Recently there's been a bit of a local housing boom. Montgomery County's economy generally does well even in the worst national economic climates. Traditionally this was largely due to downcounty Montgomery being a bedroom suburb for the immense Federal workforce. In recent years, however, the emergence of the biotechnology industry -- promoted both by the presence of the National Institutes of Health, and the actions of former County Executive Doug Duncan -- has led to a massive buildout of research and office facilities, generally along the I-270 corridor. Some "elder core suburbs" have seen major renovation. For example, in the 1970s, Gaithersburg was a fairly small and not overpopulated city with a decaying "old town". In the first decade of the twenty-first century, Gaithersburg has become a bustling city, with many of the older parts rebuilt and with a tidy and upscale Old Town Gaithersburg. Downtown Silver Spring, for decades synonymous with failed efforts to reverse urban decay, is now highly revitalized, in particular by the influx of business, much of which is sited in high-rise office complexes. Olney, in the 1960s, was a smallish outer suburb at the intersection of two two-lane State highways. Now, Olney lacks only high-rise office complexes to rival Silver Spring; it's a thriving little metropolis with several fairly modern shopping centers, cinema complexes, a major hospital and associated offices, and a smallish business district suffering from all of the problems you expect in any city. All of these places have been characterized by rapid growth in suburban tract housing, with the exception of downtown Silver Spring. Where suburban single-family detached residences have been the norm, the steady economic growth of the region has combined with the nationwide explosion in housing value to produce a lot of "in-fill" development, and a lot of additions being built onto existing homes.
To reiterate, a huge number of jobs have attracted more employees. More employees need more housing.
The cost of living in Montgomery County is very high, compared to perhaps most other places. Partly this is because so many of the jobs here are technically demanding, require excellent educations, and pay quite well. The housing shortage has had two major results; the first being lots of new construction, mostly of high-priced large homes, with almost all new homes being priced at or near one million dollars. The second result has been a lot of illicit rental space being occupied outside of licensing or, frequently, outside of safety or construction code.
Ongoing construction necessarily implies construction workers, and the more construction, the more workers. While construction may pay fairly well, generally for the majority of workers it does not pay well enough to buy a new million-dollar home. Probably the majority of construction workers live in older housing stock in such elder core suburbs as Langley Park, Takoma Park, Silver Spring, Wheaton, Aspen Hill, and Rockville.
County Code limits the number of unrelated persons sharing a single-family detached residential home to no more than seven unrelated persons. When the persons are "related" -- and that term is barely defined -- there is no limit on the number of persons, so long as each is allocated a certain amount of square footage of occupiable space. This creates a worrisome situation: when all inhabitants of a structure are "related", there is every incentive for, and few restrictions against, expanding the home to as large a degree as is possible and within the building code.
As the homes grow larger, more workers are needed, and as more workers are needed, housing pressures grow, as housing pressures grow, so grows the temptation to have as many relatives as possible living in as large as possible a house on any given property.
In the local construction industry, commonly enough major considerations on hiring and contracting boil down to the phrase "how many workers can you bring, and at how low a price". In such conditions, the price of the workforce may depend on housing costs. The contractor who can deliver an extended family all dividing one house's costs may be the contractor who has the edge in bidding. The competitive edge, thus, goes to whomever can crowd the most workers into one house. The cost of the house remains constant, divided by the variable numbers of inhabitants. As more people crowd in, the less it costs per person. It's simple math, but it promotes the so-called "race to the bottom".
As more people expand their properties to house increasing numbers of workers (and perhaps their dependents), increased strain is placed on an aging infrastructure. Plumbing designed to adequately service a family of six with occasional guests may approach or exceed design limits if pressed into service for a dozen persons. If one house per block is at such "overcapacity", the concern is for the plumbing between the house and the public mains. If the majority of the houses per block are at such overcapacity, the concern may be not merely for the mains, but for the sewage treatment plants. Comparably, electrical systems designed to accomodate the power needs of TV, refrigeration, and air-conditioning for six people may not safely handle the demands of powering the same services for a dozen people. The wiring in the home may be upgraded, and in a neighborhood of such overcapacity, the problems may be shifted out of the homes and onto the utility.
More people need more power and the utilities will have to pay for it somehow, but more importantly, twice the demand requires a bit more than twice the generation at the power house. If the fuel is coal or natural gas, twice the power consumption means twice the emissions. More people need more water for sanitation, and if capacity cannot be added quickly enough, if the waste treatment facilities become overloaded, this can have extremely bad consequences in terms of pollutant leaks or discharges.
More people per house are likely to mean more motor-vehicles per house. As construction work by its very nature usually occurs far from access to public transportation, construction workers living as extended families at "overcapacity" crowding levels will tend to very much increase the number of vehicles in any given area. If it's one house on the block, it may not be much of a problem. If it's half of the neighborhood, parking may become effectively unobtainable without converting permeable watershed in the yard into impermeable driveways. Increases in impermeable acreage contributes to flooding, erosion, and loss of buffers to filter pollutants from the surface before they reach the watersheds contributory to the Chesapeake.
Overcapacity housing may also contribute to increased costs in schools, in calls for police services, in safety hazards such as excessive vehicles present which interfere with fire-rescue response times or effectiveness. Overcapacity housing is, of course, forbidden by County Code... except for extended families.
So long as there is a certain level of construction ongoing in the County, people will continue to send abroad for their able-bodied relatives to work in that construction. And as long as those people who send abroad for more workers are related to those workers, County Code is effectively powerless to regulate overcapacity housing.
There are a variety of approaches to dealing with the consequences of widespread, and growing, overcapacity housing.
One such approach is to throw money at the problem, necessarily at the expense of taxpayers. Overcapacity housing is clogging the sewers and overwhelming the waste-treatment facilities? Build more facilities. Rip up the streets and inconvenience hundreds or thousands of people, replace perfectly good pipe with larger pipe, spend millions of dollars and years of time planning a new waste-treatment facility which by the time it is built may be insufficient to deal with even more overcapacity housing. Overcapacity housing places such demand on the electrical provision infrastructure at all levels that everyone on the grid reasonably comes to expect brownouts and recurrent failures? Build another power plant or two, replace all of the wiring, install new failover breakers and transformers. Such approaches are the infrastructure-planner's equivalent of following your dog around the block with a shovel and a plastic bag at predictable intervals.
Another approach, which I submit is better, is prevention.
By decreasing the amount of construction authorized in Montgomery County, the demand for construction workers will decrease. With less demand for workers, there will be less demand for workers from abroad to come to our area to crowd the homes of their relatives. With less crowded homes, there is almost no incentive to "oversize" a house and then again fill it to overcapacity.
Simply by granting less permission to build, the County finds an elegant, and simple, solution to problems of overcapacity, the proliferation of oversized homes, parking problems, pollution, and even global warming.
Further, the County should at least double the size of the staff of the Code Enforcement and Permitting Services agencies.
Further, the County Council should quickly revise County Code to make the limit of seven persons per single-family detached home an absolute default, with exceptions only for immediate family of the first degree of consanguinuity. Thus, perhaps four generations of a family might live in one home, from grandmother to great-grandchild; however, for any given generation, siblings alone could share occupancy of more than seven people in that home. This would prevent houses of 20 individuals all being each others' "second cousin once removed" and thus qualifying for the present day exemption for being "related".
As it becomes clear that on the one hand, the County will no longer tolerate moving an entire clan into one home, and as on the other hand the county removes the incentive of an ever-expanding construction and development trade, we will see a major decline in forces pulling people into overcapacity and overcrowding. On the other hand, the lack of employment combining with equity in a large house may convince a fairly large number of people to simply sell off and go back home where they will be rich by comparison with local standards. In this latter case, more large homes will come on the market, prices will decline somewhat more towards affordability and will tend to be populated by small numbers of well-paid individuals or the small families typical of degreed professionals, rather than overcrowded by construction workers living in barracks conditions.
I believe this resolves this issue in a way that will be to the benefit of almost all and mostly to the detriment of none.