Montgomery County Executive Ike Leggett has assembled a 35-person task force of builders, bankers and public officials to strategize on ways to quickly expand affordable housing in the county.
That group will have until October to write up a detailed plan for leveraging private dollars to fix what Leggett has called one of his main priorities.
“This is not the type of report where they’ll come back with a list of far-reaching ideas,” he told The Examiner on Monday. “We’re looking for solutions that we can implement now. …”
For fiscal 2008, the preliminary budget Leggett unveiled last month sets aside a much larger funding pool for the cause of affordable housing — $30 million, which is 50 percent more than the prior fiscal year.
Leggett has said this increased focus on affordable housing is crucial for a county often falsely seen as possessing purely wealthy residents.
The number of current affordable housing units in Montgomery County is not one officials agree upon. In fact, the very definition of “affordable housing” is still being debated. But the county executive told The Examiner that his staff’s best guess is that there is a 40,000- to 45,000-unit deficiency.
The task force is made up of numerous big names in the community, from County Council President Marilyn Praisner to Sharan London, executive directorof the Montgomery County Coalition for the Homeless, to Cheryl Cort, the policy director for the Coalition for Smarter Growth.
In terms of people from the development community, the list includes David Flanagan of Elm Street Development, the firm that came under heavy criticism for planning and zoning code mistakes that caused delays in the Clarksburg Village project, as well as representatives from real estate consulting firm Banneker Ventures, mixed-use development firm Mid-City Urban and assisted-living and affordable housing advocacy group Victory Housing.
From the banking industry, those with representatives on the task force include Bank of America, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.
