Salisbury may consider future of rental ordinance

SALISBURY, Md. – The City of Salisbury could soon revisit an older ordinance known as the 4 to 2 ordinance, which limits how many unrelated adults can rent a home together.

The ordinance was originally created to prevent Salisbury University students from encroaching on residential neighborhoods.

Right now, the ordinance restricts rentals to two unrelated adults per home.

“The 4 to 2 legislation was originally developed around the university to kind of ebb the flow of college rentals, which it was pretty effective at,” said Salisbury Mayor Randy Taylor.

Taylor said there’s been discussion lately about rolling back the 4 to 2 ordinance. It’s something the city mayor is not in favor of.

“I think it has unintended consequences, I think the university would even agree that pushing the kids to more of a multi-family arrangement rather than residential in the traditional neighborhoods was a good thing to support the neighborhoods,” said Mayor Taylor.

Taylor said he thinks there are other approaches that are more useful.

“If you look at our pipeline, we’ve got almost a thousand units coming online, a lot of those are apartment complexes things like that so, hopefully rental housing is moving out maybe to the duplexes and the apartment complexes, so we can maintain our traditional single family residential neighborhoods,” he said.

However, CEO of Habitat for Humanity of Wicomico County Molly Hilligoss said many living situations are different today.

“We have gay couples that want to live together, we have single women, multiple single women that want to live together, single men that want to live together to cost-share,” said Hilligoss.

She’s calling on the City of Salisbury to get rid of the ordinance.

“We have so many low-income people that are looking for affordable housing, now is the time to repeal this ordinance, so that working folks can cost-share and live together,” said Hilligoss. “There’s no reason for the City of Salisbury to mandate who can live together.”

Hilligoss suggests that City officials obtain an official legal opinion from the Maryland Attorney General, Office of Civil Rights on the legality of the 4 to 2 ordinance.