakes, the corn, the chowder, all the delicious things we had here as we celebrated 40 years. I’m sure Marcella will have a burger on special year for me, I’m probably gonna leave with some ribs today. I’ve already had some cream of crab soup. But before it’s over, we will celebrate number five on the 27 day countdown. Brought to you by curio wellness and our friends at GBMC, it will be not the coconut shrimp, but the coconut shrimp. I actually saw that delicious snozzberry sauce getting poured out over here. I said, Is that for me, it was like tons of it, but we’re Kocos. We’re Laravel and a Abbey. First time visitor on that. I’m sure it’s very nervous on the program right now. He is the returning Baltimore city councilman from the district three, which is right here. I call it racigs District is what I call it. We’re sick is gonna be here a little later on. Ryan Dorsey is here a virgin flight. Man, I’ve been invite you on for years. Where are you behind? Man, everybody knows you but

Ryan Dorsey  01:25

me. You know I’ve been dodging you.

Nestor Aparicio  01:28

I think you have been pretty. I think you have How are you good to good to know you meet you. I met you on Sunday. Here. Sunday was something, right? I mean, you represent this council. People say Baltimore City here’s Koco celebrating 40 years right up the street from your childhood home, where you sitting councilman. You visit with your wife, you come in, and what I saw in here Sunday was 40 years. No community love, all the things that that would make anybody from Baltimore city

Ryan Dorsey  01:58

proud. Nobody’s got a problem coming around when crab cakes are on the menu. Well, right? Well, you got

Nestor Aparicio  02:03

invited and you well, you know where the best ones are in your council or your district, right? Councilmanic district

Ryan Dorsey  02:08

anywhere, not just my district, my city, my state, anywhere. I never had a anybody ever had a better, better crab cake than cocoa.

Nestor Aparicio  02:15

Well, I tell you what I do, the crab cake tour. So I was at Costas the other day. I last, because of fade least, I get around all the places and people, when I say Koco’s, are like, hey, hey, gotta get over there. So everybody knows what’s up. And we are a crab cake city, and everybody knows this is an epicenter, complete destination. You know, I don’t want to be unkind to Kocos or Ruth Chris, but I’d say it’s sort of the ruse Chris of your council. This is his gathering point for everyone you know. I know you’re proud of your district. I’ve never had you on I know you grew up here. Rask has been telling me about you for years. You grew up with six kids who, by the way, named me, nasty, Nestor. Okay, Steve and Ryan are the reason your namesake and your classmate, nobody calls him Ryan. They top named me. We think it was top. Steve took a little bit of a credit for it the other day, but I was nicknamed nasty Nestor, right here on East Dale drive, babysitting those kids in 1989 and said, Uncle Nestor. They called me nasty Nestor, and that’s the reason. And you are the direct link to the descendants of nasty Nestor. How about that? I dig it. Well, you grew up here, so I said, Why did you run? Not everybody runs for council. Not everybody’s as feisty as you’ve been on lots of issues. I’m gonna let you stand in and tall on all the bicycle all the things that you’re Montebello and what happened here in the bridge, and all that you’re proud of this district. You grew up here. You never left why?

Ryan Dorsey  03:49

Because it’s a great place to live. My family’s here. I’m from here. I’m rooted here. I like it here. And I worked in a family business. For years after college, I went to school for music, the return on investment as a, you know, the prospects of becoming a rock star are pretty guitar guy. What do you know? I actually started college as a violin major, and then my degree is in music composition. Not a whole lot of job prospect there, and also all that stuff takes like grueling hours and hours and hours, 1000s of hours, sitting alone in a practice room, and that’s just not me. That’s not who I am, that’s not what I want to do, that’s not what I want to spend my time. I want to spend my time chopping it up, right, right? And but you still play the violin. No, I don’t, not for a long time, okay, but I worked in a family business, basically hanging TVs on rich people’s walls for years. What was the business soundscape over on cold spring lane, Roland Park and and the the value, kind of like, return on that isn’t necessarily what I think I was looking for in life. And was just kind of like, you know what? What could I do? I’m still young, make an impact. Make Yeah, and, and if I say Baltimore sucks and I love it, you know exactly what I mean, and so does everybody else that I know. Baltimore has been for a long time, kind of a hard place to live for a lot of people, especially if you really care about it and want to make people’s lives better, and or even just realize that we have greater potential than we realize as a city, as a community, as a population, and the activism here wears people down and they go into some other like world, or they just lay back from it after a while, because they tired of banging their heads up against the wall. Everybody I know when I say Baltimore sucks, and I love it, it’s not, but I love it, it’s and I love it because I do love it here, and it is difficult to live here. And, you know, I have plenty of friends who would do a good job at, I think the role of like public servant, but are also doing other things, like they’re musicians, they’re nurses, they’re lawyers, they’re just parents, they’re whatever. They work at a restaurant, right? Plenty of people doing the thing that like suits them, and no need for them to uproot in order to take a position of public service and leadership if they don’t want to, but I think that they’d be great at it. I want those people to stay where they are, doing what it is that they’re really good at and they love. And I just got to a point in my life where I was like, What can I do? What should I do? And this was a thing that kind of just in a conversation here and there, came up as the thing that might be an opportunity. And I don’t really know anything about public servant. You know, electoral politics, campaigns,

Nestor Aparicio  06:52

you weren’t Schoolhouse Rock, Social Studies. I like Johnny Oh, like on that, Carson cabinets on this week, not I mean, his father ran he grew up in a household. You When did this strike you on a day to say, I can run for councilman? You know, it’s the first step to being whatever you want to be in the political space. But, like, especially in your own Do you even, did you even know where your district was? I didn’t know the first voter. You haven’t done anything, okay,

Ryan Dorsey  07:15

yeah, I had literally never voted in a local primary election when I decided I was gonna vote for president, or, like, yeah, general elections, President, Governor, whatever, even local general elections. But I had never voted in a local primary election, and that’s what matters the most in Baltimore City, determining who the Democratic nominee is going to be, because we haven’t elected a non Democrat in six decades, and I had never realized the importance of that. Didn’t know who my

Nestor Aparicio  07:46

representative, as a city resident, who had watched mayors go to jail, mayors go to governorship, the wire, all of that you were not politically your parents, politically active, sure,

Ryan Dorsey  07:58

my parents, and in fact, I had in my band that I was playing in after college. One of my band mates was a political organizer, actually, and it just didn’t, you know, I didn’t really think much about what that meant

Nestor Aparicio  08:14

or what he did on it was this, we talked about Turner

Ryan Dorsey  08:17

played a Sheila Dixon event in Patterson park when she was city, the sitting City Council President, and was running for

Nestor Aparicio  08:26

susan o’malley, was the mayor. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so you’re talking turn of the century talk, 25 years ago, right?

Ryan Dorsey  08:32

And, and she so we, you know, I even played an event. Was it? Maybe when she was actually mayor, running. Okay, running for mayor,

Nestor Aparicio  08:43

yeah. I mean, so all of this had happened. What turned your eye to the community? I’d say we did for me, I live in the city, 20 years down in Harvard. I’m a wacky ass sports radio guy, right? It’s what I do, right? My wife got cancer in 14 and 15, and I was over at Hopkins. She’s fighting for her life leukemia. We’re a mile and a half away from Hopkins, and I saw all that happened with Kathy, with Sheila, with the gift cards, with Trump getting elected. With Freddie Gray. I saw the fireball in the sky over here in East Baltimore, because I lived on the 23rd floor at video the fireballs on the night of Freddie Gray, and that put me into a space to say I’m going to run for mayor. So I put this together in 1718, and 19, to run in 20, because I thought Sheila was just going to win. I thought Sheila was going to win the primary, and I was going to get it as independent and duke it out in the summer of 2020. Then we all had masks on the election. Got moved six weeks Brandon went from a young man who came and sat with me at fatally he’s telling me his mervo subway story, and when he got when he got mugged with Don molar and Don Mola says, nice kid. Too bad he can’t win about Brandon, right? Because he was Jack Young. Was the mayor at that point. And I’m like, I live. In this city. Somebody, Ryan, me, you bill TJ Mary Miller, I don’t care who it is, somebody’s got to step up and be on the up and up about the city. And Ted vanitulis always said to me, you’ll do more, not ever running with this. So you talk about what you could do to be a public servant. I think I decided that the best thing I could do was talk to guys like you and women like you, know Brooke, and hold you all accountable after being elected, because I’m unelectable. I moved to the county couple years ago, but not for any political reasons, just I sold my place, but like I get where you’re coming from, to say I never thought about running for office. It’s not about running for nasty Nestor and sports, but like cities effed up and it has bones. It has great people. It has all this, all the things that we all love about it. But to your point, it needed, it still needs caring, responsible people to try to lift it every day, you know. And I’m glad all of you step up. I like all of you. I like Felicia. I like you. I met Mark last week. I mean, everybody in the council, Bill Henry’s coming over. I know all of you to be people that really Cory, I mean people that I have on the show all the time. There’s a lot of really good public servants that maybe you’re maybe you feel the same way being involved in it.

Ryan Dorsey  11:16

I do. But, you know, at the same time, look, there wasn’t some like catalyst event that pushed me into it. It was just this general, like, years and years of living here and everybody feeling like the city could be better, and that the fact that it’s not just generally, must have something to do with the people in leadership. And so why don’t we change that leadership? And so, you know, I essentially explored the idea and just went, Oh, that guy’s my city council representative. I met him once. I bet I could do the job better than him. That’s about it. And then just put myself to it. It was about a year and a half out from the next primary election. I figured, what year was this? That was 20. That was the fall of 2014 Okay, yeah, so it was, I was about a year and a half out before Freddie Gray, I was about a year and a half out from the 2016 you had not been healthy, Holly, yet, she and I were elected at the same time. Okay? I announced my candidacy at Clementine up in Hamilton, Sheila had already bonds at that point of the Baltimore uprising. Oh, wow. Okay, so I was literally like, 15. Yeah. People were like, May of 15. April. May of 15. What is going on in the city right now? And everybody was basically saying, you know, I don’t know that I can do anything about what is happening right here, right now, this moment tonight, but I know that there’s a future where we need change, and Ryan is proposing to be a part of that change, and I’m gonna support him in that. And the mistakes were there,

Nestor Aparicio  12:56

and you just literally, you knock doors, walk the neighborhood, oh yeah. I mean, you’re not like a super famous dude that ran for student council who knew everybody and shook every hand or worked at the bar here, you know, like you said, told me you worked at Bo Brooks at one point, up the street. But I mean, did you have any business human I don’t even mean money. I just mean, like, was there the first 50 people or 100 people that told you this was a good idea, or were there people saying, Oh, come on, dude, you know, I mean, I’m sure you’re young, right? You’re You’re young, white, no political background, you’re all that getting taken seriously out of the gate probably was your first challenge, right? Like, literally,

Ryan Dorsey  13:37

right, as the idea occurred to me, and I started thinking about it, and started having some like conversation about it. You know, I was up kind of on Facebook Messenger, sending messages to people,

Nestor Aparicio  13:50

and they think you were beer talking or you serious drinking. 22 No, I’m just saying, like, did they think you’re poop talking or like you’re really gonna do it? Once they get an email from you, they know you’re

Ryan Dorsey  14:01

serious. One of the first people that I went to was the mother of a long time friend and family I’m friends with, and her reaction was, oh my goodness, this is such a great idea. You’ll do great I’m sure that you can do this. And one of the next people that I contacted was her ex husband, who I’m also just as close with, and his response was, You can’t be serious and and, and, but if you are, you should talk to so and so and so and so. Most

Nestor Aparicio  14:33

importantly, could she vote for you? And could he not? Or in fact, she

Ryan Dorsey  14:37

could and he could not. You. Yeah. Well, right, Dorsey, let me tell you when I when I realized what I needed to do in order to actually be able to run all that. Yeah, I knew I needed a campaign treasurer, that that was an essential what

Nestor Aparicio  14:58

was always on the bumper. Dicker. So I always knew that that was the Friends of right treasurer.

Ryan Dorsey  15:03

You have to have a treasurer legally, and they’re on the hook. If something funny happens with the money, they are criminally on the hook. So you got to be really close with your person. And I went to a person who I kind of hardly knew, but who was kind of a friend of a friend, and was kind of an anarchist punk, queer and was in school to become a an accountant. And I was like, Hey, I know it won’t win you any cool points to be the treasurer on a Democratic campaign, but maybe it’ll look good on a resume. I don’t know. Would you be interested in doing this? And the response was also, you can’t be serious

Nestor Aparicio  15:50

and, and, but the other part is, if they’re not taking you seriously, they’re thinking, well, I won’t have a whole lot of

Ryan Dorsey  15:55

money to worry about. My response was stupider. People have done it.

Nestor Aparicio  16:01

Oh yeah. Well, that’s

Ryan Dorsey  16:02

true. And so the and the reaction was fair point. Okay, almost one, let’s do it. And so we did it, and that friend is still my campaign treasurer today, all right, well, we’re two in, going third, right? Third. I’m in my third term right now. Yeah, okay, yeah. And it’s great. It’s the best one yet. So

Nestor Aparicio  16:24

Well, I mean, cry, let’s do the postcard for the city. If Brandon sitting here, which he loves the crab cake of Coco’s, by the way, and he has sat here with mask on in the middle of the plague when he first got elected, and all that stuff for you with the state of the city, for people out there, black, white, young, old. I hate the city. I’m never coming downtown to people that came twice for Nate bargazi Last week, or coming down to the Ravens game week after next state of the city as you see it, things that your eyes saw in 14 or 15 as a neophyte. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. Guy. You’ve picked fights with lots of different people and gotten that you can you have things you can say you’ve created and stood on and things, what? What has helped the city and this renaissance part sell me now as a county resident, I’m city four days a week. I mean, I see it myself. I drive through the city and see less crime, less trash, less mess, less dirt, less grunt, less threat, less threat. Just driving through I don’t feel like bad things are going to happen, because the place feels much more cleaned up, despite what that douchebag in the White House has to say about it.

Ryan Dorsey  17:33

But nonetheless, we are improved over the last four or five years, especially in terms of the state of our public infrastructure and investments, our buildings, our parks, our rec centers, or whatever we are improved in the state of our agency operations and improving. And some of that stuff takes a long time to like, right this ship, when you’ve got decades of like, kind

Nestor Aparicio  17:58

of what that means Public Works, picking up the trash, all basic, basic services, yeah,

Ryan Dorsey  18:04

and even administrative, like administratively, having SOPs in basic city agency operations, right, making sure that I

Nestor Aparicio  18:12

need to get a permit. Oh, man, that that was always the biggest nightmare for city business owners to say they need to get

Ryan Dorsey  18:17

a permit for the city agency personnel to have a specific way of doing their job in a reliable and consistent manner that can deliver services to the average person consistently. We’re, you know, we’re better and improving in that, and we have been in recent years, and I’ve been a part of this. I think passing laws that set us on a long term trajectory of improvement create a complete streets law that says that our streets need to not only accommodate the highest volume and highest speeds of car travel, but to meet all people’s needs in terms of how they safely and effectively get from point A to point B, whether or not they own a car. We have an inspector general’s office that is this independent watchdog that I also led

Nestor Aparicio  19:13

on that big deal in the county, by the way, big deal in the county, big

Ryan Dorsey  19:16

deal in the city. We have improved ethics laws to hold people like myself, but other city employees and contractors accountable as well.

Nestor Aparicio  19:29

Example that I mean, because I I have no pushback on this. I just trying to understand what you say. Listen, ethics in the city. I almost ran for for Mayor crazy as me, because I just tired of being lied to, ripped off, stolen from as a resident, right? Like that. That was just that was going to be the baseline of, I’m like you. I might not have known what I was doing, but I’d be honest doing it well, you know, he’s coming into it, and I never felt that way, right? And people outside feel like, if you want to be a criminal, get in. The city government, and I’ve never felt that way at all. But putting more ties in so that the healthy Hollies and I’m gonna steal gift cards or whatever it’s gonna be isn’t gonna happen anymore. I having that trust is that’s the most. I think that was one of the things was really missing, one of the things that got you into government.

Ryan Dorsey  20:18

So I did two things simultaneously. Look, they’re kind of like four pillars to like what I do as kind of a leader. I care about housing, jobs and transportation, where we live, where we work, and how we get between the two. These are the three, kind of three legs of livability, right? They work together. They’re symbiotic. And then there’s this fourth thing, like government accountability and trust, that’s kind of separate from that.

Nestor Aparicio  20:45

And without that, you got nothing.

Ryan Dorsey  20:47

Literally, you don’t have a government that can effectively deliver any of the other stuff, sure. And so I created the Inspector General’s office in my first term. And then also, what happened in the first term? Look, I had no love for Kevin Davis as a police commissioner, and was happy to see him go. But then, when Catherine Pugh was nominating a new police commissioner nominee, she put forth Darrell de Souza, who wouldn’t answer critical questions about like basic philosophy on public safety and policing, things either in private or in the public confirmation hearings, he just wouldn’t answer these questions that I thought were really important, and so I voted against him, and specifically said, How could I possibly vote for a person who won’t even answer these basic questions for me? And then two months later, he was being federally indicted for fraud and going to federal prison. And the day after the indictment came down, it came out that, you know, maybe two days later, that he also hadn’t been filing his financial disclosure forms with the city properly annually. He had been here for a long time, he wasn’t following these forms. And then the day after that, it came out that none of the top brass at BPD was filing their financial disclosure forms. And so I rewrote the whole system of how we ensure that we as a city, know who is supposed to file these forms, that those people unequivocally know that they are required to file them, and that we also have a system for following up with them when they fail to file them on time, but also prompt them to do it before it’s due and and that they know what the consequences will be if they fail to file. And so we are much, much more compliant in our financial disclosure forms. I even want a step further, and now it’s not just me that’s accountable in my financial disclosure. You uniquely elected officials also have to disclose certain things about their spouse’s income as well. My wife is an artist, for example. Now, what if the top dogs at somebody who was trying to do business with the city was paying my wife 10s of 1000s of dollars for art? Right? There might be a, might be a conflict of interest there, right? And so I have to disclose things about her work as well. So we’ve improved a lot of things about public trust, public accountability, and I led on all of those things. I led on three different ethics bills in my first term, plus the creation of the Inspector General.

Nestor Aparicio  23:18

How popular, unpopular to make you in your own circle. I you know, I don’t know. It’s

Ryan Dorsey  23:24

not a popularity context for me.

Nestor Aparicio  23:26

So I’ve never met you before. Three days ago, I know of you. You said you were ducking me. I don’t know if he’s kidding or not, but, but. But for me, the whole accountability part of you being an elected before I thought of being an elected, long after I thought of not being elected, and through all of this process, that you’re the perfect guy to come on the show to talk about what was wrong, to make it right. I love that you’re here now in saying the city, in your time here, you can literally say this place has gotten better. And so Brandon could sit here and say that Bill Henry’s going to come over here and in a little while and say that, because I really believe that to be true. But the numbers, despite what Schindler says, are where we are, and all of you should stand proud. All the things you just said to me would resonate to somebody that’s never heard him say, Well, maybe guys like him, rabble rousers and guys that are going to come in and not worry about pissing off somebody that’s going to jail, you know, literally. And there was a perception that it was just rampantly out of control in regard to ethics, in regard to money, in regard to, you know, lots of names that are still out in the news, of people getting released and paroled and all of this stuff, first things first. We have people in the up and up now, and we’ve had the same Mayor through two terms, and we’ve had stability, right? I mean, the things that were missing when you came into this 12 years ago, there is some stability here now. That benefit is its own benefit, right? Yeah.

Ryan Dorsey  25:00

Not to mention massive decrease in homicides and violent crime in this city.

Nestor Aparicio  25:04

Why is that? Explain to folks why that is

Ryan Dorsey  25:07

because the gun violence reduction strategy that mayor Scott has put forth is working plain and simple.

Nestor Aparicio  25:16

He sat and told me what he was going to do, and I talked to a lot of smart people around that time because I was thinking of running so I’m doing a radio show trying to find the smartest people I can about all of the thoughts of how we don’t have Freddie Gray again, how we don’t have mayors going to jail again, like none of that. And they said to me, we’re going to take young black men who are very violent, who don’t have parents, and we’re going to talk to them. We’re just going to talk to them. Yeah, that’s right. And we’re and so more

Ryan Dorsey  25:43

like crime has absolutely no history of working here or anywhere else. Tough on crime is a myth, like smart on crime and intelligent about how we treat and work with not work against, human beings as human beings, actually works here and everywhere else, and that’s what we’ve begun to do as a city, and it is paying out dividends.

Nestor Aparicio  26:12

When you first heard of the strategy and Mayor Scott’s plan, you sound like you were probably in on it from the beginning, like what we’re doing is not you didn’t like the police commissioner, it’s a lot of things you didn’t like. You don’t like transport. Like. You don’t like transportation. There’s a lot of things that you stood out pissed off about.

Ryan Dorsey  26:26

My whole job is to be unhappy with things and try to put forth the things that I think will make me less unhappy. Okay, fair enough. Okay, and, and, and my the other you know, if that’s that’s half my job, the other half my job is to hear from other people about what they’re unhappy with and try to fix their problems. 95% of my problem is just, my job is just, is just hearing, you know, where somebody’s got an issue and trying to solve it on a case by case basis. And then when I see those cases amass over time, to go, what’s the underlying cause here? What can we change as a system, as a policy, as a law that will stop this from continuing to happen, and not just stop it, but, like, bring about the positive alternative to

Nestor Aparicio  27:10

it? Your phone’s ringing about the same thing over and over again, yeah,

Ryan Dorsey  27:13

and sometimes, and for a lot of people, it’s not a linear connection, or it’s not a the it’s not intuitive necessarily that the end and the means are connected. And we’re at a point now where I’ve been kind of at some of the same things for long enough that the dots are getting connected for more and more people. And so when you

Nestor Aparicio  27:40

start to sound smarter, when it works, to where you can point at it and say, this is was a good idea, or

Ryan Dorsey  27:46

when other people start going, you know what we should do, and somebody goes, that’s the thing that Dorsey’s been talking about for the last, like three years. And that’s where we are right now, with respect our housing crisis and our housing affordability crisis, and what we can and should and need to be doing to improve our housing outcomes and housing production in the city. And we’re at a place now where you know, part of why I feel so positive on the city right now is that we’re basically all rowing in the same direction me as the land use and transportation committee chair and as a close ally to city council president Zeke Cohen and a close ally to mayor Scott we’re all working in the same direction to advance policies that will help us to produce more housing to fulfill an unmet need that’s been chronically unmet for a very, very long time, not just in Baltimore City, but in the state. You’ve heard Governor Moore talking about this, and at the national level, you hear people like Elizabeth Warren talking about the millions of housing units that we are short as a nation, and where everybody understands that the crux of the problem lies at every individual local jurisdictional level throughout the country that we all adopted really bad land use zoning laws century or half a century or more ago, or redlining in Our case, well, that’s right, we pioneered it, and the Supreme Court invalidating laws like Baltimore’s prompted federal leadership, Calvin Coolidge, Woodrow Wilson, a century ago, to teach local jurisdictions how to write laws that would produce the same discriminatory, segregative outcome by constitutionally acceptable means, using economic tools to separate people. When the Supreme Court said you can’t use the color of a person’s skin to explicitly separate. Engagement by law, right? And so today, we’re 100 years steeped in those same laws, and they don’t look really any different now than they did 100 years ago, and they are the reason why we have segregated neighborhoods, not just by race, but also by class, and that our housing stock is dramatically mismatched for our supply, between our supply and demand. It’s why we have far fewer housing units than what we need as a city, than we have a demand for as a city, and why we’re unable to produce the number and the type of dwelling units and in the neighborhoods where people want to live well,

Nestor Aparicio  30:43

by the way, right? Dorsey’s here, a third district Councilman here in Baltimore City. We are in his district. We’re here at Coco’s pub, celebrating 27 years for me, 40 years for Marcel and her mom. And it’s all brought to you by the Maryland lot of your friends at GBMC as well as I’m going to be eating some coconut shrimp here courtesy of our friends at Curia wellness, because it’s our 27th anniversary, and they sponsor all of our anniversary all of our anniversaries around here. I had Zeke on two weeks ago. I had Odette on. I had Mark Conway on. Felicia was going to come today, but couldn’t make it. I talked to Brandon a couple of times. Let’s go, because I’ve been Adam on the show, and I had Zach on as well. All of you have spoken of housing like and obviously Odette is her thing, right? So here’s where I get at it. And say we’re so flighty in Baltimore City for people leaving and the electorate, it gets smaller and smaller. Tax base gets smaller and smaller, and yet, I saw a report this week that we’re like the third most young people getting jobs and affordability to some degree, to be able to move in, maybe with roommates in Federal Hill, like we used to do in the day. But the housing issue, we used to have a lot more residents in this city, deteriorating housing, obviously lead paint as best, all those things, unlivable housing, dwellings that need to be not just rethought, but raised your district, and what you’ve seen for a dozen years here, you have more people, less people, less housing. And what when you say we don’t have enough housing? Why is that? Because the city’s always been the same, and at one point we had twice as many people around here.

Ryan Dorsey  32:14

If you look at not just the most recent census, but even the one before that, you can see that we have a clear trajectory where even though we are losing total number of residents, we are actually gaining in number of households. And if you look here and Metro in the metropolitan area and across the country, what has happened is that average household size has shrunk from three and a half people to two and a half people. When you’re talking about little numbers like that, a difference of one person makes a huge difference through 400,000 to 600,000 if that’s right, literally, look at it like that. And so what we have are fewer people trying to occupy more dwellings, and yet we have only retained, for the most part, the same large dwellings that were accommodating Boomer families with six and eight and 10, these big, beautiful homes in this neighborhood that’s right up Berkshire. Yeah, right. And so we’ve got two adults or three, you know, two adults and a baby occupying a three bedroom house that once housed 10 people in it, and could could clearly adequately house that number of people still today, and we prohibit that too large a house from ever becoming even two apartments, right? So you and you and your partner and your eight kids can all live in this house, and it’s perfectly acceptable for there to be 10 people living in that house. And each of you can own two cars and park those 20 cars up and down the street anywhere you want. But it’s a bridge too far to say, let’s put up some walls and install a new kitchen and bathroom and make it into two units, and Nestor and Ryan each live in this as two apartments. The two of us are too much, but the 10 that are the family that can live there are not. And this is totally illogical, and we don’t make that same rule in row home neighborhoods. We only make that rule for detached home neighborhoods because, by design, they were conceived through zoning as a place of exclusivity, where you can’t live here if you are somebody who can only afford an apartment, you can’t live here unless you have the money for the down payment, the income level, the credit to be able to Get the loan and the car payment on top of that, because we’ve spread it out so much that it’s you can’t, you can’t practically live in much of these neighborhoods, unless you also drive a car and are dependent on that just to come and go from your house anytime you want to go anywhere.

Nestor Aparicio  34:57

Transportation, I think that’s. So when I think of you from the outside, I think of transportation. I think of you as the bike guy. People do, yeah, well, I mean, you, you stood on that, right? So

Ryan Dorsey  35:08

Fox Baltimore has gone to great lengths to portray me as a person who only cares about bikes.

Nestor Aparicio  35:15

Okay, so I don’t watch Fox News, but I did think it’s your signature issue. You know what I mean? People think my signature she was fighting with Peter Angeles. But that’s not all I did, or not all capable of doing, but the transportation thing and biking, and I’ll just say this to you, I don’t bike. I have biked in places I don’t like the way people drive. I don’t I would not feel safe on a motorcycle based on how unsafe I feel sometimes on 695 here, that being said, been to Amsterdam. I am a world traveler. I mean, I’ve been on five continents. I’ve been in big cities, I’ve been in farms, I’ve been in mountains, I’ve been in islands. I get the bike thing. I appreciate the Asian part of it, I appreciate the Netherlands part of it. I my thought was, When are people going to adopt it here? It’s a great idea in theory, until nobody rides bikes or doesn’t feel safe on a bike, or wherever it was, or the bike lanes get so dirty with schmutz and trash that you you couldn’t ride through it if you wanted to. Now I will say this, I drove down Argonne Lane about two years ago cursing you, saying, Dorsey, want to come on my show, and there’s trash here, and he built these things. And who the hell would use this? And now today, I didn’t do this on purpose, because I usually take cold spring to Moravia. I was going to go over to is Woodley in your woodley’s in your, your district, right? Woody bakery.

Ryan Dorsey  36:44

Woodley bakery is directly across the street from the northeast corner of

Nestor Aparicio  36:48

my desk, all right? Well, you could still walk over there get chocolate chip cookies, because the best, the best donut, Best Cookies, chocolate chip cookies, my well, I’ll go to Fenway for the peach cake next week. But so for me, um, the the notion that bikes are a great thing, that they could catch on, that people should be doing it, that it’s healthy, that it’s all of that. But I took Argonne down here. It was cleaner from from the college through that I can literally look at you and say, You can ride your bike through there today. Two years ago, it wasn’t good glass. Just using the bike lane as a dump dumping spot doesn’t help bikers, and it doesn’t help your cause to create the bike lanes, but I know what you were trying to do, which was open this up, that you wouldn’t need a car, you’d be healthy, you could get where you want to go. And for people who don’t have the money that we all know, the transportation system with bussing, I’ve been up and down that river a million times that I live in Laravel and I work in Towson. How the hell do I get there if I don’t have a car? Because it’s tough. My dad, I grew up in a house without a car. I took busses everywhere in my childhood. So the first 15 years of my life, I had a bus pass in the city, in the county, everywhere. I know that that’s not a great way to do this. I take the light rail to the airport a couple times a year. It’s fine. I live in 1000 but the bike thing, give me the whole soup to nuts. Fight back on the Fox Baltimore thing and tell me where your inspiration and perspiration came for transportation.

Ryan Dorsey  38:18

A third of the households in the city of Baltimore don’t own a car, and if you look at the multi adult households that have only one car, this is all based on census data. What it comes down to is when you combine those multi adult households with only one car and the households that have no cars, 50% of the adults in Baltimore City can’t walk out their front door and get into a car and won’t go where they want to go right now. And so

Nestor Aparicio  38:43

that’s hard for some people in their car, cushy little car right now, driving around in their Lexus or the BMW or their Toyota or their late mile Chevy, and they’re listening to me on the beltway right now. You don’t have a car, you know? Yeah. And so everybody I knew growing up has a car. I go to Manhattan all the time. Nobody has it’s not sure. I live downtown Baltimore. There were weeks we didn’t move our car.

Ryan Dorsey  39:02

Yeah, and there’s mass and there’s massive economic disparities that follow that delineation of car ownership or non what kind of job can I get? Well, and transportation is the number one barrier. It’s the deal maker or breaker in terms of being able to find a job too. I mean, it’s the number one barrier to employment. You

Nestor Aparicio  39:22

get a job at trade point Atlantic right now from here, probably eight miles away, because I’m gonna, can’t how

Ryan Dorsey  39:27

many minutes get there, 90 minutes of public transportation each way. And nobody

Nestor Aparicio  39:32

understands. I understand that because I’ve talked to five mayors in a row, and I lived in the city for 20 years. I understand that. I understand that, but, like, people don’t really understand that, that if, if Marcella wants to hire someone here at Coco’s, hiring a nice kid from Well, five miles away on the wrong side of the tracks, they have no way to get to work. What

Ryan Dorsey  39:52

people also don’t understand is how we got here, and that is at the end of World War Two. This is exactly the end of World War Two. You. Is precisely when the city started losing population white flight, and the GI Bill started promoting white people moving out of Baltimore City, and they were moving there into newly sprawling suburbs, and they were moving there with their cars, and they were still working in Baltimore City and retaining friendships, relationships and influence, so that even though they were abandoning our tax base, they were still wielding influence over city decision making, and they made their money in Baltimore, that’s right, living and so as it became an imperative for them to drive their car as fast as possible from their home in Baltimore County into downtown Baltimore, they persuaded Baltimore city leadership to prioritize their interests of cars over the interests of public transit, and this meant the road to nowhere. Well, this meant specifically flooding the streets with cars that were then impeding the very high functioning streetcar operation in the city, high frequency and very high consistency to streetcar operations, especially where left turning cars were stopping on the center, running streetcar tracks and obstructing those streetcars from progressing down the road because they were stuck behind a car that was waiting for traffic so that the car could turn left.

Nestor Aparicio  41:22

So one car stopping 200

Ryan Dorsey  41:24

people, yeah, that’s right, right? Oh, yeah, okay. And, and then the end, because the street cars 60s. You’re talking about 50s and 60s, right? The 1950s late 40s, yeah, because the streetcar system was systematically dismantled, or the beltway came from 47 to 63 right? And, and so the cars were what made it impossible for us to continue to reliably run street car operation, public transportation and and so I didn’t know that that is exactly

Nestor Aparicio  41:53

my dad would take the 23 street car, you know, I mean, Eastern Avenue, Highlandtown. Early in Highlandtown, the tracks were always still there. You know, you can still see him in a couple places, maybe around town, but you would see the tracks. And I’m like, Well, what made that a bad idea? Cars. Cars made a bad

Ryan Dorsey  42:10

cars made it a bad idea. Cars made it a non functional system and, and that was a decision to prioritize one set of transportation needs or desires over another, and that meant that if you wanted a high quality of life, you had to already be able to buy into the middle class at the cost of a car. Note that that was the cost of entry into the middle class. And if you didn’t have that from the outset, you were stuck economically. And that’s car insurance, gas. That’s right, right. On average today in Maryland, it costs somewhere between nine and $10,000 per year to own a vehicle that’s by far the most expensive means of getting around. And so we’re leaving people behind who can’t already afford that, and for the people who can just barely afford it. It’s coming at a cost to rob Peter, to pay Paul or 25% of their income. That’s right, that’s right. It’s a fortune, right? Yeah, that’s right. And so at a very fundamental level, creating safe and adequate and interconnected bicycling facilities is about creating any viable alternative at all for that 50% of the population who can’t walk

Nestor Aparicio  43:24

out of the well, right now, can I play old guy on a radio rush? Oh man, I be the old man here.

Speaker 1  43:29

Those damn line machines, they come out in front of me. I’m gonna kill somebody out there. Is that

Nestor Aparicio  43:35

pretty good? That’s my Dundalk coming out. You like

Ryan Dorsey  43:36

that? Drive, slower. Drive slower things are

Nestor Aparicio  43:43

cray, cray. And I’m just saying because, like, if I hit somebody, I’m talking about flex posts, like the poles, or are you talking about the little Johnson scooter routers. Oh,

Ryan Dorsey  43:52

Scooter, yeah, yeah. But you know how few scooter related crashes there are, or bicycle related crashes, or even dirt bike related crashes there are, compared to car on car or car careening off cars. Yeah, but even proportionally,

Nestor Aparicio  44:11

Listen, I’m not against your bike thing. I’m not even against the scooter routers. I’m for safety, and we were more

Ryan Dorsey  44:21

tickets we wouldn’t need, that’s right, we wouldn’t need bike facilities if drivers were just more considerate.

Nestor Aparicio  44:28

That would be for a camera between Bel Air road and Harford. Harford Joppa Joplin, like the way I’ve seen people drive after the plus 10 years, it’s all different level of craziness. So the bike lane thing that happened here, at what expense, and, and, and, I think the step we have mentioned Stephanie’s name, Stephanie’s the bike lane lady in a lot of people’s mind. No, no, it was Sheila. Go ahead. Sheila. Go ahead. Sheila put it was during Stephanie’s period,

Ryan Dorsey  44:58

the first i. A serious bicycle facility plan in the city, or actually, Schaefer did well. Now we’re going back 40 years. Now, 20 years, yeah, there was a bike plan dating all the way back to Schaefer never implemented. Sheila was the first to start the work of like creating bicycle facilities in the city. Stephanie created the mayor’s Bicycle Advisory Commission, and it’s just been a slog to try to get anything done year after year. Can you prove

Nestor Aparicio  45:24

that more people are using it and are, I mean, I see you from Fox News standing on it and saying it’s your issue. I wouldn’t, dude, I would love 10 years from now to see us visibly look more like

Ryan Dorsey  45:40

Amsterdam. You’ve been to Amsterdam, you’re familiar. And so all this talk about like people are like, ah, they get crazy. Don’t get

Nestor Aparicio  45:47

stoned on a bike. Not that I’ve done that in Amsterdam or anything. But

Ryan Dorsey  45:51

you familiar with this term? You ever heard the term bike lash? Think it’s

Nestor Aparicio  45:54

the first time I’ve ever admitted that on the air. Okay, it’s fine. You ever heard your sponsors? You ever

Ryan Dorsey  45:58

heard the word bike lash? This is what happens when you install bike lanes anywhere there’s backlash over the bike lanes, bike lash right? Where else

Nestor Aparicio  46:06

have they done it? Where it’s been like, like, gotten away with it, Austin, Texas, or Amsterdam? No, okay, they did that a million years ago, right? That’s right. They had to get the cars out of there because the city’s sinking and there’s nowhere to put the cars. There is no parking in

Ryan Dorsey  46:19

Amsterdam. Just envision the worst traffic jam you’ve ever been in in Baltimore City. That was it was even worse in Amsterdam, everywhere, all the time in the 1970s and they went, you know, what doesn’t work this. We need an alternative to this. And so they started building bicycle facilities, and they committed to it, and the culture changed because of it, and now it is this thing that nobody who’s ever even thought about it knows. Go Amsterdam, that’s a place where people bike. It’s just so readily identifiable. It’s because they started doing what Baltimore is doing.

Nestor Aparicio  46:55

45 really had no choice. I mean, as I see it, do we Amsterdam? The whole city looks like the pier at Fells Point, or downtown in Annapolis, where it’s just Ricky and narrow and built three days, three centuries ago. And you feel penalized. If you had a car there, I wouldn’t know what the hell to do with a car downtown Amsterdam, you know, like, literally

Ryan Dorsey  47:19

and and we can be the same,

Nestor Aparicio  47:23

but will we, you know? I mean, if we

Ryan Dorsey  47:26

maintain our commit, if we maintain our commitment to becoming a healthier, more equitable, livable city, yes, over time it but it takes time and every place,

Nestor Aparicio  47:39

take the first billion dollars a city has and buy 10, 10 million bikes and give them to everybody. And if everybody had a bike, they would use it. I think, I guess.

Ryan Dorsey  47:47

Well, look on the far one end of the spectrum, you got the 10% of people who they’re gonna bike everywhere all the time. You can’t get them in a car. It’s the only way they want to get around. On the other end of the spectrum, you got 10% that are like, there’s nothing you could do to possibly get me on a bike ever. In between, you got 80% of the population that’s interested but concerned. You got to make it safe for people. You also have to make it working. It can’t just be a safe bike lane that goes from point A to point B and doesn’t connect to any other bike lane. You got to build safe and interconnected bicycle facilities so that people

Nestor Aparicio  48:28

can travel a freeway to freeway to send stop and there’s no road anymore, right?

Ryan Dorsey  48:33

That’s right, right? Yeah. Well, we think that we built a road to nowhere. We think that it’s a failure if we build a bike lane from one point to another, and nobody uses it without going but wait a minute, where would the bicyclists be coming from? Where would they be going? Only where this one bike lane goes. Why doesn’t it connect to any other bike lanes? We have to build out a complete network in order for it to be functional and usable.

Nestor Aparicio  48:58

Look, if you ever can get pairing Parkway paved, maybe we just shut it down the cars and just let it be a bike lane. I mean to me, if Lombard was was a bike lane and Pratt was a two way car thing, and I could just get where there’s nothing but bikes like Amsterdam, yeah, like, I would feel safe, and I’m almost 60, but I don’t. Every time I’ve been on a bike as an adult, at first, it hurts behind you. I don’t like bikes. That’s why I do yoga. I know I’m not a what do they call her? What do they call that cycling thing that they do in the classes that you don’t spend class? Yeah, the road to nowhere there. I ain’t doing all that, but I don’t love bikes. But the biggest thing for me with a bike is just feeling like somebody’s going to kill me in a car. Yeah, that’s my biggest concern. Cars are deadly. I know this. You know Ryan Dorsey Nestor, transportation, housing, third district, Councilman, citizen, you’re not a rock star anymore, though you’re not a band anymore. No, I

Ryan Dorsey  49:59

do play my electric. Base. These days, base, I play, I play scales and I play arpeggios. That’s it.

Nestor Aparicio  50:07

Just, like, shooting free throws or, like, that’s right, like, just, just putt, putt, instead of no golf. Why wouldn’t I? Yeah, I like it. I like it. So for your district, what’s important? Here we talk about city issues. What are the things you fight every day. The little bridge over your Montebello was something getting done, right? That

Ryan Dorsey  50:23

was your that was a big deal. I mean, it needed to be replaced, but the plan was for it to be replaced like a highway, like bridge that only serves the purpose of moving as many cars as fast as possible. And that was just an outdated mid 20th century, you know, 1950 is kind of ideal, and I made sure that it was better and more than that, and it’s, you know, really thoroughly enjoyed by a lot of different people for a lot of different ways of getting around. Now,

Nestor Aparicio  50:54

are you hard when you see people on bikes riding around in these lanes? I mean, I I step across them when I see them. And one thing I’ll say is, I notice them because they’ve changed the parking they’ve changed how it is. I can’t say that I see bikes flying everywhere through there, but I want to I know they’re there. I don’t want some jack wagon to come along 15 years from now and throw it out, right? I mean, now that they’re here, they’re here to stay, right? I mean, and now it’s like, All right, let’s use them, get a job, have transportation, be healthier, all of those things that we said for save money,

Ryan Dorsey  51:23

the housing is the biggest issue at this point, right? Like I said before, the housing and the transportation, they go hand in glove. You can’t get a bunch of people riding busses if you’ve created a system where everything’s so spread out, like suburbs, where you need to use a car to get where you’re going, so you have to build in a concentration of bus ridership along where the busses run, in order to justify increased bus service and to make it possible for that reliability to serve more people. Same thing with bicycle facilities. You make the bike lanes go where people need to come from and where they need to go to. That’s why we have them. And prioritize putting them along Main streets like Harford road, so that, you know, businesses don’t run on how many cars you can park businesses run on how many people, no matter how they get there, can come in and out and spend their dollars and and when you can get people there by more than one means, more than just driving accessibility, right? Yeah, sure, and but, but at the same time, you need population density around those commercial corridors as well in order for them to have a mix of an adequate number of customers who come from a block away, two blocks away, and also people who come from a half a mile or a mile or the other side of the city. And we really severely lack that. Baltimore Harford road here has the lowest population density of any, any of the commercial corridors in the city, and

Nestor Aparicio  53:02

maybe that’s what I came with the wrong word with Zach last week, because I said you have more people in your notes. We’re zoned by people as we vote. But I said you have density. You mean his, his goes up. Yours has big houses and wide spaces. That’s Moravia Walther. All of this area over here, right? Built a lot. It looks different than this. It doesn’t look row housing.

Ryan Dorsey  53:23

That’s right. Okay. So, so that, but that, that lower density makes it impossible for us to support more businesses than what we already have here. Existing on Harford, humans, we don’t have enough humans, and we’ve known this for a very long time and done nothing about it, and so that’s why I’ve put forth this bill to create this Harford road overlay district to allow higher density housing within the first block off of Harford road. We’re not saying transform drastically the whole neighborhood, and we don’t even expect that first block to transform drastically. We just want to stop prohibiting the possibility of higher density housing in that area where it’s most walkable, to the commercial corridor and to that bus in

Nestor Aparicio  54:08

cities with subways, DC would be a great example, but New York would be the greatest example. And I often think of whatever courage it took to have be a city council person in 1890s or whenever it was in New York City, and say, we’re going to build holes underneath the city and we’re going to burrow out with trains that are going to run through like just Baltimore. Never entertained that concept. Lots of cities in America never entertain that concept. Certainly west of here, everything’s freeways and freedom and Texas and you know all of that. And then you go to Europe and see how people get around, how they live and the quality of life isn’t spent doing this 45 minutes driving from Arlington to, you know, Dallas and the triplex at $4 a gallon.

Ryan Dorsey  54:49

Yeah. Even when other East Coast cities, DC were opting into federal assistance to build subway systems, Baltimore opted out, we had basically said, Oh. We’ve already two races for that. Yeah, we’ve already thrown in the towel on our street car system. We’re totally bought into cars as a way of life. We don’t want the billions of federal assistance in order to build out of functional mass transfer. I

Nestor Aparicio  55:13

had larry hogan on the show talking about killing the red line. I ran on that. Okay, well, that’s why I didn’t vote for you. So So for me, this notion of having humans crowded toward Harford road, or not crowded, but just crowded like but, but the the notion that that’s what a subway stop would look like, that’s what East Point mall looked like when I was a kid, being a mall rat was like, there’s a mall. You put people around it, you put transportation there, and they work at the point. They work at GM, they work downtown. They can get there. There’s the beltway, they can get there. That was so it becomes a it becomes a spoken hub, right? I mean literally where people want to work. It helps Zeke’s, it helps Coco’s, it helps all of these businesses. And people would want to walk to their cheers, or to whatever, their service, their yoga. Doesn’t just help

Ryan Dorsey  55:59

these businesses, it makes it possible for there to be more of these businesses. You know, right now you could have maybe one, like handmade goods store, you know, for like boutique items somewhere along the Harford road corridor. But if you opened a second one, they would cannibalize each other, and both would fail. It’s not enough customers, right? And so creating the possibility of more people living in these neighborhoods where people want to live, right? These are high market value areas. People really want to live here, but we have laws that prohibit the neighborhood from expanding its housing opportunity, and so we can change that, but we have to change zoning laws, and that’s what I’ve made my number one priority.

Nestor Aparicio  56:43

See, I love this almost like a Mork and Mindy episode with Ryan Dorsey. What have we learned here today? We’ve learned that we have outdated, antiquated laws that were set up mainly by racists to make things that are very functional dysfunctional. So is that good? That’s good? Yeah. Well, the last thing you just said really resonated with me in regard to getting people to where the busses would be, where the transport, the bike lanes were, all of that, so that they can have jobs and have better lives and be closer to good schools and all that good stuff. That’s right. Keep up the good work, man. It’s fun. Fun. Hour it went by so quick that I’ve blown into Bill Henry’s time. So the good controller, I saw him a minute ago. I think he said, Yeah, see, I got my reading glasses on. I could bear I’m like, Bill, is that you and you winked at him? And I’m like, yeah, it’s Bill Emery. Find more information for you. If they live in your district and they’re mad at you, or they’re happy with you, or they saw you on Fox News and want to be nice to you, how do they find you?

Ryan Dorsey  57:36

Email me. Ryan dot Dorsey at Baltimore city.gov, that’s got a weekly newsletter that we put out about events and grants and other opportunities coming up, city programs and things like that. And I write my own like four or five paragraph most people would say too long message every single Friday, I write about whatever I’m up to and whatever I think. That’s

Nestor Aparicio  57:59

when you really piss people off sometimes, right? That’s, that’s the fun one. Look,

Ryan Dorsey  58:04

the easiest way to get in politics is to do nothing and have no opinions on anything. You can’t piss anybody off. I actually came to get things done, and in particular the difficult things that nobody else was trying to do, because they’re too difficult, but they are equally, they’re equally or more important.

Nestor Aparicio  58:20

Well, a dozen years in, you’re getting stuff done, man, we finally sat down and you got, like, a thing, a track record, a lot of answers for people. So my pleasure, really. Thank you. Thanks. Um, and also classmate of the guy that named me, nasty Nestor, 40 years ago. We’re out here at Coco’s, and you’re about to go eat some delicious

Ryan Dorsey  58:38

get the cream of crab soup. Get the coconut

Nestor Aparicio  58:41

shrimp. Get the coconut shrimp. Get shelf Greek salad. It’s money. It’s all brought to you by the Maryland lottery. The Lucky Seven stubblers are here. I’ll be giving these away later on. We get to drop the mic, just boom, throw it down. Bill Henry’s gonna be here. We’re six gonna be with his wife, and I think Marcel is gonna come by. We’re gonna celebrate 40 years of cuckoo’s pub at Coco’s pub. We’re Laravel. Stay with us. You.