Councilmember Mink looks to better ways to tackle the housing crisis.

Update from the PRA AHS Committee

Councilmember Kristin Mink (D-5) has issued a statement in which she says that “I appreciate the Planning Board and Planning staff for their work on the Attainable Housing Strategies Initiative. Tackling the housing affordability crisis is necessary and urgent, but we have other, better tools available than the AHS’s far-reaching and relatively low-yield recommendations. I look forward to leaning into those other possibilities with colleagues and the community.”

She expresses doubts that replacing a single-family home with one- to two-bedroom 6-plexes and 8-plexes would “… make a meaningful dent in our housing crisis and would continue to leave low- and middle-income families behind.”

“We should be prioritizing high-yield strategies that can earn the support of our communities.”  Examples she cites include:

• The Housing Production Fund [HPF] which”… is already helping to fund mixed-income projects across the county, like District 5’s Hillandale Gateway — 496 units, nearly a third senior housing, being sustainably built to some of the highest above-code building standards in the world.”
• “Establishing a modest new excise tax on residential tear-downs could generate a meaningful increase in funding available for the HPF, while disincentivizing construction of enormous new single-family homes that are typically sold at more than double their pre-tear-down value.”
• “Finally, we do need more housing density as a county, and we are already expanding areas for dense redevelopment through the traditional master planning process. In District 5 alone, we greatly increased areas eligible for mixed-use development along Route 29 and Old Columbia Pike through the 2024 Fairland Briggs Chaney Master Plan, and we are close to realizing thousands of housing units through the Viva White Oak project as part of the White Oak Science Gateway Master Plan.”