Bhavna Sivasubramanian is a housing research planner with the Montgomery County Planning Department in Maryland. As part of the Research and Strategic Projects Division, she conducts demographic, housing, and spatial analyses to inform ongoing master-planning efforts.

Prior to joining Montgomery Planning, she enjoyed a career in international development, working on issues of food security and informal livelihoods in sub-Saharan Africa and India. Bhavna holds a master’s degree in regional planning from Cornell University and a bachelor’s degree in international relations and economics from Tufts University.

Bhavna Sivasubramanian

We spoke with Bhavna after she completed Affordable Housing Essentials: How to Design, Develop, & Finance Properties Growing Cities Need in February 2025.

How was your experience in this program? Did it live up to your expectations?

I had a wonderful experience in this program. Prior to enrolling in the class, I briefly spoke with someone who had previously TA-ed the course, and was told that it would offer a holistic perspective of affordable housing from both the supply and demand side, and it did exactly that. The unique structure of combining conceptual lectures with a practical case study allowed for the real application of learned skills, while directly interacting with a diverse mix of participants.

Students ranged from developers – domestic and international – to housing authority representatives to non-profit members, which added a lot of nuances to the discussions. Given the relatively short length of the course (12 hours spread over 4 days), it was fast paced, but energizing, engaging, and intellectually stimulating.

“I left each class eager to read more to reinforce the material, think deeper about solutions to the case study, and learn from the other students based on their experiences.”

This program requires you to act in the role of a developer for its interactive case. As a planner by profession, how was that, and what insights on “the developer’s perspective” have you taken away?

As a local government planner by profession, taking on the role of an affordable housing developer took me out of my comfort zone and forced me to address the issue of affordable housing from a different angle. Putting on the developer hat allowed me to see how integral each party is to one another in reaching the mutual goal of affordable housing development. 

Conceptually, we learned in the course that the motivations of a developer are to maximize development profit while those of the government are to deliver quality public policy outcomes. When putting this into practice during the case study and being tasked to find the money to fund the project, the strengths and weaknesses of each party were illuminated. While the government needs counterparties to turn money and laws into outcomes, the developer needs government partners to streamline the development process. Being in a breakout group with developers, I gained insight into the types of questions they ask to reach their goals, the ways they try to mitigate their risk, and the various stakeholders they engage with to ensure long-term housing viability. 

In a 2023 article, the New York Times went in-depth on Montgomery County, noting that “For decades, Montgomery County has led the country in affordable housing innovations”. Then, in 2024, the Attainable Housing Strategies initiative was approved by the Planning Board. What can the rest of the US learn from the County’s efforts to affect the housing shortage?

Montgomery County, the entire DMV region, and numerous parts of the country, are facing an increasingly acute housing shortage, exacerbated by a growing population and lack of variety in available homes. Montgomery County has over 1 million residents and is expected to add 200,000 more people over the next 25 years, but we are not building enough housing fast enough to keep up with this growth. A quarter of households are made up of single people, yet more than a third of the county is zoned exclusively for single-family houses, potentially leading to a mismatch between housing needs and the types of housing available. Tens of thousands of people are living in houses with more bedrooms than residents, even as others struggle to find housing at all. Similar scenarios are seen all across the United States. 

This housing mismatch is why the County has spent the last few years determining how we can provide more types of housing that are attainable to a wide variety of current and would-be homeowners. The Attainable Housing Strategies Initiative serves as one way to bridge the gap and offer more housing opportunities for people with different lifestyles, incomes and needs. It focuses most immediately on key zoning changes that would allow property owner and developers to build more housing and more types of housing, especially along the corridors highlighted in our general plan Thrive Montgomery 2050. Providing duplexes and triplexes, courtyard cottages, and even smaller apartment buildings (termed “missing middle” housing) can expand homeowner opportunities for the county’s diverse residents, enabling a more equitable future. 

Though this initiative has yet to be turned into policy at the County Council level, it is a useful and innovative guide for other jurisdictions around the country confronting the housing shortage. While Missing Middle Housing alone will not solve Montgomery County, or the country’s, affordable housing shortage, together with other steps it will help make more housing attainable for residents of varied income levels at lower market prices.  

Would you recommend this program to other housing planners?

“Yes, I would highly recommend this program to other housing planners!”

Although my daily role does not involve conducting feasibility analyses or sourcing funds for individual housing projects, it is critical to learn the language, behavior, and overarching system of those who are implementing housing development. While some of the information covered in the course may be more technical than required for a planner’s everyday work, grasping the fundamentals of the housing value chain and identifying the interests of the key players are affordable housing essentials. It remains important and relevant to understand the types of conversations stakeholders are having and be able to engage in these discussions to reach the shared goal of affordable housing.