Ten months ago, the Greenbelt City Council received a report on affordable housing prepared by Mary Kovar, an intern with the Maryland Municipal League and a graduate student at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy. Kovar made three recommendations: that the city create standards for new housing developments to include affordable housing units with those standards to generally follow the Moderately Priced Dwelling Unit Program (MPDU) standards set by other area jurisdictions; that the city renew its Housing and Urban Development Section 8 contract for Green Ridge House when it expires in 2019; and that the city explore new opportunities for affordable housing development and require all economic development occurring have an affordable housing component. Also, council expressed interest in determining whether the city had the legal authority to enact rent stabilization legislation as has been done by the city of Takoma Park. With a busy schedule and change in city managers, nothing has yet been done.
Council’s June 12 worksession was identified as a panel discussion on affordable housing. The panel attending the meeting consisted of Hillary Chapman, housing program manager at the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments; Stephanie Prange Proestel, deputy director of the Housing Initiative Partnership of Hyattsville; Jesse Buggs, director of the grants office, housing and homelessness for the City of Bowie; and William Duncan, a Greenbelt resident retired from Enterprise Community Partners of Columbia.
There was little new information provided at the worksession. It was agreed that the Greenbelt Homes, Incorporated (GHI) housing stock provided some of the best and most affordable housing in the area. Duncan indicated that he chose to move there upon retirement. At the meeting’s outset, Mayor Emmett Jordan noted that Greenbelt already had the lowest housing valuations in the area. He also noted little opportunity for finding a location to develop additional low-cost housing, because Greenbelt no longer had buildable land sites other than at Greenbelt Station.
Read more of this story in the June 29 News Review