Marc Elrich’s Housing Hocus Pocus

Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich wants you to believe he’s fixed the housing crisis. His latest County press release boasts that MoCo has “created or preserved” 2,289 affordable homes since the start of Fiscal Year 2025, a phrase that sounds bold until you realize most of those homes have been standing for decades.

The Department of Housing and Community Affairs (DHCA) blurs the line between building new housing and keeping existing units from disappearing. The result is a headline number that flatters, not informs. The County’s real budget documents show that roughly 60 percent of these “affordable units” are preservation deals. In other words, aging buildings acquired or refinanced with public money to stay nominally affordable. Only about 40 percent are genuinely new construction or conversions.

You can’t fix a housing shortage by putting a fresh coat of bureaucratic optimism on a vintage apartment building.

Since 2023, Montgomery County has poured over $316 million into “affordable housing.” For that, residents got fewer than 5,000 units, many of them simply renewed on paper. Meanwhile, rents rise, construction lags, and middle-income families drift to Frederick and Prince George’s Counties.

Elrich blames “the market” for not producing affordable housing, but it’s his own policies that make it nearly impossible for builders to do so. Between restrictive zoning, slow approvals, and a reflexive hostility by developers toward rent control rules, the County has regulated itself into stagnation. Elrich's housing hocus pocus celebrates this as progress.

The County's omission of any clear breakdown between creation and preservation isn’t an oversight; it’s the point. The messaging is built around conflating maintenance with production so every fiscal year can be sold as a record-breaking one. What the press release calls “2,289 homes” is really a story about how Montgomery County spent millions to stay exactly where it was. That may preserve balance sheets, but it doesn’t house families.

Taxpayers deserve a transparent accounting of how many new homes are being built — not how many leases got re-signed with subsidy strings attached. Real leadership would focus on zoning reform, permitting efficiency, and partnership with the private sector to expand supply.

Until then, every “affordable housing milestone” under Marc Elrich should be carefully scrutinized. He's a master at housing hocus pocus.