Jason Booms over at Spartan Considerations wrote a post today presenting a list of questions regarding housing and inviting answers.
And boy, do I have answers. But before I get to it, it’s important to note that housing is an incredibly complex topic with a lot of nuance. Housing problems cannot be solved by simple, singular solutions, but rather, by multiple solutions working in tandem – such as more supply at all income levels, more subsidies, and tenant protections. Additionally, it is important to note the while housing is a basic, fundamental human need that is financially out of reach for many Americans, it is also a primary builder of wealth for homeowners across America. This fact often puts homeowners and affordable housing advocates at odds with each other.
1. How many new homes should be built in Howard County, let’s say by the end of 2022? Note: 0 is a perfectly allowable response if you believe that is what the number should be. If you want to use another timeframe, please indicate the timeframe you are adopting for your response.
I honestly cannot answer this. This is a question for someone with planning expertise and a greater understanding of what the needs are in Howard County from a pure numbers standpoint. The Howard County Housing Affordability Coalition last year cited a shortage of 6,000 affordable units, but regarding housing in totality, I don’t have an answer.
2. What is preventing Howard County from building 100% affordable housing only? Again, feel free to suggest a timetable.
You mean aside from Liz Walsh and Deb Jung, who pretty much killed affordable housing funding in this most recent budget cycle, including a project that was 100% affordable and would have provided housing for foster youth?
The greatest local barriers to building affordable housing are land scarcity and zoning. Roughly half of the county’s land area is preserved green space or agricultural land or environmentally protected. Of the remainder that is developable, only 2% of it is not currently developed or planned to be. This leaves very little land for new housing, especially land that is zoned for multifamily housing, and it means land is expensive. Dense, multifamily housing is the most economically efficient route to increasing the supply of affordable units, but with expensive land that allows only low-density single-family housing, the fact is that it is nearly impossible to build any appreciable number of new affordable units without a number of local policy changes to include zoning reform, density bonuses, and deeper subsidies.
3. Where should any new developments be built? Again, if you say “they should not be built anywhere in Howard County” that is an allowable response.
This is an incredibly difficult question to answer specifically. The truth of the matter is that any individual development being proposed must be considered on its specific merits given its location and circumstances. There are developments that would not make sense in one area of HoCo, but would work well in others.
4. To avoid appearances of impropriety, should all County Council candidates pledge to not accept developer money, either directly or indirectly? If the first clause of the previous sentence bothers you, feel free to focus your response on the rest of the question.
I understand that the perception is that taking campaign contributions from profit-driven special interests, such as developers, automatically means corruption. However, I would challenge folks to consider this: homeowners stand to make significant financial gains via anti-development policies that restrict supply and thus drive up property values, but nobody questions who they’re donating to and what they get in exchange for it. It’s a question worth asking, not as a whataboutism, but because folks often attribute housing woes to developers while discounting the very real impact of profit-driven homeowners protecting their property values (see also: redistricting).
All that aside, there is merit to campaign finance reform, and I’m all ears to any ideas for financing campaigns without introducing potential conflicts of interest like this.
5. What types of affordable housing should be built? For example, thinking globally, are there case studies regarding types of housing/developments that we could/should emulate/adapt. Again, “no” is a valid response.
Anything and everything. Apartments. Multiplexes. Accessory dwelling units. Mixed-use development. Live-where-you-work. Etc. We must hit all income levels.
6. How can we best address school overcrowding, infrastructure (broadly defined),and congestion issues while still building new affordable housing?
We can start by asking ourselves two questions: 1) why is school overcrowding such an issue when we talk about housing, but it suddenly stops being such a dire issue when someone proposes redistricting the schools to better make use of available capacity? and 2) why do we blame new development for school and road overcrowding and not ourselves? Do we not have children and cars taking up space in schools and on roads as well? Did any of us take note of how crowded a school was before we moved in or gave birth?
This is not to dismiss the validity of these concerns. Rather, it is to expose the tendency of people to point out this issue only when it benefits them, while offering no solutions. And it is a solvable problem if we stop getting in our own way. We depend on impact fees from new development for more infrastructure, but we also restrict new development because we don’t have enough infrastructure. We are shooting ourselves in the foot by doing this, because we drive up prices – worsening affordability – while getting little revenue to actually solve the overcrowding issue. My position is that we all use infrastructure, so we must all pitch in and pay for it.
7. How can we best ensure that developers are paying their fair share?
Define “fair share.” Then ask “How can we best ensure that developers taxpayers are paying their fair share?”
Folks can scream all they want, but this is important: we all use the schools, roads, and infrastructure. It doesn’t matter if we moved into a brand-new house yesterday or an existing house 30 years ago. We all use the public services, so we must all pay our fair share for the level of service we demand. Focusing on developers’ fair share and not our own is short-sighted – especially in the second-richest county in the state.
8. How can we best ensure that deals that are made don’t “evolve” in a way that runs contrary to the spirit and principle of building affordable housing?
I’m going to assume that this is referring to the misguided perception that the Downtown Columbia redevelopment is somehow not providing the affordable units it promised. Allow me to correct the record: the DRRA agreement lays out the mix of affordable units that serve multiple income levels. There are MIHU units currently leased at the Juniper; the New Cultural Center, a Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) project, was approved last year. Other MIHU units are in process but currently held up in APFO. Housing – especially affordable housing that must compete for limited LIHTC funding – takes time to move through the red tape and planning process, so it does not surprise me that hundreds of units did not materialize in an instant the minute the DRRA was signed.
9. What are the best arguments for building now as opposed to waiting on other spending priorities such as alleviating school overcrowding? What are the best arguments for waiting to build?
My preference would be for us not to make housing vs. schools an either/or proposition. To choose one over the other would serve no one well.
Howard County is in high demand and has been for years. That isn’t going to change if we stop building housing; it will simply drive prices up as bidding wars ensue. We’re seeing this currently, and Montgomery County learned this the hard way; they stopped building, and all it did was drive up prices while their school overcrowding got worse. You could never build another new home in Howard County ever again, and our schools would only remain crowded, if not more so, and our housing prices would be sky-high. See also: California.
We must find a way to address both housing and infrastructure by looking at tax restructuring to bring in more revenue. There is no good reason why the second-richest county in Maryland can’t do this. It just takes political will.
10. Bonus question: What defines a “progressive?”
I’d say that progressives define themselves, and they define themselves however they choose. Questions like these are the basis of ideological purity tests that do nothing to solve problems for real people.
At the end of the day, I’d like to see three things: more housing supply to help keep prices from getting out of control; carefully crafted tenant protections to prevent needless evictions and other exploitation of renters; and shifting government housing subsidies away from benefiting affluent homeowners and instead toward benefiting the housing insecure and rent-burdened.
I could write a ton more on this topic, but I’ll stop here. Please reach out if you’d like to discuss further.