Site sourcing and screening — Maryland

What the Maryland screen actually checks

The Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development (DHCD), acting through its Community Development Administration (CDA, a unit of DHCD's Division of Development Finance), administers the federal Low Income Housing Tax Credit under the Maryland Qualified Allocation Plan (QAP) and its attached Multifamily Rental Financing Program Guide (the Guide). The current QAP was approved by the Governor on April 8, 2026, effective that date, following a public hearing held March 25, 2026 — the twenty-fourth amendment to a plan first approved April 5, 1990. The QAP and Guide together implement the Housing and Community Development Article, §§4-101–4-255 of the Annotated Code of Maryland, and the Code of Maryland Regulations (COMAR) Title 05, Subtitle 05, Chapter 06.

Two things fall out of this list immediately. First, Maryland's environmental threshold is written more loosely than a named Phase I requirement — worth flagging now and returning to in Phase 2, because it changes what a screening tool can assume is actually in hand. Second, the Priority Funding Area check is not a nice-to-have geography signal the way a walkability score is; it is a pass/fail gate that applies to every new-construction application, full stop, regardless of how well the site otherwise scores.

No regional pools — one statewide round, and a discretionary bonus as the only geographic lever

It is worth being direct about this because it cuts against a reasonable prior: Maryland's 2026 QAP does not structure its competitive round around fixed geographic pools the way some states apportion credit by region or by county. The only mandatory set-aside is the federal floor itself — "As required by §42(h)(5)(A) of the Internal Revenue Code a minimum of 10% of the total LIHTC available for allocation must be set aside annually for projects involving qualified nonprofit organizations" — layered with two DHCD-created pools of its own: up to $1.5 million per round reserved for smaller projects and newer development companies (the Infill and Redevelopment Pool, capped at $500,000 per project, minimum 12 units), and up to $3 million reserved for two permanent supportive housing projects serving the chronically homeless (the PSH Set-Aside). Neither pool is geographic. There is no Baltimore City carve-out and no county-by-county allocation.

Instead, every application competes in one statewide round on one point scale, and geography enters through the scoring criteria described below plus a single discretionary safety valve: State Bonus Points. DHCD's own language in Section 4.8 of the Guide states the purpose plainly — bonus points may be awarded to "[r]epresent an equitable regional or geographic distribution of resources, ensuring that unintended consequences of scoring do not systemically and practically prevent a given region from receiving appropriate LIHTC and RHFP resources." That is a may, not a must, and it is one bullet among a dozen other stated purposes for the same bonus-point pool (disaster response, workforce housing near new employers, elderly and intergenerational housing, ENOUGH Act/Just Communities tracts, the Purple Line corridor). A project must already have scored at least 120 points before it can receive any State Bonus Points at all, and no project may receive more than 10 bonus points except for specific categories (intergenerational, elderly, and permanent supportive housing).

Whether this discretionary mechanism actually produces geographic balance in practice, or merely could, is not something the QAP text settles — it is a live policy tool DHCD may or may not deploy in any given round, and a screening or modeling tool should not encode it as a guaranteed correction. What the 2026 cycle's own numbers show is that recent rounds have in fact spread geographically without a mandatory pool forcing it: DHCD's Notice 26-11 records ten applications in the Spring/Summer 2026 round requesting $13.75 million in Rental Housing Financing Program (RHFP) funds (including $2 million in HOME funds) and $12,910,000 in federal LIHTC, proposing 477 units across seven counties and Baltimore City. That is a real, reported outcome for one round — not evidence that the scoring system guarantees it every round.

Priority Funding Areas: a 1997 Smart Growth law that is now a hard LIHTC gate

Maryland's Priority Funding Areas (PFA) program predates the QAP's use of it by a decade and belongs to a different body of law entirely — the 1997 "Smart Growth" package, now codified at Md. Code Ann., State Finance and Procurement Article, Title 5, Subtitle 7B (§§5-7B-01 et seq.), with §5-7B-02 defining which areas qualify. The concept is Maryland's own and predates most states' growth-management statutes: rather than restrict development outside designated areas directly, the law restricts what State infrastructure money — roads, water, sewer — may fund outside them, creating a strong practical incentive to build inside them instead.

DHCD's Guide imports that PFA test directly into the QAP as a threshold, not a score: "All projects involving any new construction must be located in a Priority Funding Area (PFA)" (Guide §3.11.7). The Guide's own list of what counts tracks the statute closely:

The gate has a real consequence a screening tool should surface early: a site outside all six categories cannot be a new-construction 9 percent, 4 percent, or Multifamily Bond Program deal in Maryland — no scoring category, State Bonus Point, or basis boost offsets that. The workaround is not a rezoning; it is a county government choosing to designate the parcel's area as a PFA under its own comprehensive plan, a land-use policy decision that runs on the county's own clock, not DHCD's or the QAP's. That interaction — PFA designation as a local land-use act, not a federal-credit election — is developed further in Phase 3.

Community Context scoring and the State Basis Boost that doesn't stack

Maryland's site-related scoring lives in Guide Chapter 4, Section 4.2 ("Community Context"), and the QAP is explicit that these three subcategories are mutually exclusive — "Projects may only receive points under one of the following categories: 4.2.1, 4.2.2, or 4.2.3" — each capped at 16 points.

The Communities of Opportunity category is worth unpacking because it is doing double duty — it is both a scoring category and, separately, an automatic basis-boost trigger. DHCD's Composite Opportunity Index is the department's own construct, built from three factors — community health, economic opportunity, and educational opportunity — each assembled from named American Community Survey 2016-2020 five-year-estimate variables (median household income, homeownership rate, median home value, population change, poverty rate, unemployment rate, commute time, and educational attainment). A tract qualifies only if its composite score sits above the statewide average. Separately, and independent of that index, a site also qualifies if it sits in one of two named legal settlements: the Thompson v. HUD case in Baltimore City, or the Conciliation Agreement among HUD, several complainants, and Baltimore County designating 116 specific census tracts in Baltimore County.

The basis-boost mechanics interact with all of this in a way worth stating precisely, because getting it backwards double-counts a benefit that does not stack. Under QAP Section E.3: "All family projects located within Communities of Opportunity and projects located in an ENOUGH Act or Just Community census tract that request competitive tax credits qualify for the State 30% Basis Boost without prior CDA approval." For every other project, CDA retains discretion to grant the same 30 percent State Basis Boost case by case if needed for feasibility. But the QAP is explicit on the one thing that does not stack: "Projects receiving a Basis Boost because of location in a Qualified Census Tract (QCT) or Difficult Development Area (DDA) are not also eligible to receive the State Basis Boost." A project already getting the federal 30 percent QCT/DDA boost does not also get Maryland's state boost on top of it — and, separately, tax-exempt bond deals financed outside the State's annual ceiling are excluded from the State Basis Boost entirely, because HERA does not permit it for credits allocated outside the state ceiling.

The ENOUGH Act and Just Communities: a newer, poverty-targeted layer

Two more geographic designations sit alongside the Composite Opportunity Index, aimed at the opposite end of the same problem — concentrated poverty rather than opportunity access — and both are recent enough that a screening tool built even a year or two ago would not have them.

The Engaging Neighborhoods, Organizations, Unions, Governments, and Households (ENOUGH) Act of 2024 — Senate Bill 482, Chapter 408, Laws of Maryland 2024, sponsored under the Moore-Miller administration's Governor's Office for Children — created a grant program targeting concentrated child poverty; to qualify for the ENOUGH Grant Program itself, a community must contain at least one census tract where more than 30 percent of children live in poverty and be served by a community school with a concentration-of-poverty rate of at least 80 percent. "Just Communities" is a related but distinct DHCD designation, not a creature of the ENOUGH Act's own text: DHCD used a racial-equity and social-justice framework, program evaluation, and community engagement to designate 419 of Maryland's 1,463 census tracts across 17 counties and Baltimore City as Just Communities, a five-year designation that creates priority consideration for competitive state funding starting in fiscal year 2026.

For LIHTC purposes specifically, both function the same way in two places in the QAP: they trigger the automatic State 30% Basis Boost under Section E.3 quoted above ("projects located in an ENOUGH Act or Just Community census tract"), and they appear again as one of the enumerated purposes DHCD may use State Bonus Points for — "[p]romotes the development of projects in ENOUGH Act or Just Communities census tracts" (Guide §4.8). Neither designation is the same geography as a Community of Opportunity, a QCT, or a DDA; a site can carry any combination of these four, none of them, or overlap on more than one, and a screening tool needs to check all four as independent layers rather than assuming one implies another.

Where the data gets thin: environmental layers and income limits

The Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE) — a separate cabinet agency from DHCD — publishes a live ArcGIS REST endpoint at mde.geodata.md.gov/mdedata/rest/services, confirmed reachable and returning structured JSON during this research pass. Two folders are directly relevant to LIHTC site screening: LMA_Land_Restoration_Program, which serves a Land_Restoration_Program_Sites MapServer covering MDE's Voluntary Cleanup Program, Brownfields Initiative, and State Remediation Sites list in one queryable layer; and WSA_Wetlands, which serves a Screening_Points MapServer. Both were live and queryable as ArcGIS REST services at the time of this research.

What was not confirmed in this pass is whether MDE's Oil Control Program — the program that tracks leaking underground storage tanks and roughly 1,000 active responsible-party cleanup sites statewide, a hazard category distinct from the Land Restoration Program's brownfields/VCP sites — publishes an equivalent REST layer on the same endpoint or elsewhere. Public MDE materials describe an "Oil Control Remediation Sites" map and fact sheets, but this research did not locate or test a corresponding queryable service. A screening tool should verify that directly with MDE rather than assume Oil Control data carries the same API access as the Land Restoration Program and Wetlands layers.

On income limits, DHCD does not simply point applicants to HUD's raw Multifamily Tax Subsidy Project (MTSP) release; it publishes its own derived, statewide "Low Income Housing Tax Credit Program Income and Rent Limits" document, organized by HUD Housing Metro FMR Area (HMFA) or Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA), converting each area's HUD-published median family income into a full table of income limits (20 percent through 80 percent AMI) and corresponding maximum rents by household size and by bedroom count. The version confirmed in this research was effective April 1, 2025; it carries an explicit hold-harmless caveat directing any property placed in service before May 15, 2023 to a third-party (Novogradac) income-limit calculator instead, since hold-harmless limits under the Internal Revenue Code may run higher than the current published table. The 2026 edition's exact effective date was not independently confirmed in this pass and should be checked directly against DHCD's current posting before relying on a specific figure.

One more figure is worth flagging as approximate rather than QAP-stated: Maryland's annual LIHTC ceiling is set by the federal population-based formula under 26 U.S.C. §42(h)(3)(C), not by a dollar figure printed anywhere in the QAP or Guide text reviewed for this phase. Trade-press reporting around the 2026 QAP's approval cites roughly $30 million in annual per-capita credit authority; that number was not independently verified against an IRS revenue procedure or a DHCD-published ceiling figure in this research and should be treated as a secondary-source approximation, not a QAP fact.