Category: Zoning

Written Recommendations: MoCo’s More Housing N.O.W. Package

Written Recommendations: MoCo’s More Housing N.O.W. Package

Posted on by Carrie Kisicki

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

CSG More Housing NOW Written testimonyDownload

Photo: Montgomery County Council

DC Testimony: DC Office of Planning and DC Office of Zoning Performance 2025 Oversight Hearing

Posted on by Cheryl Cort

February 25, 2025

Dear Chair Mendelson: 

Please accept these comments on behalf of the Coalition for Smarter Growth. CSG advocates for walkable, bikeable, inclusive, transit-oriented communities as the most sustainable and equitable way for the DC region to grow and provide opportunities for all. 

We wish to comment on the performance of DC Office of Planning and DC Office of Zoning over the past year. The efforts of these are helping to bring much needed dedicated affordable housing to sought-after locations, and to help make housing in general more available. We commend the Office of Planning, Office of Zoning and the Zoning Commission for their commitment to public engagement, and careful, deliberative process.

Chevy Chase Comp Plan amendments and Small Area Plan implementation

We have engaged in key planning and zoning efforts, including a focus on Ward 3 and the Chevy Chase Small Area Plan, and rezoning process to implement important recommendations and policies from the Small Area Plan (ZC 23-24). 

The zoning changes to the Chevy Chase area are modest, but important for opening up this exclusive neighborhood to low income residents, African American families, and other people of color who are greatly underrepresented in the Chevy Chase neighborhood. Discrimination has excluded people of color, both historically and systemically. 

The rezoning changes will help to expand housing capacity and diversify Chevy Chase main street, and utilize the public land of the library site. This public site will benefit the community and the city by creating modern public facilities and dedicated affordable homes. Dedicated affordable homes in this neighborhood and Ward 3 are an extreme rarity. Figure 1 (below) illustrates this: at 12% of DC’s affordable housing goal for Ward 3/Rock Creek West we are hardly where we should be. The Chevy Case rezoning, the library mixed use redevelopment and the future rezoning of Wisconsin Avenue, and Connecticut Avenue should accelerate this part of town’s move towards a more inclusive community. 

Figure 1

Source: DMPED 36,000 by 2025 Dashboard, emphasis added.

U Street Police & Fire Stations rezoning to implement Comp Plan

We have also engaged in the extensive Zoning Commission review process for the U Street Police Station (ZC 23-02 & ZC 23-25) to align the zoning of this site with the Comprehensive Plan amendments of 2021. This process took dozens of hours of public hearings. The resulting rezoning and future public land disposition offers the chance to build more than 100 dedicated affordable homes, along with market rate apartments, and new police and fire facilities in the highly sought-after U Street neighborhood. U Street has experienced a major decline in low income and African American residents, so this public land redevelopment contributes to reversing this trend. 

Looking ahead

This coming year, we look forward to engaging in the follow up zoning changes from  the Wisconsin Avenue Development Framework, Connecticut Avenue Development Guidelines, and launching of the Rhode Island Ave. corridor planning study. But the biggest planning activity is the Comp Plan rewrite. We are hopeful that this rewrite will take on the need to make it easier and less costly to build more housing in high demand locations, and fully utilize form based zoning as a critical tool to ensure great public spaces, and buildings scaled for people, and walkable neighborhoods. We ask the administration and Council to provide the resources needed to set up a successful process to address our housing and equitable development goals. 

Thank you for the opportunity to comment.

Sincerely,

Cheryl Cort

Policy Director

RELEASE: CSG and Montgomery for All support the More Housing N.O.W. Package

RELEASE: CSG and Montgomery for All support the More Housing N.O.W. Package

Posted on by Carrie Kisicki

The Coalition for Smarter Growth and Montgomery for All are proud to support the More Housing N.O.W. package to increase housing options in sustainable locations and support our workforce and first-time homebuyers. Building more housing along our corridors, a central piece of this package, will help more people afford homes in Montgomery County and live close to jobs, transit, and amenities.

CSG in the News: Jawando urges County Council to pause attainable housing plan

Posted on by Carrie Kisicki

The Coalition for Smarter Growth, a nonprofit that, according to its website, advocates for “walkable, bikeable, inclusive, and transit-oriented communities” in the Washington, D.C. area, released a statement Tuesday afternoon saying the organization is “deeply disappointed” by Jawando’s comments.

“Smaller, multi-family units like those proposed in the Attainable Housing Strategies recommendations can be built and sold more affordably than single-family detached homes. Expanding housing choices also offers creative pathways and opportunities to produce subsidized affordable homes, a feat that is financially prohibitive to accomplish with single-family detached homes,” the nonprofit wrote.

RELEASE: CSG Response to Councilmember Jawando’s Comments on Attainable Housing (MoCo)

RELEASE: CSG Response to Councilmember Jawando’s Comments on Attainable Housing (MoCo)

Posted on by Carrie Kisicki

We are deeply disappointed by Councilmember Will Jawando’s statements on the Attainable Housing Strategies Initiative (AHSI). His statements fail to recognize the reality of our county’s housing crisis and lack of sufficient housing options, and do not address the full range and potential of the AHSI recommendations.

Event Materials: Fixing zoning to build more affordable housing & walkable communities (DC)

Posted on by Ayesha Amsa

How can we build more homes while ensuring neighborhood-friendly buildings and great public spaces? Emerging approaches to zoning offer simpler rules for creating great places, while reducing delay, uncertainty, and the cost of new housing.

We Won! Prince George’s to move ahead with long overdue zoning rewrite

We Won! Prince George’s to move ahead with long overdue zoning rewrite

Posted on by Cheryl Cort

Great news: the Maryland General Assembly voted to pass HB 980, and enable Prince George’s County to implement its new zoning regulations!

HB 980 amends an existing state ethics law unique to Prince George’s. Like other jurisdictions, the County needed to repeal and replace its entire zoning map to implement its new zoning regulations. But this action ran into a potential conflict with its unique zoning ethics law that does not apply to any other jurisdiction. 

To address this, the Prince George’s House Delegation introduced HB 980 and helped advance the bill from the House to the state Senate. In the Senate, under the leadership of Senator Paul Pinsky, the bill was amended to address concerns and ensure broad support. The legislation was retitled: Prince George’s County – Public Ethics – Application Payments and Transfer and Zone Intensification Requests. Most significantly, the amended bill offers an extra safeguard by prohibiting the County Council from approving zoning intensification (to build more on a site) requests that differ substantially from the zoning category already adopted in 2019.

In addition to Senator Pinsky, we are also grateful to Senator Malcolm Augustine, Delegate Erek Barron, and Delegate Joseline A. Pena-Melnyk for their thoughtful engagement to create this successful outcome. 

The zoning rewrite is important because it helps the County better guide transit-oriented development and create more walk- and bike-friendly designs. This not only benefits Prince George’s but all of Maryland by focusing more of the region’s growth around transit stations and close-in communities. More transit-oriented development reduces how much people in our growing region need to drive, and gives us more opportunities to walk, bicycle and ride transit for more of our trips. This all reduces greenhouse gas emissions and pressure to build on greenfields. A modern zoning code also means thriving places and a stronger economy. 

We are grateful to al those who took taking action to ensure Prince George’s can use the tools it needs to guide a more sustainable and prosperous future.