This is a multi-part series making yet another effort to correct misinformation and false narratives surrounding housing in Howard County.
There are a lot of old wives’ tales out there, well-worn precepts that are nearly universally believed because they contain a tiny grain of truth, but are otherwise bogus. You’ll catch a cold if you go outside with wet hair in winter. You should wait an hour after eating before going swimming. Developers have ruined Howard County with overdevelopment and overcrowded schools and we must stop them.
That last one drives me nuts. Not because I care about developers (the accusation that I’m a “developer shill” when I defend housing is becoming sadly predictable and tiresome). It’s because this narrative has the potential to cause serious, negative consequences for housing affordability – and schools, for that matter.
Housing is treated as a commodity in the United States, subject to the whims of capitalism and the market. This means that econ 101 principles generally apply to the housing market. High demand and low supply drives prices up. Increasing the cost to build housing – such as construction materials, fees, and staff needed to check off all the regulatory boxes – drives prices up. Expensive land and low-density zoning that necessitates building high-end homes to ensure adequate returns to investors drives prices up.
Howard County hits this trifecta; demand is high for our land of pleasant living and good schools while new housing construction has slowed; our zoning codes, public infrastructure requirements, and politically dicey approval processes add years of delay, risk, and uncertainty to development projects; and much of the county is blanketed in single-family-only zoning that bars cheaper, denser housing from being proposed without a fight. It’s little wonder that Howard County’s housing cost of living is nearly twice the national average.
Any housing policy expert will tell you that stifling supply is going to make things worse. After years of experts saying so, even the Biden administration is now wising up to the fact that demand-side solutions (e.g., housing subsidies) are not enough; they must be coupled with abundant supply to have a measurable impact on housing affordability.
And yet, any developer proposing a project – especially one with any kind of density – is guaranteed to set off a round of kvetching by Howard County citizens and current and former elected officials. School overcrowding is guaranteed to be a topic of conversation. Traffic and flooding will likely also make an appearance in the local conversation. It makes sense; after all, many of our schools are over capacity, and Ellicott City did experience two catastrophic floods in recent years. The narrative will be this: that developers created these problems, and they must be stopped – or at the very least, we should make them pay higher fees and build new schools.
Developers make for a convenient scapegoat. They are capitalist entities, after all, who want to maximize profits. The tale that they are overflowing the county with houses, people, and cars in greedy pursuit of the almighty dollar is all too easy to say and believe. But applying some critical thinking reveals that this topic is not as simple as it appears, and the blame is largely (but not entirely) misdirected. Not only that, but the proposed solutions that go along with this narrative are short-sighted, place responsibility on the wrong people, and will make both school overcrowding and housing affordability worse.
In the next post in this series, I’ll be producing data that undergirds the following tenets:
- our infrastructure inadequacies are the fault of elected officials and ourselves;
- slowing housing construction has not, and will not, deter population growth;
- none of our problems will be solved by obstructing housing, but will instead be exacerbated.
Stay tuned!