View slides from CSG’s presentation to the Montgomery County Young Democrats on May 20, 2025.
Author: Carrie Kisicki
CSG in the News: Elrich vows to push back on approved More Housing N.O.W. legislation
“Every new home helps, but the Council must also adopt the other tools in the package to meet our county’s great housing need. Most important is the approach reflected by [the ZTA] —making it much easier to build duplexes, triplexes, and small apartments near transit and jobs,” Carrie Kisicki, Montgomery advocacy manager for the Coalition for Smarter Growth, wrote in an email statement to Bethesda Today.

Written Recommendations: MoCo’s More Housing N.O.W. Package
March 11, 2025
Montgomery County Council
100 Maryland Ave
Rockville, MD 20850
More Housing N.O.W. Package
ZTA 25-02, Workforce Housing – Development Standards
ZTA 25-03, Expedited Approvals – Commercial to Residential Reconstruction
SRA 25-01, Administrative Subdivision – Expedited Approval Plan
Expedited Bill 2-25, Taxation – Payments in Lieu of Taxes – Affordable Housing Amendments
Thank you for the opportunity to share testimony on behalf of the Coalition for Smarter Growth. CSG advocates for building walkable, bikeable, transit-oriented communities with housing all people can afford is the most sustainable and inclusive way for the D.C. metro region to grow.
I am writing to offer our support for the More Housing N.O.W. package, and to thank the sponsors for stepping up and showing Montgomery County is ready to do what is needed to address our housing crisis.
We can’t afford to wait for housing action.
Montgomery County has a strong record of supporting subsidized affordable housing, including making historic commitments to funding for affordable housing these past few years.
We have not been innovators in the same way in making sure our county has homes that are affordable to our middle class, young people, older adults looking to downsize, and others who do not qualify for affordable housing—yet are increasingly unable to find market-rate homes they can afford amongst our limited housing options.
Our current zoning policies have severely restricted the number and variety of homes available near jobs and transit across our county. As a consequence, we are losing people who would like to live and work in this county yet must turn to other places where they can find housing they can afford.
- This trend hurts our ability to attract and retain a strong workforce, and sustain the robust tax base needed to offer critical services and programs.
- It is making homeownership in Montgomery County an increasingly exclusive proposition. Home prices across the county have been rising faster than inflation for two decades, and only households earning $150k or more increased their rate of homeownership rates between 2010 and 2021 while rates of homeownership for all other income bands declined.
- This trend also undercuts our climate goals by forcing people who work in Montgomery County to live farther from their jobs and from convenient transit options—leading to longer commutes, greater pollution from vehicle emissions, and increased demand for sprawl development in other jurisdictions to fill the housing demand that our county is failing to meet.
More Housing N.O.W. offers promising new approaches to create the housing our county needs.
The proposals in the More Housing N.O.W. package will help expand the supply and variety of housing types available near jobs and transit—giving more people with a wider range of household sizes and needs the opportunity to live in Montgomery County.
Allowing a Greater Variety of Housing Types
CSG strongly supports the approach of building a wider variety of housing types in sustainable locations with access to transit and jobs, as proposed by ZTA 25-02.
- Detached single-family homes remain the most expensive housing option in the county. As of February 2025, the median sale price for a detached single-family home in Montgomery County was $835,000, while the median sale price for a townhouse was $500,000, and $279,000 for condos/co-ops.
- To make housing and homeownership affordable for more people, it follows that we need to offer more options that better align with people’s varied incomes and needs.
- We support expanding housing choices to allow for duplexes, triplexes, and other small multi-family buildings that can accommodate more people and meet a wider range of housing needs than detached single-family homes alone.
Office-to-Residential Conversions
We also support efforts to facilitate office-to-residential conversions when feasible, as provided for by ZTA 25-03, SRA 25-01, and Expedited Bill 2-25.
- As work trends and housing needs shift, our land use policies need to keep up. These bills will provide greater flexibility to ensure parcels with underused office space can be adapted to best serve community needs.
- Office-to-residential conversions are often uniquely complex and costly due to the challenges of converting a building or site not previously designed for residential use to meet residential standards. Offering support through a PILOT, as outlined in Expedited Bill 2-25, may help projects that are highly desirable and appropriate for a given site, yet may not otherwise be financially feasible, get across the finish line.
Additional recommendations
CSG supports the measures in the More Housing N.O.W. package, and thank its sponsors for standing with a broad and diverse coalition of Montgomery County organizations and individuals who recognize that we need bold action and new approaches to create the housing our county needs.
We also offer the following recommendations to even better achieve our shared goal of creating more affordable homes for all people in sustainable locations in Montgomery County.
ZTA 25-02, Workforce Housing – Development Standards
- Include corner lots along included corridors: We support this ZTA’s intent of supporting corridor-focused growth, and note that some corner lots located on included corridors are currently excluded from this ZTA if their address is on a side street rather than on the corridor itself. For consistency, we recommend including these corner lots in the ZTA as well.
- Support homes near transit: This ZTA will help create more homes with access to jobs and economic opportunity. This benefit can be amplified by allowing a wider variety of homes near rail stations as well as on major county corridors.
We ask the Council to consider expanding the coverage of this ZTA to also apply to R-40, R-60, R-90, and R-200 lots in strategic locations near rail stations—particularly the Purple Line and MARC, excluding lots contained within the Agricultural Reserve.
Workforce Housing Opportunity Fund
- We support this proposed fund, and ask that the Council hold firm in its commitment to allocating the $4 million in proposed funding for the program as new funding that is additive to the total funding in the HIF, not diverted from other HIF programs.
Further Recommendations and Areas for Analysis
We raise the following as potential areas for additional analysis to make sure the policies in this package achieve their intended goals as effectively as possible. We strongly encourage the Council to turn to affordable housing organizations and the Montgomery Housing Alliance as a resource in considering these matters.
- Building height: In ZTA 25-02, are there sites where the 40 foot height limit may be more restrictive than what existing stepdown requirements addressing limits on building height would allow? Could modestly increasing this height limit to align with standards for existing examples of housing types like townhomes and small apartment buildings in the county allow for the production of additional homes?
- Reducing costs to create workforce-level homes: The amount of cost and uncertainty associated with development approval processes and requirements can make or break the feasibility of building a new housing project—especially those with subsidized affordable homes.
We recommend consulting with experienced affordable housing developers regarding the development review process and the targeting (both in terms of unit percentage and AMI) of income restrictions proposed in ZTA 25-02 in order to help identify the most strategic pathways to expeditiously producing workforce income-level homes.
Sincerely,
Carrie Kisicki
Montgomery County Advocacy Manager
Photo: Montgomery County Council

Take action! Contact your representatives to support the Maryland Housing for Jobs Act
Support the 2025 Housing for Jobs Act!

Maryland has a housing shortage that is making it harder for people to afford to live here and is holding back our economy per this state report. And even when people have managed to find a more affordable home, it’s often been in outer areas far from jobs and services, meaning more sprawl, more driving, higher transportation costs, and more climate pollution.
The Housing for Jobs Act (HB 503/SB 430) would set regional housing targets based on the number of jobs in a given set of counties grouped by their area of the state. It would set clear standards for approving and denying new housing when counties haven’t met their housing to jobs ration, giving extra credit to localities who create housing near transit and to those who create affordable housing.
Click here to read CSG’s testimony, and use the buttons above to contact your state representatives to ask them to support the Housing for Jobs Act!
Photo credit: Carrie Kisicki
CSG in the News: MoCo residents polarized over proposed workforce housing legislation
March 11, 2025 | Ginny Bixby | Bethesda Magazine
Supporters who spoke at the hearing in general praised the legislative package’s aim to increase the county’s housing supply and create realistic homeownership opportunities for more county residents.
“It’s a plain and simple fact that our county needs more housing,” said Carrie Kisicki, Montgomery advocacy manager for the Coalition for Smarter Growth, a Washington, D.C. metro region nonprofit focused on housing affordability and transit access. “People want housing that they can afford, and they do not want to have to spend their lives sitting in traffic just to get to work.”

In-Person Testimony: MoCo More Housing N.O.W. Package
It is a plain and simple fact that our county needs more housing. People want housing that they can afford, and they do not want to have to spend their lives sitting in traffic just to get to work.
Nothing demonstrates the strong support for these simple ideas more than the broad, diverse coalition that showed up in support of the announcement of the More Housing N.O.W. package.
Testimony: Maryland Housing for Jobs Act (HB 503/SB 430) – Support
Location matters when we build new housing. The Housing for Jobs Act will help to produce more of the homes Maryland needs in strategic locations tied to our transit network, our environmental health, and our economic success.
Testimony: Maryland FY26 DHCD Capital Budget
The work of DHCD and affordable housing practitioners across the state is essential to meeting this need and building more inclusive, equitable communities where all people can afford to live. We ask you to support the full FY26 DHCD capital budget request.
Testimony: Maryland Single-Staircase Building Study (HB489)
Single-staircase buildings offer a potential solution to several of the housing challenges Maryland faces. Modern fire safety requirements and building materials make it possible to build single-staircase buildings safely, and this study will help us update our state’s housing policies to reflect these advances.

CSG News: What we believe
These are not normal times. So in this, our first newsletter of the year, we will begin by sharing what we believe—and offering opportunities to be involved in positive local change.