Efforts are underway in Prince George’s County to expand the menu of housing options available to developers, in hopes of providing more affordability for residents.
County officials are in the early stages of exploring housing on smaller footprints, so-called tiny homes or micro-units, which are built to maximize space while minimizing costs.
The county is “working on a plan to develop what we call tiny homes, tiny home communities throughout our county, to give everyone at every price point an opportunity to realize the American dream,” Prince George’s County Executive Aisha Braveboy said last week at a Bisnow event in College Park, Maryland.
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Braveboy's office didn't respond to multiple requests for comment on what that plan would entail. But she said at the Thursday event that the county would host future meetings and conferences on the topic of alternative housing.
Later that day, at large Council Member Jolene Ivey and District 9 Council Member Sydney Harrison hosted a town hall on microhousing, designed to present community members with information and hear feedback.
“Housing has become very unaffordable for so many people, and it is possible that if we go down this path, we'll be able to provide a kind of housing that is much smaller, so therefore less expensive, and that will help with the affordability for some people,” Ivey said in an interview Tuesday.
In 2023, 50.3% of renter households and 28% of homeowners in Prince George’s County were cost-burdened, meaning they were spending 30% or more of their income on housing, according to a Planning Department study released in January.
At Thursday's town hall, officials from the county Planning Department presented information on different forms of microhousing — micro-apartments, tiny homes on wheels and compact homes grouped around a shared courtyard or garden space.
“Other areas of the country have seen them, but we have not seen many of them being built here in Prince George's County,” James Hunt, acting planning director for the Prince George’s County Planning Department, who presented at the town hall, told Bisnow.
The presentation referenced the county’s affordability struggles and a supply pipeline problem. It said the county needs to add another 36,000 housing units by 2030 to meet projected demand, a goal that Hunt later told Bisnow the county will likely fall short of.
Hunt said the Planning Department would need to look at its zoning ordinance to determine what changes are necessary to allow these various types of housing.
Ivey said she expects there will be at least two more community forums before a legislative effort gets underway. She said Braveboy wasn’t involved in the town hall, but Ivey recently learned that the county executive was also interested in this issue. Ivey said she would be happy to collaborate.
Even if developers are able to build these alternative types of micro-units, it isn’t a given that they would want to execute them or that their finances would make sense in this investment environment.
But because they would be more affordable, more people would likely be able to buy them, and thus more developers would be interested in building them, Ivey said. And the demand is there — from seniors who need to downsize to young professionals right out of college.
Hunt said his goal is to provide options, with the hope that different types of development would make sense in different situations.
“Residents have screamed multiple times that they're tired of seeing townhomes,” he said. “So let's give them other housing types. Let's give developers other housing types out there so they can address the housing needs of Prince George's versus just always giving them townhomes or giving them single-family detached.”
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