Duncan receives housing award

Montgomery County Executive Douglas M. Duncan yesterday received a regional award for affordable-housing programs, though activists say the county has promised much more on the issue than it has delivered.

During a downtown luncheon, a block from the White House, the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments recognized Mr. Duncan, who is running for governor, for a fund that creates and preserves affordable housing in Montgomery County.

Mr. Duncan, who stayed for the entire three-hour luncheon, rose and spoke for about 60 seconds.

“It’s a great program, and thank you for this award,” he said, after thanking the County Council and Elizabeth Davison, director of the county’s Department of Community and Housing Affairs (DHCA), which handles most affordable-housing issues.

Mrs. Davison’s agency, however, is one of three county agencies that activists and homeowners say have failed to properly monitor developers for compliance with the law.

As a result, they say, the county has not held developers to their legal requirements to build affordable-housing units in and among regularly priced homes. This has created clusters of affordable housing, instead of diffusing the subsidized units throughout high-priced developments.

The county has also allowed developers to sometimes buy out their obligation.

“The developers over the course of several years now have gotten out of building [affordable housing],” said Drew Powell, chairman of Neighbors for a Better Montgomery, a group that primarily tracks political contributions from developers.

“If this is a county that really wants to commit to providing affordable housing, then the first thing you do is demand that developers fulfill their obligation to build [affordable housing],” said Jim Humphrey, of the Montgomery County Civic Federation, a consortium of homeowners associations.

Mr. Duncan said the county has “tightened up” enforcement of affordable-housing requirements. He said it was “the exception” for the county to allow developers to delay or avoid affordable-housing construction.

The federation, however, issued a report this summer that charged developers with breaking the law, which requires them to build affordable housing at the same time as market-rate units, in several new developments around the county.

Mr. Humphrey also said that DHCA statistics show that since 1990, developers have paid $1.8 million to buy their way out of 116 affordable-housing units in 12 projects.

That money went to the Housing Initiative Fund (HIF), but Mr. Humphrey said that only 43 affordable-housing units have been built with the money, and the federation does not know where the rest of the money went.

The County Council this year allocated $20 million in property-tax revenue from two years ago to the HIF. Mr. Humphrey said that the federation does not know how any of that money is being used.

“We wish that it was administered in a more transparent manner,” he said.

Jeff Hooke, who helps run the Maryland Tax Education Foundation, a small nonprofit and advocacy group, called Montgomery County’s affordable-housing program “a fig leaf to give wealthy developers huge zoning breaks.”

If a developer who is limited to building a 10-floor building promises to include additional affordable housing, Mr. Hooke said, then they could be allowed to build three additional stories and make a bigger profit.

“The incentive zoning system basically leads to the trading of zoning breaks for political contributions,” Mr. Hooke said.

Mr. Hooke has testified to the council that they should require developers to bid for increased density, giving the county more money and affordable housing, rather than giving the density away for small requirements of affordable housing.