Frederick County Sets Housing-Start Record
Maryland's Frederick County, already grappling with 18 years of growth, set a record for housing starts last year, raising concern that a new wave of building is underway.</br></br>Nearly 3,000 homes, town houses and apartments were constructed in 1989, surpassing the previous high of 2,082 housing starts in 1986, according to a report issued by the county's planning department.</br></br>"It's our biggest year yet," said Monika Robertson, a planning department employee who helped compile the statistics. "We expected 2,000 to 2,500 new dwellings. There were an awful lot of apartments built last year in Frederick city."</br></br>The growth in housing units has outpaced the county's population boom in recent years. The population of the county grew 32 percent between 1980 and 1990, while housing starts grew 38 percent during the same decade, the report said.</br></br>While the type of housing being built remains primarily single-family dwellings, multifamily dwellings and town houses are beginning to account for more of the total housing stock.