The County Council Passed an Affordable Housing Financing Bill That Can’t Finance Affordable Housing

Four rounds of amendments stripped rental housing from the bonding authority heading to November's ballot — asking voters to approve something that can't solve the problem it was designed to solve.

Last month, I wrote Can Howard County Afford to Build More Affordable Housing? about CR-40, a bill before the Howard County Council that would put a referendum on this November’s ballot, authorizing new bonding authority to finance affordable housing through the County’s Housing Opportunities Trust Fund. The Council voted on it earlier this month, on April 6. Voters will indeed be asked an affordable housing question on November's ballot — but for the 9,000 Howard County households looking for an affordable place to rent, the answer is already no.

By the time the Council actually voted, the bill had been amended, and then amended again, and then amended a third and fourth time. What ends up heading to the ballot bears almost no resemblance to what County Executive Calvin Ball originally introduced.

The version voters will see in November authorizes bond financing for exactly one kind of project: for-sale homes built by the Howard County Housing Commission. The much broader authority Ball originally proposed — the kind that would actually help close the funding gap needed to get more affordable housing built in Howard County — got stripped out in a legislative session that was, to put it charitably, chaotic and confusing.

Councilmembers Liz Walsh, Deb Jung, and David Yungmann voted for the amendments. Councilmembers Christiana Rigby and Opel Jones voted against.

And the Ball administration, in an email from Deputy Chief of Staff Felix Facchine distributed by the Howard County Housing Affordability Coalition, used language you rarely see from an executive branch describing its own bill: the final version “renders it unavailable for most affordable housing projects — an outcome that runs counter to the broader goals the legislation was intended to advance.”

Consider this the follow-up piece, now that the Council has had its say. Grab a ten-layer slice of Smith Island Cake — as I describe how the Council managed to put a charter amendment on November’s ballot that, if passed, won’t actually solve the problem the original bill was designed to address.

Text of the Final Resolution with “for sale” underlined.

How Affordable Housing Actually Gets Built — and Why Local Gap Financing Matters

Quick refresher from my March article. Affordable housing projects require stacking many financing sources — a layer cake, if you will — of tax credits, grants, loans, and subsidies from local, state, and federal government. The largest layer of the cake is the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC), the primary engine providing affordable housing financing nationwide. LIHTCs provide upfront cash covering up to 70% of eligible construction costs. To be eligible for this tax credit, units must be rented at rates affordable to households earning 60% of Area Median Income (AMI) or below, for at least 30 years.

That word “rented” is the most important word in the sentence. By federal statute, LIHTC is available only for rental housing.

Even with LIHTC covering the biggest layer, affordable housing developers of rental properties still need to cobble together the remaining funding needed to close the gap, and the HOTF is Howard County’s primary local tool for providing it, having helped close the gap on Patuxent Commons, Waverly Winds, and Ranleagh Court. Ball’s resolution, as introduced, would have authorized the county to issue bonds and deposit the proceeds into the now-depleted HOTF — replenishing the fund so it could continue doing what it has been doing: closing the gap on LIHTC deals.

The 60% AMI Problem

According to the 2024 Howard County Rental Survey, approximately 9,000 Howard County households earn 60% of AMI or below but are without access to affordable housing. The vacancy rate for rent-restricted affordable units serving this income group is 0.3%. For a family of four with a household income of approximately $86,000 looking for a rental they can afford, there are essentially no available options in Howard County.

For this group, homeownership in Howard County is not a realistic option either — there are no homes affordable to them available to buy, nor enough affordable rental housing available at a price that would allow them to save for a down payment.

Peter Engel, Executive Director of the Howard County Housing Commission — the only entity whose projects are eligible under the bond authority as amended — took the time to personally comment on my March article. The head of the agency with the most at stake, making his case in the comment section of The Merriweather Post. His core point: market-based supply increases alone can’t solve the affordable rental shortage for households at or below 60% AMI. The people affected, in Engel’s words: “some of our teachers, aides, first responders, but also retail, hospital workers, para professionals, and many others.” These are the people who make Howard County function — and at current prices, they cannot afford to live here. What they need is affordable rental housing. And the bond authority, as amended, cannot finance a single rental unit.

For the 9,000 Howard County households earning 60% AMI or below, this bill does nothing.

How the Amendment Session Actually Went

One more quick recap, so the sequence makes sense. The bill Ball introduced — CR40-2026 — would have let voters authorize the county to issue bonds and deposit the proceeds into the HOTF, to be used for any eligible affordable housing project. Rental, for-sale, Housing Commission, private, nonprofit. Broad authority. Council and Executive retain annual control over how much to borrow and when, the same way they handle every other category of county bonding. That was the starting point.

Then came the amendments.

Round 1 — Walsh. Councilmember Liz Walsh offered an amendment inserting the words “for sale” throughout the resolution. That single edit eliminated rental housing as an eligible use for bond proceeds. Passed 3-2. Walsh, Jung, Yungmann in favor.

Round 2 — Administration. The Ball administration, recognizing that the Walsh amendment had just gutted the bill, filed its own amendment to try to salvage it. This one attempted to restore a pathway for rental properties by allowing bonding for Housing Commission projects OR affordable homeownership projects. The critical word was “OR” — it preserved a lane for Housing Commission rental projects.

Round 3 — Jung. Councilmember Deb Jung then amended the administration’s amendment. The substance of her change was replacing one word: “OR” became “AND.” Projects now had to be Housing Commission-owned AND for-purchase. Not one or the other. Rental pathway: gone. Private and nonprofit developer pathway: already gone. What remained: Housing Commission for-sale housing only. Passed 3-2.

Round 4 — Walsh. Councilmember Liz Walsh then offered a technical amendment to more precisely define the Howard County Housing Commission for purposes of the resolution.

Walsh amended the bill. The administration amended Walsh’s amendment. Jung amended that. Walsh amended that. Four rounds. The final bill passed 5-0 on the underlying resolution, because once you’ve stripped out everything the bill was trying to do, nobody has a reason to vote against the husk.

What the Final Version Does — and Doesn’t Do

What the November ballot question authorizes, if voters approve it: bond financing for affordable for-sale housing projects wholly owned or controlled by the Howard County Housing Commission.

Possible use case: the county issues bonds, repaid with tax dollars over time, and the Housing Commission then acquires land and builds affordable townhomes or condominiums that are sold to income-qualified buyers at a below-market price. These are real, and they could produce real units — probably a few dozen over the life of a bond issuance — giving the families lucky enough to purchase them the opportunity to realize the financial benefits of homeownership. This is not nothing. But its impact is limited to several dozen new homeowners. And every project the HOTF has funded to date — Patuxent Commons, Waverly Winds, Ranleagh Court — would be ineligible under the final language.

What it cannot be used for is the creation of a genuine revolving loan fund that can provide gap financing in perpetuity. The model works like this: bond proceeds get deployed as soft loans to affordable housing developers; those dollars come back to the fund over time, as projects refinance or sell; and the recaptured dollars get redeployed into the next project. Every dollar does multiple tours of duty. Montgomery County's Housing Opportunities Commission has been running exactly this kind of revolving fund — its $100 million Housing Production Fund — projected to finance up to 6,000 units over the life of the bonds, at a net cost to the county of roughly $2.7 million per year.

That was the vision for a bonded HOTF in Howard County — a self-sustaining capital engine for affordable housing in perpetuity. A Housing Commission for-sale program, however worthwhile, is not that. There is no revolving fund inside this version of the bill because there is nothing large or recurring enough to revolve.

Reactions

The Howard County Housing Affordability Coalition made this same structural argument the day after the vote, and it keeps gnawing at me: the amendment should have provided broad bonding authority and left allocation decisions to the annual budget appropriations process — which is exactly how every other category of county capital bonding works. School bonds aren’t restricted to a specific school. Road bonds aren’t restricted to a specific road. Councils authorize capacity; executives and future Councils decide how to use it. This one got preemptively ring-fenced.

Councilwoman Christiana Rigby, who voted against the amendments but yes on the final resolution, recorded a selfie video in the George Howard Building parking lot minutes after the vote, visibly frustrated: "Amendments were passed that limit the impact so severely we are looking at a few dozen units rather than the hundreds we need. This job is hardest when good solutions are pushed aside for ones that fail to meet the moment."

And Janssen Evelyn, a candidate running for the District 4 seat Jung is vacating, went further than a post — he published a full series of explainer graphics walking voters through the before-and-after of the amendment session, concluding that “Not everyone can afford to buy a home, and they shouldn’t be pushed out because of it.”

Councilmember Jung, who sponsored the amendment that changed "OR" to "AND," posted her own defense of the vote on Facebook on April 15. "I amended CR40 to ensure that 100% of the additional funds go to affordable homes for purchase," she wrote, adding that "corporate landlords have lobbied for rentals only — and up until now, they've gotten what they've asked for." Jung called the final version "a big victory for affordable housing" while acknowledging the bill has no borrowing limit or time frame, writing that "the success of CR40 depends on what happens next" and warning against developer influence on public funds.

Closing Thoughts

The authority Ball originally proposed would not have obligated the county to do anything. It would not have required a single bond to be issued. Instead, it would have given a future Council a tool it could deploy — for homeownership, for a revolving gap-financing fund, for whatever future Councils and Executives decided the moment required. Any actual bond issuance would still go through the normal budget approval process. So why tie a future Council’s hands?

Don't get me wrong — making homeownership more accessible to working families in Howard County is a worthy goal that I support. But county-issued bonds, repaid by taxpayers over decades to subsidize the construction of a few dozen for-sale units, are not a sustainable strategy. It's a one-time deployment with nothing left over to do it again. The better path to making homeownership more viable is letting the market build more affordable housing types — duplexes, quadplexes, cottage courts, ADUs, small apartments. Rezoning will enable less expensive housing types to actually get built — at scale, for many more families, with no government subsidy required.

But for rentals? As Engel notes, no supply-side market solution will bring rents down enough to make them affordable for renters doing the essential work in our community. That's actually where a subsidy is needed. And that is exactly what this bill fails to deliver — a permanent, self-sustaining capital engine for affordable housing, the kind of tool Montgomery County has spent 25 years quietly compounding into 4,000+ units and counting.

What the Council actually sent to the November ballot is a narrow authorization for a program that does not yet exist, using a financing structure that cannot revolve. That is the ceiling of what this version of the bill can do.

I’ll still vote yes in November, because a narrow tool is better than no tool, and because voting no doesn’t bring back the broader bill. But the Councilmembers who voted for these amendments should not be congratulating themselves that this bill is going to solve our housing affordability crisis in any meaningful way. The version Ball introduced was a serious attempt to meet a serious problem. The version that passed is the problem dressed up in the language of a solution — a bond authority severed from the system it was designed to serve, unable to finance housing that Howard County actually needs.

Julia McCready at Village Green/Town² captured the broader cultural reality well this week: “The trouble with renters is not them. It’s us.”

Rent is not a four-letter word. But on April 6, the Howard County Council treated it like it was.