How Prince George’s County could deal with soaring rents

Prince George’s County has been searching for a long-term solution aimed at keeping soaring rents from pricing out longtime residents. That concern led the Maryland county’s council to impose a temporary cap on rents last year.

Now the council will get ready to start taking up more permanent solutions.

During a briefing last week, members of a task force studying the issue unveiled their recommendations to the council, which included making rent caps a permanent policy change in the county.

“Something that we would recommend is that the county really consider a policy that is anchored to an inflation index and has a hard cap in place to ensure that stability,” said Bithia Ratnasamy-Palmer, who chaired the task force.

The team recommended that the county create a formula that would have at least 4% increases but no more than 10% in any given year.

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Not everyone on the task force agreed with everything in the final recommendations, Palmer said, but there was an acknowledgment that there would need to be some flexibility to deal with rising maintenance and other costs that could provide some exemptions to those caps.

One of the things the council needed to do, Palmer said, is to think about the specific nature of different types of properties and landlords. But she also said a higher cap number should be coupled with strong tenant protections.

“It’s essential for the county to think about how to protect renters rights,” such as anti-harassment policies and rules that govern threats of eviction or reporting to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement as a means to intimidate tenants, Palmer said.

Currently, the average asking price per square foot in Prince George’s County is less than in any other part of the region. However, the median income is also thousands of dollars less in Prince George’s County than anywhere else in the region.

That means, despite the comparatively less expensive rents, 52% of county residents are considered “rent burdened” — they pay more than 30% of their income on rent. That number has been steadily climbing since before the pandemic, and it is now approaching 65,000 households.

In the short term, the 3% caps passed on a temporary basis last year are set to expire on April 17. But the council has already begun the process of extending it by another six months into October, in order to buy the council more time to consider the recommendations from the task force and put together a long-term, more encompassing solution.

But members of the task force also made clear that the solution lies well beyond focusing on rents.

“Rent stabilization is not in and of itself an affordable housing production tool, nor is it a preservation tool. It also doesn’t guarantee universal affordable rents,” said Melissa Bondi, of Enterprise Community Partners, who contributed to the task force. “If the rent is too high today and it goes under rent stabilization tomorrow, that rent is not likely to decrease, so it would still be less affordable.”

Bondi told the council that there continues to be a strong need for more housing in general, and places in the county are not able to meet the housing needs of people who want to live or remain in the area.

“Those who are seniors, those who are coming out of school with student loan debt and want to build their careers and their families here, everyone in between. We are not producing or preserving enough housing that’s affordable for all of the folks we’d like to have in our community as a region. And so that’s a challenge for all of us.”

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