Townhouses! These are in Riverdale Park. Image by the author.

Earlier this month, Prince George’s County Council President Tom Dernoga and Council Vice President Wala Blegay introduced a bill that would block new townhouse developments in most areas for the next two years. Townhouses would be allowed in three types of places identified in Plan Prince George’s 2035, the county’s comprehensive plan: “Regional Transit Districts,” which include places like Branch Avenue, Largo, and New Carrollton; “Local Transit Centers” like Capitol Heights and West Hyattsville; and “Local Centers,” basically smaller commercial areas like Riverdale Park or Brandywine.

Dernoga and Blegay say their goal is to block suburban sprawl and push new construction to areas like the Blue Line corridor, which officials envision as Prince George’s answer to other suburban downtowns in Maryland, like Bethesda or Silver Spring. Already over $1.2 billion of investment is happening near the county’s four Blue Line stations, including nearly 1,700 homes, offices, retail, and a hotel. Although county zoning allows townhouses in many places, Blegay told WTOP that outside of the county’s transit centers, single-family homes should be built instead because “that fits the character of the area.”

Wait, is this bad?

Today you can step off the train at Prince George’s County Metro stations like Naylor Road and literally be in a field. That’s a huge missed opportunity! More people living, working, and shopping near Metro can support the county’s tax base, reduce suburban sprawl, and combat climate change. This can also attract nice amenities like high-end grocery stores that are reluctant to locate in Prince George’s, frustrating residents who have to travel long distances to shop.

But are those the best places for townhouses to go? Angie Rodgers, the county’s deputy chief administrative officer for economic development–and a vocal opponent of the bill–says the priority should be big, mixed-use buildings closest to the train, and townhouses in surrounding areas and more suburban parts of the county.

A close-up of neighborhoods along the Purple Line, including Hyattsville, College Park, Riverdale, and New Carrollton. Under the bill, townhouses would only be allowed in the green areas. Graph via Prince Georges County.

As I told the University of Maryland Diamondback, housing development isn’t just a faucet you can turn on and off. This bill can’t make people build next to the Blue Line–but it would stop people from building in lots of close-in, decidedly un-sprawl places. Here’s a brief list of recently-built developments that couldn’t be approved under this bill: this recent development of four townhouses in Mount Rainier, two blocks from the DC line; these townhouses in the middle of Hyattsville; these townhouses off Route 1 in College Park across from the University of Maryland; these stacked townhouses that replaced a vacant office park next to NASA Goddard in Glenn Dale; and these townhouses one mile from the Downtown Largo station that replaced a half-built, abandoned church.

A very brief history of townhouses in Prince George’s County

This isn’t the first time Prince George’s County has tried to block townhouse construction. Developers built a ton of them starting in the 1970s, when inflation was high and single-family homes were increasingly out of reach for homebuyers. At the time, upwardly mobile Black families were flocking to the county, which had become the nation’s wealthiest majority-Black jurisdiction, in search of a higher quality of life.

One of those families was mine. In 1984, my mother bought a new townhouse in Suitland at 23 with a high school degree and a bank teller’s salary, and that’s where we lived before we moved to Silver Spring in 1991. (That townhouse isn’t near the Metro or in any of the county’s Local Centers, meaning had Dernoga and Blegay’s bill been in effect, it couldn’t have been built.) Starting that year, Prince George’s County went on a townhouse tear, approving 10,000 of them over the next five years.

I lived in this Suitland townhouse (on the left), one of many built during a housing boom in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. Image by the author.

However, some county officials perceived townhouses as cheap and low-quality. In 1996, then-Councilmember Ronald Russell–who represented Blegay’s district–told the Washington Post, “I can’t think of anyone who wants more town houses in Prince George’s County…I have a community where people are paying an arm and leg for town houses that are breaking down in the first two years.”

Then-County Executive Wayne Curry, who had grown up in Prince George’s during segregation wanted to see more high-end homes built instead. (A developer by trade, Curry helped by building a neighborhood in Upper Marlboro named for himself.) So the county limited how many townhouses could be built and created restrictions that made them larger and more expensive.

All townhouses aren’t low-quality, but the rhetoric around them in Prince George’s County does reflect the distrust some Black communities have with the real estate industry and fear of being targeted with inferior products. The result is that today, townhouses make up just 16% of the county’s housing stock, compared to 51% for single-family homes. Still, home prices in Prince George’s County remain lower than surrounding counties, and took longer to recover after the Great Recession.

So some residents, fearful for their property values, fight things being built near them– gas stations, an Amazon warehouse –but also townhouses. After all, if people in plurality-white Montgomery County can do it, why can’t they?

Prince George’s County needs more housing choices, including townhouses

Stop me if you’ve heard this before: we have a regional and national housing shortage! According to the Urban Institute, Prince George’s County needs 35,000 new homes in the next 20 years to accommodate its share of the region’s growing population. And with a dwindling supply of homes, prices in the county are rising fast, meaning even middle-class people are getting pushed out. Prince George’s County, like its Beltway neighbors Montgomery and Fairfax lost people last year – while DC and farther-out counties gained people. One of them is Charles County, which just eclipsed Prince George’s as the nation’s wealthiest majority-Black county.

A new single-family house in Brandywine. Image by the author.

The county’s 2021 Comprehensive Housing Strategy finds the lack of diverse housing options–whether it’s smaller houses, newer homes that need less maintenance, or homes in communities near shopping and transit–make it hard to retain existing residents or attract new ones. Restricting townhouse development will only give people fewer options at a time when they need more choices, especially young people or people of color.

Who lives in different types of homes in Prince George’s County, broken out by white and Black residents. Graph from @whatthecarp on Twitter

Prince George’s may be a majority-Black county, but its housing patterns look just like its majority- or plurality-white neighbors: Black residents are less likely to own homes and are twice as likely to live in townhouses compared to white residents. That’s why Montgomery and Arlington counties are looking at ways to provide more housing choices, including townhouses. As Rodgers notes, the “progressive discussion around land use and zoning in this country…has focused on eliminating single family zones, and not town houses or other building types that promote more density.”

That’s why it’s jarring to hear Blegay, one of three women of color under 40 who joined the County Council last fall and a staunch progressive, talk about the importance of preserving neighborhood character–the same language that communities in other parts of the region and the US used to push non-white and/or less-affluent people out. That legacy shaped Prince George’s County and it continues to have an impact today.

To say that single-family homes should be the only type of home in most of Prince George’s County is to say a lot of people don’t belong in most of Prince George’s County. That includes my family.

In the meantime: the County Council could move quickly on this bill, and a public hearing and final vote could be scheduled within the next month. We’ll keep you updated when that happens.

Dan Reed (they/them) is Greater Greater Washington’s regional policy director, focused on housing and land use policy in Maryland and Northern Virginia. For a decade prior, Dan was a transportation planner working with communities all over North America to make their streets safer, enjoyable, and equitable. Their writing has appeared in publications including Washingtonian, CityLab, and Shelterforce, as well as Just Up The Pike, a neighborhood blog founded in 2006. Dan lives in Silver Spring with Drizzy, the goodest boy ever.