By Montgomery Planning Staff

Montgomery Planning is proud to have a team of planners who reflect Montgomery County’s rich multiculturism. As part of National Hispanic Heritage Month, we are highlighting some of our planners working to craft a better future for a diverse Montgomery County.

Almost every Friday, Mario Emanuel Perez and his two children set off for a 30-minute bike ride to their Silver Spring elementary school, picking up dozens of other students and parents along the way.

Perez, who goes by “Ema,” organizes the weekly “bike bus” to encourage people of all ages to ride. The cycling trips, he said, benefit their health, take traffic off the road, and shorten the school’s car drop-off line. Meanwhile, he hopes the children grow up more comfortable riding on local streets and eventually become safer drivers who look out for cyclists.

Most of all, he said, the group rides forge a bond between neighbors.

“If you just see it as a bike ride, you might be missing the point,” Perez, 45, said. “There’s an undeniable aspect of community that I think is very important.”

Montgomery Planning’s Ema Perez leads a regular “bike bus” of Forest Knolls Elementary School students and their guardians. Adults navigate the students on bikes along a pre-determined route to get to school.

Creating a sense of community throughout Montgomery County is something Perez, who joined Montgomery Planning in 2022, traces to his upbringing in a poor, but walkable and close-knit, “barrio” in Buenos Aires, Argentina. It’s where he saw firsthand the benefits of “complete communities”—a goal of Thrive Montgomery 2050 to make them more livable and convenient by instilling a sense of place and allowing residents to reach daily needs within a short walk or bike ride.

As a Montgomery Planning intake planner, he’s a first set of eyes on hundreds of plans submitted every year—everything from homeowners wanting to install a new fence to large developers seeking to build new subdivisions and shopping centers. He ensures the proposals meet initial requirements before forwarding them on to lead regulatory reviewers for more detailed scrutiny.

Perez came to urban planning relatively late in life. After completing high school in Buenos Aires, he repaired cars in his father’s auto shop for a few years before coming to the United States at age 21. He worked for auto shops in the DC area for 14 years, then decided to attend Montgomery College in the evenings after work.

Because he was 35 at the time, he said with a laugh, “People would think I was the instructor.”

Perez is an intake planner in Montgomery Planning’s East County Planning Division.

It had been while working at an auto body shop in Tysons that Perez became interested in urban planning. He saw how communities around Metro’s emerging Silver Line stations transformed from a sea of auto dealerships and vast parking lots into transit-oriented hubs with high-rise living.

“It made me very curious to see how these things take shape, how the built environment changes and why,” Perez said. “I thought, ‘Maybe it’s time to open up the books again.’”

He eventually transferred to the University of Maryland in College Park, where he became a full-time student while helping his wife raise their then 2-year-old son. He graduated in 2021 at age 41. (The couple now has two children, ages 7 and 5.)

“I found myself relating more to the professors than to the students,” Perez said. “I don’t think there were many college students that were changing diapers like I was.”

His urban planning classes made him reflect on how the lower-income neighborhood where he grew up actually had many of the qualities prized in professional planning. It had no paved streets or public water system. But it did have a network of sidewalks to help residents safely reach a hardware store, produce stand, and other daily needs within a few short blocks—the kind of “15-minute living” encouraged in complete communities—and public plazas to mingle with others.

“Everybody knew their neighbors,” Perez said. “Everybody was connected and knew the neighbors’ kids. We were friends with one another.”

He has seen the growth of Latin culture in Montgomery County, where about 20% of the population identifies as Hispanic—the fastest growing ethnic group in the county since 1980.

While Montgomery Planning does well reaching out to the public in different languages, he said, he would like to see more Hispanic planners in the profession overall.

“Representation is a big factor,” he said. For example, he said, “I can say, ‘Hey, I’m here. I’m in the Planning Department. I speak Spanish. I can help you.’”

He also plans to continue helping his neighbors get to know each other, whether it’s organizing the Halloween parade or more community bike rides. He wants his children to have what he did in Argentina.

“The built environment is something that you can control,” Perez said. “But what grows in the built environment needs a little bit of help—and that’s how you develop a sense of community.”