Question 2: If elected, what strategies would you pursue to ensure housing is affordable for people of all incomes?

Transcript: Hi friends, I'm Andrew Friedson, and for those who don't know me, I'm running for reelection for County Council. Housing is a human right in Montgomery County, and that's why I've been leading on this issue since the day I joined the Council. In my first budget, I led the effort to add $5 million to the Housing Initiative Fund, which will be 5 million additional more dollars in our baseline, our minimum level of effort, so that we can prioritize each and every year the type of housing that we need to build in Montgomery County. In the Growth and Infrastructure policy, I hope to lead the effort to end our countywide housing moratorium so that we won't stop housing, we'll encourage housing because we know we need it, and led the effort to implement desired growth areas so that we could get housing and jobs and high quality transit that we need to solve our environmental, our equity, and our economic goals to be able to move our county forward. I co-led an effort to get more housing at Metros so we can get housing right here in places like Forest Glen, high rise, high quality housing so we can get more residents to take advantage of the most strategic locations we have in Montgomery County. And I coauthored an effort to create a $50 million housing production fund that's become a national model for how to leverage financing to create new affordable housing. The bottom line is we have to treat residents as a benefit, not a burden to our community.