Challenge remains to provide affordable housing for workforce

Wednesday, March 5, 2008

Affordability of housing is not a new challenge, nor is it local. Jurisdictions everywhere are dealing with this. The hot housing market that fueled the overall economy for much of this decade has since cooled off. The impacts on local markets vary but sharp increases in median home prices and even sharper increases in land values have made the challenge even harder, especially here. Presently the housing market is soft with many more choices available. Prices have stabilized and in many cases are falling. It is a buyer’s market. Industry experts expect this trend to continue for perhaps another year but many forecasts show a turnaround in early 2009.

So there is some short-term relief in sight as builders and developers adjust their plans. In fact, we’ve heard from several builders and developers, both large and small, who desire to offer more workforce housing. This is in response to market shifts but also a genuine desire to help address a community need. One targeted example is St. Mary’s Affordable Rent for Teachers program, a partnership between a local builder and St. Mary’s public schools for discounts on rentals for first-year teachers. Also, larger projects involving public investment are advancing with The Gateways on Great Mills Road, Hunting Creek on Willows Road, even the new off-base military housing communities Columbia Colony in First Colony and Challenger Estates in Wildewood taking shape.

One area that has gotten much recent attention is mobile home parks and what future role they play in affordability of housing. As the closure of National and White Oak trailer parks off Route 235 is completed in the coming weeks there will be two fewer parks. This continues a downward trend started a few decades ago when growth pressures brought offers for development projects such as Wal-Mart for commercial and other uses for these sites.

Historically, mobile and manufactured homes have offered a unique affordable and workforce housing option to this community. The construction of the Navy base and its early growth were the reasons for the rapid influx of mobile home parks in the 1950s and 1960s. During that time the flexibility and speed of readying mobile homes resulted in a significant percentage of new housing stock coming from this sector. This continued into the ’70s and early ’80s.

According to the Census Bureau, in 1990 there were 3,842 mobile homes representing 14 percent of all the housing stock in St. Mary’s. At that time St. Mary’s led both the nation, at 8.3 percent, and state, at 3 percent, in terms of mobile home percentage of total housing stock. But by 2006 these rates had fallen across the board. More importantly, in St. Mary’s the rate had fallen faster than both the state and nation. In 1996 St. Mary’s at 5.2 percent was actually less than the nation at 6.9 percent. Maryland had also fallen to 1.7 percent. Over this 16-year period the county had lost more than 1,700 mobile homes, almost half its inventory. Meanwhile, the total housing stock grew by some 11,000 units with median prices well over $300,000.

Mobile home parks will continue to play an important albeit diminished role in the future of affordability of local housing. This is a component of one of the recommendations of the community workforce housing task force: preserving and revitalizing existing neighborhoods. The added challenge we face as a peninsula and a community interested in preserving agricultural land confronted with similar development pressures is balancing these sometimes conflicting interests so thZat affordability of housing can be achieved.

What we’ve learned about affordable and workforce housing from the market, the mobile home park experience in particular, and a variety of land preservation efforts, is that it takes a collective and collaborative effort involving the private and public sectors, along with community and other nonprofit organizations, to bring this about.

The writer is director of the St. Mary’s County Department of Economic and Community Development.