Howard County’s proposed solution to its housing crisis? Borrow.

Clare Mansour’s dream is to be an art teacher, but the cost of doing so in Howard County doesn’t add up.

Even with a roommate, the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, student estimates the cost of renting a place near her family in Ellicott City would eat up much of her $50,000 starting salary. After she paid the rest of her bills, there would be little room for savings or leisure items such as art supplies — things that make the difference between living and just scraping by, she said.

“It would be really tight, if at all possible, for me to pull this off,” Mansour said Tuesday evening at a public hearing centered in part on Howard’s housing crisis.

Howard’s housing prices have skyrocketed over the last decade, setting off a crisis that could create serious consequences. County Executive Calvin Ball’s administration is proposing a charter amendment that would authorize the county to fund affordable housing development by taking on debt in the form of bonds, similar to the way it finances capital construction for schools, roads and other infrastructure.

If the County Council votes in favor of the measure, it would appear as a referendum on the November ballot. Passing the referendum would not automatically lock the county into taking on debt to fund affordable housing projects. Rather, it would create the option to do so during future budget cycles, with public input and after Ball reaches his term limit at the end of 2026.

The proposed amendment was among 80 recommendations in a master plan to address housing needs that the county published in 2021. Montgomery County and Baltimore similarly use bonds to fund affordable housing projects.

In January, Howard County’s median sales price was $534,167, meaning half of all homes sold for more than that. The figure is far higher than the state as a whole, which had a median sales price of $393,667, according to Zillow data. At the same time, the average monthly rent has spiked to $2,200, about 34% higher than it was when Ball’s first term began in 2018.

Without affordable housing, critical infrastructure including hospitals, nursing homes and schools may struggle to attract essential workers. Aging residents risk their adult children moving farther away if they’re priced out of the communities where they were raised. When the population stagnates, local governments might have to turn to tax increases to pay for growing expenses — or cut services.

People don’t typically end up homeless because they were reckless or irresponsible, Dana Sohr, a representative of the nonprofit Bridges to Housing Stability, said at Tuesday’s hearing. The organization often serves paraeducators, nursing assistants, child care workers and other essential workers who are typically making no more than $50,000 a year, he said.

“They ended up homeless because one thing went wrong — one illness, one abusive partner, one layoff, one diagnosis in a county where housing costs consume such a large percentage of income that often there’s no safety margin left when life goes sideways,” Sohr said.

Glaring housing shortage

As the county was developing its master plan in 2021, consultants estimated Howard was short 20,000 housing units, leaving it with fewer units for every job than nearly every other jurisdiction in the region. The county’s master plan identified zoning as one of the main barriers to housing diversification. The other was community opposition.

Since the plan’s introduction, efforts to enact some of the 80 recommendations have failed. The council declined to advance a package of housing bills that Ball introduced in 2023 that would have set a cap on rents to prevent price gouging.

Other recommendations have been adopted with more ease, such as the creation of the Housing Opportunities Trust Fund in 2022. At least 50% of the fund must serve households earning less than 50% of the county’s median income, said Kelly Cimino, director of the county’s department of housing and community development, which oversees the fund.

The trust fund’s impact is evident in high-profile projects such as Patuxent Commons, which received $1.6 million in gap financing before opening in late 2025. The apartment complex sets aside 25% of its units for people with disabilities.

Still, the county’s budget is tight and demand for financing has far exceeded the $15 million the county has put in the trust fund. Over two application rounds, the county received requests totaling $32 million, Cimino said.

Without a dedicated source of money to finance the fund, the department must rely on transfer tax revenue and developer fees — both of which depend on the health of the real estate market. If councilmembers and voters approve the charter amendment, officials could issue bonds to borrow money for the trust fund.

Jessamine Duvall, executive director of the Columbia Housing Center, said the charter amendment simply asks voters to decide whether affordable housing should be treated as infrastructure. The measure doesn’t represent a final decision on whether to take on debt, she said.

The resolution is really about “trusting that our residents understand the challenges facing our community and trusting them to weigh in on whether housing should be treated as the essential infrastructure that it is,” Duvall said.

The council’s next opportunity to discuss the charter amendment is a work session scheduled Monday.

Baltimore Banner reporter Hallie Miller contributed to this article.