On a Tuesday evening in October 2025, twenty-five people walked into the Huntingtown Volunteer Fire Department on Old Town Road to talk about the future of their town. Calvert County had mailed 5,700 postcards to get them there.
That turnout looks small next to the number of postcards. But the decision on the table that night, and still not fully made as of this writing, will shape how much housing gets built in Huntingtown for the next generation, and by extension, what a house there is worth. If you are comparing Calvert County towns right now, this is the story you need to understand before you look at another listing.
What the county actually asked
The meeting was part of the Huntingtown Town Center Master Plan update, a process Calvert County's Department of Planning & Zoning formally began on July 16, 2025, when staff asked the Planning Commission for guidance to move forward. Long Range Planner Tay Harris has been the county's point person on the project since. The plan itself hadn't been touched since 1993. That's over three decades of zoning policy sitting still while the town around it changed.
Huntingtown wasn't singled out. St. Leonard and Owings went through the same survey process that summer, running from late July through late August 2025, with their own input meetings that October. Calvert County has had a town center system since 1983, but a 2019 Comprehensive Plan amendment eliminated the old major and minor town center categories and folded everything into one classification. A 2022 amendment then trimmed the list of towns still slated for town center expansion down to four: Huntingtown, Lusby, Prince Frederick, and Solomons. Huntingtown made the cut. Whether it should stay there is exactly what residents were being asked in 2025.
The number that actually explains the fear
Here's what the survey results showed, according to county reporting on the input meetings: a majority of Huntingtown respondents, along with a majority in Owings, said they wanted the town center designation removed. The reason given wasn't abstract. Residents said they were worried their town would end up looking like Prince Frederick, with more townhomes and apartment buildings replacing the single-family character they moved there for.
That fear isn't universal across the three towns surveyed. In St. Leonard, 60% of respondents wanted to keep the town center designation. So this isn't blanket resistance to growth. It's a town-by-town calculation, and Huntingtown residents ran the numbers and didn't like where more density growth would take them.
By November 2025, the Board of County Commissioners and Planning Commission had directed staff to consider whether Huntingtown's town center should be classified as "major" or "minor," a framework the county had technically eliminated in 2019 but is now dusting off specifically for this plan. The rural commercial rezoning option that was also on the table has since been dropped entirely due to public feedback, according to the county's own project page. Every option still standing keeps Huntingtown zoned as a town center in some form. The fight now is over how big that footprint gets to be.
What scarcity has already bought Huntingtown
Look at what the county's own housing data shows across these towns, drawn from the March 2026 draft of the Master Plan of Town Centers:
| Town | Median Home Value | Avg. Monthly Mortgage | Homeownership Rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Huntingtown | $593,500 | $2,770 | 90% |
| Owings | $592,900 | $2,881 | 94% |
| Dunkirk | $557,700 | $2,760 | 99% |
| St. Leonard | $489,500 | $3,096 | 96% |
| Solomons | $455,000 | $2,538 | 69% |
| Prince Frederick | $383,000 | $2,295 | 54% |
| Lusby | $327,500 | $1,916 | 82% |
| Calvert County overall | $440,200 | — | 87% |
| Maryland statewide | $397,700 | — | 69% |
The pattern is not subtle. Huntingtown, Owings, Dunkirk, and St. Leonard, the towns whose residents have shown the most resistance to expanded town center growth, all sit above the county median in both home value and owner-occupancy. Prince Frederick, the town furthest along the growth path with the townhomes and apartments other towns say they fear, sits well below the county median in home value and has the lowest homeownership rate on the list at just 54%.
This is not a coincidence of geography. Prince Frederick's town center strategy has meant more permitted density, more rental stock, and more turnover, which keeps prices more accessible but also keeps a larger share of the housing stock in renter hands. Huntingtown's residents, by pushing back on that same growth model, are effectively voting to keep the town's housing stock overwhelmingly owner-occupied and its future supply tight. A 90% homeownership rate doesn't happen by accident in a growing suburban county. It happens when a community keeps saying no to the kind of multifamily development that would dilute it.
Where the decision stands right now
The county's own planning materials, as of this writing, still describe the Huntingtown update as something Planning & Zoning "anticipates initiating" in 2026, meaning the actual rezoning document has not been finalized. Compare that to Dunkirk and Prince Frederick, whose town center master plans had already moved through public hearings and were scheduled for a Board of County Commissioners adoption vote on August 4, 2026, capping a review process that had run for more than a year and a half, according to the Southern Maryland Chronicle.
Huntingtown is behind those two towns in the process. That matters for anyone deciding where to buy right now. The zoning question that will determine how much new single-family and multifamily inventory Huntingtown adds over the next decade is still open. Nobody, not the Planning Commission, not the county commissioners, not the 25 people who showed up at the fire department, has locked in an answer yet.
What this means if you're comparing towns
If you want a Calvert County home in a neighborhood where the owner-occupancy rate is already high and residents are actively working to keep it that way, Huntingtown's current trajectory points toward continued tight resale inventory. That's good news for appreciation if you already own there, and it means buyers should expect to compete for existing single-family stock rather than count on a wave of new construction to ease the market.
If you'd rather buy into a town center that's already committed to growth, with more new construction, more housing type variety, and a lower entry price, Prince Frederick's master plan, already through the county's public hearing process, and its lower median value reflect that different bet. Neither approach is right or wrong. They're two different answers to the same zoning question, and Huntingtown just happens to be the one still being written.
Common questions
Does the pending zoning update affect my ability to buy or sell in Huntingtown today? No. Current listings and closings proceed under existing zoning. The master plan update affects what gets built and approved going forward, not transactions happening now.
When will Calvert County finalize the Huntingtown plan? The county's planning department has said it anticipates initiating the formal update process sometime in 2026, following the completed 2025 survey and public input meetings. No adoption date has been set yet.
Should I wait to buy in Huntingtown until the plan is decided? That depends on your goals. Buyers focused on established single-family neighborhoods with strong owner-occupancy are buying into a pattern that already exists, regardless of how the town center question resolves. The update mainly affects future development in the designated town center area, not the broader town.
If you're weighing Huntingtown against Prince Frederick, Dunkirk, or another Calvert County town and want to know what a specific zoning outcome could mean for a specific street or subdivision, that's the kind of question Amber Verdadero answers for a living. Get your instant home valuation or schedule a free consultation to talk through what the numbers actually mean for your move.
