There is a movement to provide more affordable housing in Montgomery County, Maryland.
An initiative that some officials say is aimed at creating more opportunities for affordable housing is causing controversy, with County Executive Marc Elrich calling its presentation “misleading” and speaking out against it live on WTOP.
The county planning commission put together an Attainable Housing Strategies Initiative that would allow for zoning changes where single-family homes are built.
The changes would allow for the properties where there are single-family homes to actually become duplexes, triplexes or small apartment buildings in what some officials say is an effort to find more places for the middle class to live
The council has not taken any action yet. Instead, they have been holding listening sessions in the last few weeks to gather feedback on the initiative from residents. The most recent session was held Wednesday night in Bethesda.
The reactions appear to be a mixed bag among residents on how they feel about the proposal.
Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich joined WTOP’s Anne Kramer and Shawn Anderson to talk about why he’s against it.
The transcript below has been lightly edited for clarity.
Shawn Anderson: Give us an idea why you are against this initiative, when it certainly seems housing is so out of reach for so many in the county.
Marc Elrich: Exactly for the reason the way this topic was introduced, I think the person referred to this as affordable housing. So I want to just start by reading from Park and Planning’s document on Attainable Housing Strategies. And in it, there’s a question that says, ‘Is this affordable housing?’ And this is what Park and Planning says, ‘No, the prices newly built homes will be determined by the market.’
And so if it’s in a neighborhood of million-dollar houses, these will be a million-dollar town houses. If it’s $800,000 homes, they’re $800,000 homes. There is no affordability. There is no requirement for affordable units to be built. And in the apartments, they talk about the small apartments up to 19 units. It’s 19 units because 19 units doesn’t trigger the requirement to build affordable housing. So this has nothing to do with affordable housing. It’s to build more high-end housing in certain neighborhoods, which means that’s housing that was actually planned in our master plans for other communities in Montgomery County, that’s not going to go there. It’s going to go into these neighborhoods, and it’s going to leave a very different mix of housing or people available to fill the places we plan on building.
Fundamentally, they’ve been misleading people from the beginning. The number of people that they say are coming to Montgomery County are based on their estimate of how many units we built in five-year intervals, over 30 years, throughout the county. So when they tell you people are coming here, it’s actually their estimate of what we’ve already zoned will get built. So we’re in a very different situation to many cities where they are literally built out. Montgomery County’s not built out. We’ve got room for over 100,000 households over the next 30 years. There are plans for it, and they’re acting like these things don’t exist. So they go to the community and say, ‘All these people are coming here, and we must rezone.’ And the fact is, we even have a slide from a COG meeting where they the slide says, ‘You do not need to rezone to provide the housing.’
They’ve taken what they call a ‘crisis.’ They’ve limited the affordability, not addressing it. They’re not being honest with people. There are people who commented last night about, ‘We need affordable housing.’ We absolutely need affordable housing. That’s where the crisis is in Montgomery County.
And if I build market rate housing and get no affordable housing units for the market units, which is what we get if you build it in the areas we plan for, we’re even going to have less affordable housing in Montgomery County. They’re doing a bait-and-switch on this.
Anne Kramer: If this becomes a proposal that the county council considers, if I understand this correctly, you don’t have the power to override it. So what other alternatives are there then?
Marc Elrich: Well, there are no other immediate alternatives. The council is going to make a decision about what they’re going to do. I think this whole dismissal of what people think about their neighborhoods is kind of stunning. This is a place where we pride ourselves, and everybody comes here. People discover great neighborhoods they want to live in. The idea that the council can just decide at random that people can build by right things, that the master plans, that people moved into the neighborhoods thinking they were going to have that, they don’t have that anymore, is kind of shocking.
If this was done for a reason, where you could say, ‘We have to do this to get affordable housing. This is the only way we can get affordable housing.’ I’d think differently about it, but this is a fraud the way they presented it. There’s no other word to use for it.
Shawn Anderson: County Executive Elrich, this is a conversation to be continued here in the days of weeks ahead. Thanks so much for joining us.
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