It should come as no great shock that Harford County's building boom days are a thing of the past.
Even as the extended recession that began in 2008 and was largely blamed on an over-extended real estate marketplace has come to an end, new home construction has yet to rebound in Harford County.
While the housing market has picked up in places, in Harford County the rate of permits being issued for new houses in 2015 is lagging behind what it was in 2014, and 2014 was hardly a good year.
Monthly single-family home permit totals for January and February for the county were in the single digits.
From the perspective of a county where home-building was a key element driving economic growth from the 1970s arguably through the mid to late 1990s, the rate at which building permits were issued could be seen as disturbing. At the height of the boom, annual permit totals were in the thousands.
That, in turn, lifted employment in construction as well as in any number of other ancillary businesses ranging from road paving to interior design.
The recession hit Harford's housing construction business hard, and the impact of changes made at Aberdeen Proving Ground that had been expected to result in increased demand for housing never resulted in that increased demand.
Now the situation is such that Harford County's population has been relatively stable in recent years (a reality also reflected in flat public school enrollment numbers). The demand for new places to live just isn't what it once was.
Even if there were to be a massive influx of people looking for places to live, however, it would be hard to match the impact that hit the county when the building boom of the late 1970s through the 1990s was at its peak.
It was that period that saw development along the Route 24 corridor between I-95 and Bel Air turn sprawling farmland into one of the most densely populated areas in Harford County.
In terms of sheer numbers, it would be hard to find a place in the county where something could happen on a similar scale now. Sure, there remain plenty of expanses of undeveloped farmland, but most aren't particularly close to major roadways like I-95. Presumably, the Route 543 and 152 corridors could be similarly developed, but the political sentiment in the areas that would be affected likely precludes large scale development in those areas.
It may well come to pass that the housing market will pick up in Harford County – presuming there are no more false starts or worse relating to Aberdeen Proving Ground – but home-building isn't a long-term driver of economic activity in a single community. Sure, there will always be redevelopment and specialty building, but large scale development is where the money is, and the territory just isn't there to support that kind of growth the way it was a generation ago.
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The good news is, predictions to the contrary notwithstanding, Harford County remains economically viable even without the home-building industry operating at the breakneck capacity of a decade or so ago.
