Affordable Housing

Where does “Maryland short of 96000 housing units” come from?

Where does “Maryland short of 96000 housing units” come from?

I have seen numerous “Maryland is short of 96000 housing units“. So, I am searching around to see where that number comes from.

A few years ago, there was a 2020 post ” there is still work to be done. Maryland currently lacks proximately 85,000 rental units for its lowest income households (meaning extremely low-income or those earning 30 percent of area median income [AMI] or below)” . Page 1 of “Report.pdf (maryland.gov)“.

Then December 15, 2023, there was a briefing for HOUSE ENVIRONMENT AND TRANSPORTATION COMMITTE, it provided another number of 96000 units, ent – 133470586067717734 – ENT_Briefing_December_23_Presentations.pdf (maryland.gov)

A quick check for this source: it is a website for more housing growth. Then I compared three states (MD, PA, and VA). Note: MD has 6.1 million population, VA has 8.6 million population and PA has 12.8 million. Basically, their model predicted very close numbers for these three states.

In 2019, MD needs 91k units (1.49%), VA needs 98k units (1.13%) and PA needs 105k units (0.82%). Maryland rate is highest among neighboring states. What’s happening here (data accuracy issue or Maryland is the worst)?

In 2013, Maryland population is 5.88 million, so the house shortage rate is 0.87%.

Frankly I am surprised so few work on this housing shortage modeling. We have to rely on one company and one number. Thinking of the importance of this number on our policy making on the stare level, we need to really scrutinize these predictions.

It will be great if we have another model to predict housing needs, but from a different angle: for example, from a model focusing on APFO. I am interested in knowing what’s their projected housing needs.

Affordable Housing and Pay As You Go Loophole

Howard County Citizens Association is asking the County Executive and County Council to adopt a bill to remove a loophole for developers. I came to know this loophole when Howard Hughs was proposing a new large scale downtown development with county finance help in 2016-2017. The TIF (Tax Increment Finance) was 170 million. They did not build the affordable housing units as promised in their previous developments and then they used affordable housing units again as a wedge to get their new deal approved. Here is the article I wrote four years ago on this issue: https://chaowu.org/2016/07/27/columbias-downtown-and-affordable-housing/: Columbia’s Downtown and Affordable Housing .

We should not allow developers to pay a tiny fee to skip the affordable housing requirements in their project. I am especially looking forward to affordable housing proponents to put the pressure on the county council and the county executive and remove this loophole.

We should put the developers’ interest aside and the residents’ interest first.