A proposed zoning initiative that would allow duplexes, triplexes and smaller apartment buildings to be built in single-family home neighborhoods across Montgomery County is sparking heated debate among public officials and community members.
From public forums to neighborhood listservs, the proposal is generating both criticism and support as well as fear about what it could mean for local property values. Hundreds attended the series of listening sessions on the proposed changes sponsored by the County Council in September while more than 950 people signed up to attend the final session held virtually over Zoom on Oct. 2. According to county officials, sign-ups for that event were cut off due to the high interest.
Drafted by county planners, the Attainable Housing Strategies initiative outlines recommendations to the County Council for zoning changes in some single-family home zones in targeted areas of the county. The changes, which the council would have to approve, aim to provide more housing options and opportunities, especially for middle-income residents, according to Planning Director Jason Sartori.
The Montgomery County Planning Board approved the initiative in June, sending it to the council. However, the council has not developed proposed legislation regarding the initiative nor set a timeline for a vote.
“It would be quite a while, I think, before we see not just legislation, but the legislation that gets adopted. It’ll be quite a while before we have something adopted,” Sartori said.
Planning Board Chair Artie Harris has praised the housing initiative as a “valuable tool” to address the county’s housing shortage by allowing property owners the flexibility to build different housing types.
“This proposed zoning change is not a mandate for people to turn their properties into duplexes or townhomes or small apartment buildings,” Harris said after the board’s unanimous June vote. “This simply allows for property owners to have the option to build something else and give more people the chance to call Montgomery County home.”
According to Sartori, the average sales price of a single-family detached home in the county in 2023 was $970,000 and, in the first four months of 2024, that figure had increased to more than $1 million.
“Every single neighborhood in the county is becoming less and less attainable, or attainable to fewer households than it was,” Sartori said in an interview last week with MoCo360. “If we continue to do and stick with the status quo, we’re going to see that trend continue.”
The county has also seen a decline in its population of middle-income earners and increases in its low- and high-income populations, indicating a lack of suitable housing options that are affordable or attainable, Sartori said.
According to Montgomery Planning data, the county lost more than 26,000 middle-income residents from 2005 to 2022, while gaining nearly 88,000 low-income residents and 67,000 high-income residents in the same timeframe.
In the county, middle-income is defined as a family of four earning an income three to five times the poverty level, according to Montgomery Planning. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services says the 2024 poverty level is $31,200 for a family of four. Low-income families in the county earn under three times the poverty level and high-income families earn five or more times the poverty level, according to Montgomery Planning.
A controversial proposal
Montgomery County Councilmembers have largely expressed interest in the proposed initiative while others, including County Executive Marc Elrich, oppose the idea.
“I think this is a really important framework for us to begin to consider a variety of viewpoints,” council President Andrew Friedson (D-Dist. 1) said at a media briefing Monday. “There’s a lot of room between doing nothing and doing everything that the Planning Board has put forward, which is a very ambitious set of a series of recommendations on a lot of items, going from small scale to medium scale to large scale, and ultimately the council is going to have to grapple with it and decide how we move forward.”
Elrich is critical of the initiative, saying it will not fix the county’s affordable housing crisis.
“There’s plenty of million-dollar townhouses in neighborhoods, particularly in new developments now. So it has nothing to do with affordable housing,” Elrich said at an Oct. 10 press briefing.
Those who attended the council’s listening sessions raised questions about the impact of such a proposal.
“I wish we had more than one option here instead of an all-or-nothing,” Bethesda resident Chris Bruch said during the Oct. 2 virtual session. Bruch is president and CEO of Bethesda-based developer The Donohoe Cos.
“I think where you’re losing me and many of my neighbors is when we hear about mini apartment buildings in single-family neighborhoods, when we hear about townhomes in single-family neighborhoods,” Bruch said. “And I think if there was a middle-ground option, a walking before we run theory, I think people would embrace duplexes.”
Some residents attending the session expressed frustration with the proposal’s focus on down-county communities such as Silver Spring, Bethesda and Chevy Chase, saying upcounty areas needed to “share the burden of affordable housing.”
Others welcomed the proposed zoning changes, noting they were hopeful the changes could lessen the county’s housing crisis by resulting in more units and options for aspiring or downsizing homeowners. Some said the proposal doesn’t go far enough to address the county’s housing crisis.
Some supporters, such as Silver Spring resident Jacob Goldberg, said passage of the initiative would help make the county more inclusive by allowing for different types of homeownership opportunities. A new homeowner, Goldberg said his friends aren’t able to “join” him and his wife in homeownership.
“Unless they are like us, dual-income families with no kids, without either one or both partners being a doctor, lawyer or high-income earner, it’s just not possible in this area to own a home. And that’s really unfortunate,” Goldberg said.
Sartori said the listening sessions offered an important opportunity for the council to hear about the community’s concerns and interests prior to drafting its legislation based on the initiative.
“It’s somewhat unprecedented for the council to do this type of engagement or outreach or listening to the community prior to even having actual legislation in front of them,” Sartori said. “This gives them an opportunity to kind of crystallize their own thinking on this, and then presumably be communicating amongst themselves in some way and coming up with something that they’d like to introduce.”
What’s ahead
Friedson said during Monday’s briefing that it’s impossible to know exactly what the council legislation will look like while councilmembers are still processing what they’ve heard from the community.
The council is not going to “rush” the decision-making process, he said.
“The purpose of the listening sessions was to listen. I’ve been both accused of not sharing my already formulated final decision and opinions and not listening. You can’t possibly do both,” Friedson said. “I have listened attentively to listening sessions. We are carefully reviewing the feedback.”
Once the council introduces its proposed legislation, the planning department will review it and provide comments to the Planning Board, Sartori explained. Then the board is expected to hold a public hearing on the proposal and send its comments to the council. Following that, the council will hold its own public hearing and work sessions.
While the listening sessions may have been the first time that residents engaged with the county on attainable housing strategies, county planners have been working on the strategies and gathering feedback for three and a half years.
“There were a lot of comments that we heard through these listening sessions that were not new to us,” Sartori said. “In some ways, the good thing about this was that it gave council members an opportunity to hear this before they take this up, to hear a lot of what we’ve been hearing.”
Attainable but not affordable?
Elrich’s main critique of the proposal is that he does not believe it would solve affordable housing concerns in the county.
“They’re not trying to build affordable housing. They started talking about affordable housing in the very beginning, but when people realized that’s not what they were doing, they just dropped the word affordable, and they called it attainable. But it’s not attainable to everybody, and it’s not going to be attainable to everybody,” Elrich said at the Oct. 10 media briefing.
When asked what solutions he would prioritize, Elrich pointed to using existing developments.
“One of our suggestions is that we look at the opportunities … work with developers to buy some of these office parks that are going vacant and using them as ideal places to build townhouse communities that could be built affordably, or looking at some of the areas where they’ve zoned for height, around Metro centers,” Elrich said.
He also said it is important to leverage with developers and ask them to build more affordable units in their developments.
But Harris, the Planning Board chair, noted in an email to MoCo360 that the proposed initiative is not focused on creating more affordable housing.
The proposal focuses on “missing middle” housing. The term refers to “a range of building types that are compatible in scale, form and construction with single-family homes, but include multiple housing units,” according to Montgomery Planning. These housing options were common during the pre-World War II era but faded from popularity with new construction of single-family homes and tall multi-family apartment buildings, according to the planning department.
“The Planning Board’s recommendations are not focused on affordable housing. They have always been about providing more options for our middle-income residents to be able to comfortably live in the county,” Harris said in an Oct. 11 email to MoCo360. “The county is currently doing a lot of great things to build affordable units.”
Due to their smaller size, such “missing middle” housing types can be more financially attainable for downsizing seniors, professionals without children, middle-income and millennial families, and newcomers to the region who can’t afford or may not need a large single-family home, the planning department says.
“We know there are 30,000 or so approved housing units in the pipeline; however, one-third of these have been in the pipeline for more than 10 years and over 85% of all pipeline units are multifamily,” Harris said. “Maintaining the status quo is not going to meet our housing needs over the next several decades. We need zoning and land use policy [to] help fill the gaps where the pipeline doesn’t deliver. We need to move quickly to take action and deliver solutions for the county.”
Regionally, efforts to create similar “missing middle” housing regulations have been controversial. The board of supervisors in Arlington County, Virginia, voted in March 2023 to end single-family-only zoning, facing both praise and criticism from residents and resulting in a lawsuit. WAMU reported that trial arguments began in July after nine Arlington homeowners filed a lawsuit against the county over its new zoning policy, arguing the county made the decision without conducting an appropriate study of the potential impacts on communities.
In nearby Alexandria, Virginia, a group of homeowners sued the city over a decision to end single-family zoning. While city officials attempted to have the lawsuit dismissed, a judge ruled in August that it can move forward to trial, The Washington Post reported.
