I live in Howard County District 4, specifically in Harper’s Choice Village in Columbia. Like our neighbors in Wilde Lake and Hickory Ridge, our village’s socioeconomically diverse population is evident in our housing. Stand at the edge of a cluster of single-family homes, and you can throw a stone across Harper’s Farm Road and reach a group of mid-priced apartments. Walk toward our village center – where we shop for groceries, grab a cup of coffee, get takeout, and enjoy Italian ice on hot summer nights – and you’ll find condominiums and apartments on all sides. Across the intersection of Harper’s Farm Road and Cedar Lane sits a high-rise of public housing on a lush green parcel of land. Take a stroll down Cedar Lane, and you will pass by private income-restricted housing, market-price townhomes, and the community pool and elementary school where our kids create friendships and play together.
This is Jim Rouse’s Columbia. Housing for all, regardless of income level, and shared community amenities and services that bring people together.
Howard County has a dearth of affordable housing, and our real estate market is currently on fire, with houses selling in less than a week and for well above asking price. High demand for our land of pleasant living, our schools, and our ideal location between Baltimore and D.C., combined with tighter squeezes on housing construction due to infrastructure limits, have driven prices up. Meanwhile, we are quickly running out of developable land that isn’t preserved green space, environmentally protected, or set aside for agriculture. Add to that our wide swaths of low-density, single-family-home-only zoning that forbid the construction of affordable multifamily housing units in much of the county, and it’s quite clear how we have reached the point where the cost of living index for housing in Howard County is nearly twice the national index.
With all of this in mind, I could not believe my ears when my District 4 County Council representative, Deb Jung, recently spoke out against an affordable housing development being proposed in Ellicott City. I’ve written about the Dorsey Overlook project before, which is a 100% affordable project that will serve a range of income levels from 30% to 80% of the area median income (AMI). It will also serve disabled residents and, for the first time in county history, include units reserved and prioritized for aging out foster youth. The development would be nestled next to a sizable cluster of $500K townhomes and will be ideally situated in close proximity to retail, services, and transit. In other words, it would bring a bit of the Rouse vision to Ellicott City.
And yet. Ms. Jung expressed objections to the project (starting around 4:18:00). She claimed that a 100% affordable housing development with no market-rate units would concentrate poverty in a single development. She also blamed the Department of Housing and Community Development, which is responsible for affordable housing initiatives and assistance efforts, for continuing to place low-income housing in areas assigned to a particular group of schools. She claimed that this was “segregation by design.”
Girl. What?
Her objections are not entirely wrong. The concentration of poverty in schools is well-documented to be detrimental, and mixed-income development creates more granular socioeconomic integration. However, this project will serve a wide range of income levels. The development will be immediately adjacent to market-rate townhomes, similar to how the entirety of Columbia was designed. While her point about the schools is valid, it is HCPSS, not DHCD, who sets school boundaries – and households qualifying for 80% or even 60% AMI are not living in poverty. Moreover, Ms. Jung seems to be overlooking the most glaring factor that concentrates lower-income or affordable housing into the same areas, one that she – not the DHCD – has the power to change: zoning.
That’s my biggest issue with what Ms. Jung is saying. A County Councilmember who is truly concerned about both affordability and integration needs to address those issues at the zoning and housing policy level, rather than waiting until an individual affordable housing development, with LIHTC and Housing Choice vouchers already secured, hangs in the balance. Purporting to support integration by voting down an affordable housing development and surrendering precious LIHTC credits is the very essence of NIMBYism, where seemingly noble intentions obstruct housing projects but mysteriously never do much of anything else to affirmatively further fair housing. On the contrary, taking meaningful local action such as getting rid of single-family zoning and enacting policies that make affordable units easier, faster, and more financially feasible to build will do more for affordability and integration than a head-shake and a thumbs-down ever will.
Now, just this week, Ms. Jung and District 1 Councilmember Liz Walsh filed amendments to strip the Dorsey Overlook project, as well as the proposed Housing Opportunity Trust Fund, of critical funding included in the FY2022 budget. Let’s not forget that Ms. Walsh has been against the Dorsey Overlook project from the start, and Ms. Jung also attempted to kill last year’s New Cultural Center project, another LIHTC development. I’m sensing a pattern here, and it is unconscionable.
The bottom line is this: given our current housing climate, no elected official who truly cares about housing affordability has any business turning down a single affordable housing unit anywhere in this county. The recently released recommendations from the Housing Opportunities Task Force made clear the state of affordable housing in Howard County, and its recommendations regarding zoning are prudent and necessary to bring more affordable housing to more areas of the county. As a resident of District 4, I am supremely disappointed in Ms. Jung and will be watching carefully to see if she decides to take any meaningful action to affirmatively further fair and affordable housing in Howard County – or if she simply decides to continue obstructing it.
*Correction: this piece initially attributed the budget amendment cutting funding for Dorsey Overlook to Deb Jung. It has been corrected to show that it was Liz Walsh who introduced that amendment, and Deb Jung introduced an amendment to cut funding from the Housing Opportunity Trust Fund.