The high cost of housing: hitting Marylanders hard

On a warm Sunday afternoon in Olney, Maryland, would-be homeowners perused a three-bedroom townhouse overlooking a lake.

This particular home was up for sale for nearly a quarter of a million dollars – which was enough to make prospective first-time homebuyers like Vincent Kiatta think twice.

“The market is tough”, Kiatta, 27, said after touring that townhome.

Plenty of Marylanders agree. According to a poll conducted in January by Greater Greater Washington, a local advocacy group, over 90% of Maryland residents polled think the cost of buying or renting a house is a problem.

Dan Reed, the Maryland policy director of Greater Greater Washington, said housing affordability is a key issue in the state.

“People need access to homes they can afford to have,” Reed said.

But that’s not necessarily what many residents of Maryland get.

According to data released by the Maryland Association of Realtors, the median sales price in the state was $430,000 in March 2026. This is a 70% increase over the past 10 years, when it was just over $250,000.

And in Montgomery County, one of the more affluent counties in the state, the median sales price was around $650,000 this March – also about a 70% increase from 2016.

A housing shortage

For Reed, who grew up in Montgomery County, the issue of affordable housing hits home.

“I watched my parents struggle to find homes they could afford growing up,” Reed said. “I lived in a variety of not so great housing situations as a young adult… so this is deeply personal to me as well.”

Kelly Virbickas is a real estate agent with Compass Real Estate, mainly working in the Chevy Chase region – where, she said the average home price is around $1.2 million.

“It’s all in the location and the land,” Virbickas said. “People want those locations because of the schooling, the proximity to work, the prestige.”

But an October 2025 report from Maryland Comptroller Brooke Lierman highlighted a big problem: There is not enough housing available to meet the demand.

So why can the state simply just build more homes?

Experts say it’s because the process of building a home, from permitting to construction, is extremely complex. Reed said that while there is enough land to build housing, zoning restrictions can slow down or even stop the process.

Many communities limit what kinds of homes can be built depending on the lot, and some zoning restrictions bar the construction of multi-family housing.

To address that issue, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore introduced  the Starter and Silver Homes Act, which would allow for smaller single-family homes on smaller lots and townhouses in residential areas across the state.

However, this bill was never voted out of committee before the end of the General Assembly’s annual three-month session in April.

Moore also has testified in favor of the Maryland Transit and Opportunity Act, which aims to encourage development near transit stations. That bill passed the General Assembly.

“Our ability to be able to create a more vibrant and a more affordable market is going to be a key determination about how we’re going to think about the larger growth of our economy,” Moore said in the testimony.

‘Not even close’

The comptroller’s report said Maryland will need about 590,000 more housing units than it has to meet growth projections through 2045. That’s a number of housing units nearly equal to the entire current population of Wyoming.

So are there enough homes being built to keep Marylanders in the state?

“Not even close,” said Jake Day, secretary of the Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development.

According to the comptroller’s report, Maryland municipalities typically approve between 16,000-19,000 housing permits annually. In order to meet the state’s projected housing goals, the state would have to double the amount of permits approved.

But going from permitting to building can be painfully slow. Kiatta knows this firsthand.

Kiatta works at Erickson Senior Living, a retirement community with multiple locations in the area. He said the company’s latest construction project in Clarksville has just now gotten under way because of the complicated approval process from the state.

“We’ve owned the land for five years, and we just broke ground this month on the land,” Kiatta said. “That’s how much time it takes.”

Kiatta was touring the townhome in Olney with his girlfriend and parents. He has lived at home his whole life despite being out of college for nearly four years, in large part because of the high cost of housing.

“But… we have to leave Mom and Dad at some point,” he noted.

Interest rates

Another major concern among prospective homebuyers is interest rates, which have increased even faster than housing prices in recent years.

According to data from Freddie Mac, a government backed buyer of mortgages on the secondary market, the average fixed-rate 30-year mortgage currently comes with an interest rate of just over 6%, nearly double what rates were 10 years ago.

Average 30-year mortgage rates fell below 4% during the Covid-19 pandemic, but all that changed once product shortages stemming from the crisis prompted prices of many products to skyrocket.

“By 2022, the Federal Reserve began raising its benchmark interest rate to cool pandemic-spurred inflation, and mortgage rates followed suit,” Andrew Dehan, senior writer for home lending at Bankrate, wrote recently in a history of U.S. mortgage rates. “Fast-forward to October 2023, and the 30-year mortgage rate broke through 8% — an average not seen since 2000.”

Rates then fell as the Fed cut its benchmark rate, but have inched up again lately as the Iran War has fueled a new round of inflation, Dehan added.

Jackie Bennett, the president-elect of the Greater Capital Area Realtors Association, said interest rates have been a factor in the increasing cost of homeownership.

“Interest rate has been sustained at a higher level, but… home sellers really have not had the confidence to jump into the market,” Bennett said.

Virbickas explained how when most people buy a home, they consider how high the monthly mortgage payment will be – which escalates as interest rates rise.

“Interest rates, when they fluctuate, it brings down [the] ability to purchase a higher-priced home,” Virbickas said.

The benefits of homeownership

While the cost of home ownership is skyrocketing, home ownership can provide great benefits that go beyond the walls of a home.

According to research from Habitat for Humanity, there is a correlation between homeownership and increased wealth.

Every year of homeownership yet tends to add nearly $10,000 in net wealth, that study said.

Elliot Eisenberg of the Housing Affordability Institute noted that homeownership provides a safeguard against inflation when people lock in a fixed-rate mortgage at a decent rate.

And these benefits trickle down to the next generation, too. According to Habitat, children of low-income homeowners are 11% more likely to graduate from high school than children of low-income renters.

So for all of those reasons, Virbickas said people who can afford to buy a home should definitely do so.

“I do believe everybody should try and own a home,” Virbickas said.

“It’s a big expense, but it’s usually very rewarding.”