Planning experts: Children may not be Montgomery’s future

Rise of childless couples and singles buying homes could mean less elbow room and more problems carving out affordable housing

Wednesday, May 24, 2006

In 25 years Montgomery County is likely to feature more compact, mixed-use communities where residents can walk to stores, restaurants and services from their more tightly packed homes and smaller households.

Experts projected a glimpse of the county’s future, based on demographic and economic trends and plans in place, and offered some advice at a forum last week.

Planning ‘‘templates” in the 1960s for growing suburbs such as Montgomery were based on families with children, said moderator Arthur C. Nelson, director of the Urban Affairs and Planning Program at Virginia Tech’s Metropolitan Institute in Alexandria.

But the county has shifted to more single-person, single-parent and childless households.

According to the 2003 Census Update Survey by the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission, more than 53 percent of Montgomery County households consist of just one or two people. The county is already oversupplied with houses on large lots given the change in demand expected by 2030.

‘‘We in planning are simply behind the curve in recognizing these changes,” Nelson said.

The forum, at Johns Hopkins University’s Shady Grove campus, drew about 180 people. It was hosted by the Montgomery County Planning Board, the Coalition for Smarter Growth and the Urban Land Institute.

The county is struggling with traffic congestion and is expected to add more than 213,000 residents, 170,000 jobs and 94,000 houses by 2030.

And the number of housing units in 2030 in Montgomery is expected to be 60 percent more than in 2000.

With the decrease in household size, many of those units are likely to be apartments, condominiums, townhouses and detached homes on smaller lots.

Given that the average lifespan of a typical house is 170 years, an oversupply of typical suburban homes could have a long-range effect.

And big box stores have a short lifespan, as little as 10 years, which makes retail giants promising candidates to absorb the next wave of condo and apartment growth, Nelson said.

All of that growth could be accommodated on land where retail, commercial and office buildings are now.

Where and how to build affordable housing in Montgomery’s expensive market creates a thornier problem, experts agreed.

An easy but unpopular solution could be found in the county’s agricultural reserve, where land should — according to Brookings Institution senior fellow Anthony Downs — be released for development.

‘‘There are no feasible strategies for reducing housing prices in Montgomery County,” Downs said, adding that homeowners and politicians prefer that home values appreciate.

Better strategies exist for answering housing needs than opening the Agricultural Reserve, said Reid Ewing, professor at the University of Maryland’s National Center for Smart Growth.

The county should tie impact fees on development to the vehicle miles associated with it, making fees higher in the suburbs than in dense urban areas, Ewing said.

Allowing homeowners with large lots to build accessory housing units without the uncertainty and expense of seeking special approval and eliminating minimum house size requirements would also help, Nelson said.

Still, ‘‘affordable housing cannot be maintained without subsidies,” said Roger K. Lewis, a professor and founding member of the University of Maryland School of Architecture.

‘‘A lot of what we are talking about is going to be affected by the fate of the earth,” Lewis said, alluding to dwindling resources and climate change.

Zoning is a crude planing tool and planning practices have been ‘‘too timid, too shortsighted,” Lewis said.

‘‘Political leaders are short-term thinkers, motivated to put out today’s fire, not the change coming,” he said.

On Sept. 27, the group will host a community discussion at Brookside Gardens in Wheaton (from 6:30 p.m. to 10 p.m.) on strategies and tools for planning in the future.