Finding affordable housing in Frederick County and indeed all of Maryland can be difficult and frustrating, and political leaders have identified it as a major problem.

The solution, as any economist will tell you, is to build more homes. The affordability issue is caused by a shortage of housing. Scarcity equals higher prices in housing as in any other product.

A state report published this month says Frederick County should produce 16,000 new housing units in the next four years to meet demand. The county is doing its own study, with results expected later this month, but the conclusion is likely to be similar.

The report says Frederick County actually needs 19,525 more residential units by 2030, and added that “a housing shortage caused by over fifteen years of sustained underproduction is unlikely to be resolved within the next five years, even with significant policy changes.”

To the casual observer driving around Frederick, it may not look like we have had 15 years of too little building, with developments sprouting like mushrooms after a rain.

If you were in charge of building new roads to keep up with rising traffic or building new schools to educate the fast-growing number of new pupils, you probably would not think growth was too slow. But that is what the numbers say.

The report says the number of new houses being built is not sufficient to accommodate our growing population. That is why housing costs are so high.

The production goal for our county is about 3,900 new housing units each year, according to state officials. Currently, according to the report, around 2,200 new housing units are produced annually.

“Frederick County knows there’s a big housing problem,” county spokesperson Vivian Laxton wrote in a statement to The Frederick News-Post. “That is true in Frederick County, across Maryland and across the nation. We support the state’s plan to figure out how much housing is needed over the next five years and to set goals for building more homes.”

Laxton said the county is working with the city of Frederick on its own housing needs assessment to show the number of units needed in the area currently and over the next 10 years. That assessment is set to come out at the end of the month, Laxton said.

“Our main focus will be helping families with low to moderate incomes find homes they can afford,” Laxton wrote. “The state and the county use different ways to measure housing needs, but both agree we need more housing options.”

In 2024, Gov. Wes Moore issued an executive order telling state agencies to take steps to produce more housing. The order directed them to identify properties for development and to reduce state permitting times.

The order created the office of a state ombudsman to act as a liaison between developers, local governments and other groups to ensure projects move quickly.

Moore also told the Department of Housing and Community Development to create housing production targets, and its first report was published Jan. 1. The report said Maryland needs to double its rate of housing production over the next five years.

As a result of the shortage of affordable housing, evictions are very high.

“During the 2025 fiscal year, about 16,000 Maryland families were evicted for failure to pay rent, and tens of thousands more faced the threat of eviction,” the report said. “In that same time period, an estimated 22,000 Marylanders, including over 2,200 families with children, experienced homelessness.”

The governor’s goals are ambitious, but hopefully they are achievable.

In our community as well as around the state, the need for more affordable housing is acute. But state and local officials need to be equally concerned about the need for new roads and schools to serve residents and their families.

Building homes without the infrastructure to support them has been tried before here, with terrible results. We should learn from that experience, and not repeat it.

— Frederick News-Post