There is no housing crisis in MoCo or most of the DMV for that matter

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Signed, a boomer that got their housing for 3 blueberries back in 1940 from a Sears catalog. Go talk to young people, even high earners, on how difficult it is to buy a house nowadays.

Reading OP is fundamental. Young people may have to make the very tough decision to not live in Arlington or Chevy Chase. They may have to: rent; commute from Gaithersburg (via the existing mass transit because climate); transfer jobs to Omaha; buy a condo in Arlington or Chevy Chase and live like most of Europe or NYC or urban Asia already does

Or, the voters of Montgomery County might decide to elect elected officials who believe Montgomery County will be better off if Montgomery County is a place where young people want to and can afford to live, and enact housing, land use, and transportation policies accordingly.

Translation: upzone MoCo, make a whole bunch of crappy section 8 housing, import poverty, trash schools and watch as the entire county declines as people with money, who make up the lion's share of the tax base, flee.

Kinda hard to have so many progressive policies and plans when you no longer have people who'll pay for all of the free stuff and progress.

[Anonymous]

I love that OP is defining entitlement as wanting to be able to afford housing on your salary.

I think it's entitled for people who already own houses to think they can dictate what happens to all the land around them, in order to ensure they can one day sell their home for 3-4x what they paid for it.

But I guess we just get to define words however we want now.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Signed, a boomer that got their housing for 3 blueberries back in 1940 from a Sears catalog. Go talk to young people, even high earners, on how difficult it is to buy a house nowadays.

Reading OP is fundamental. Young people may have to make the very tough decision to not live in Arlington or Chevy Chase. They may have to: rent; commute from Gaithersburg (via the existing mass transit because climate); transfer jobs to Omaha; buy a condo in Arlington or Chevy Chase and live like most of Europe or NYC or urban Asia already does

Or, the voters of Montgomery County might decide to elect elected officials who believe Montgomery County will be better off if Montgomery County is a place where young people want to and can afford to live, and enact housing, land use, and transportation policies accordingly.

Translation: upzone MoCo, make a whole bunch of crappy section 8 housing, import poverty, trash schools and watch as the entire county declines as people with money, who make up the lion's share of the tax base, flee.

Kinda hard to have so many progressive policies and plans when you no longer have people who'll pay for all of the free stuff and progress.

Damn you, Poe's Law.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:As a middle class person with a family who actually does live in an apartment (gasp) in NE DC (shocked silence), I just want to point out that actually there are thousands and thousands of homeless or under housed people in the area. I know because they hang out in my neighborhood.

I have zero issues living in an apartment but it seems obvious to me that we don't have enough low- and middle-income housing that is either close to commercial corridors or accessible to reliable transit. My spouse and I have also done the math on moving further out and commuting so that we could afford a SFH with a yard. For starters, everything further out is also more expensive than it used to be. And second, this would necessitate owning two cars, a major expense. And third it would require additional childcare to cover the hours we'd both spend commuting, at least three days a week. So it doesn't really work out even assuming we could find a SFH for 500k or less.

We are presently looking for jobs in another city where yes, pay is lower overall, but also where housing is much cheaper. I don't think we're the only middle-income family I'm this situation.

My spouse is a civil engineer and I am a preschool teacher.

Exactly. Personal decisions. You've now made the wise decision to move to another area with a lower COL so that you can buy. Literally proves my point. There is no crisis. There's only bloated expectations and entitlement.

Good luck when you can't find experienced teachers or civil engineers in the DMV because they all moved to Columbus and St. Louis and Philly where they can afford to own a SFH with okay schools close in.

It will be great when the city is just wealthy people, poor people, and a bunch of young professionals passing through on their way to other things. Have fun with that.

If we couldn't find teachers and civil engineers, etc., yes that would be a problem. But the fact is we don't have this problem at all. All service needs are met! There is literally no problem at all.

Do you read the educational forum? Teaching needs are not adequately met, at least in Fairfax County. As a former teacher, I couldn’t afford a tent in the town where I taught, so we moved. When I return to education, my expertise, gained from Fairfax County training, will benefit students that compete against DMV kids for college spots.

Look on the county websites. Lots of vacancies that 15 years ago would not have been there. As a woman, with a masters I stopped working as my entire county salary would have gone to child care and that was 15 years ago for one child. These jobs are not easily filled.

+1, it's genuinely hard to fill a lot of these roles. Another thing that happens is that you can hire freshly minted professionals into these jobs, but then they leave 5-10 years later because they have, or want to have, kids and they can't share a condo with a roommate anymore to save money. It is genuinely becoming critical because 10 years ago these folks had a decent number of options -- Wheaton, Rockville, parts of Alexandria, PG County. Now a 2 bedroom, one bathroom bungalow in Wheaton runs 500-600k, which at current interest rates is not affordable for a family of 3 with an HHI of 160k, especially when factoring in the cost of both commuting and childcare. When educated professionals can't afford 1200 square foot unrenovated homes outside the beltway, where the schools are so-so anyway, what do you expect them to do? Commute in from Howard County? At that point they will just get jobs in HoCo or Baltimore.

People in this thread keep saying "the market will correct" by raising wages, but that's not always what happens. Another option is to lower standards, and for cash strapped organizations (which includes most state and municipal government, including most school districts), they will often opt to go the other direction and lower entry standards. That means hiring less qualified, less educated, and less experienced people to perform the same jobs. So congrats! Your teachers and bridge inspectors won't be as good anymore. Surely that won't have any impact on your quality of life. Same thing with the people who manage the bureaucracy of government. You want to complain about your tax assessment? Good luck, because the assessor's office is understaffed with a 3 year backlog, and the people in charge can barely string three sentences together.

But you know, good luck with that. DC is going to be great when it's a few thousand very wealthy people and then millions of people living in poverty, with no middle class to speak of. What could go wrong?

Stop trying to buy a home then, idiots. Of you make $160k, go buy a condo or townhome in an affordable area. You realize billions of people with families make it work on the planet? What's wrong with living in a condo?

Here's a condo for below $190k with 3 bedrooms, which is plenty for a family of 4:

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/8830-Piney-Branch-Rd-APT-507-Silver-Spring-MD-20903/37325973_zpid/


Again, so many stupid expectations. Heaven forbid you live within your means.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I love that OP is defining entitlement as wanting to be able to afford housing on your salary.

I think it's entitled for people who already own houses to think they can dictate what happens to all the land around them, in order to ensure they can one day sell their home for 3-4x what they paid for it.

But I guess we just get to define words however we want now.

Except there is affordable housing, it's just that peoples' expectations don't match reality. Oh my God, so you can't afford a 3 or 4 bedroom home with a yard and a garage in your salary. Boo hoo. Who said you were entitled to that because you exist and work a job? Go buy a condo for less than $200k.

Of course no one ever wants to tell people they need to reset their expectations and Iive within their means because everyone is entitled to anything they want these days.

[Anonymous]

lol. OP is for a free market but also wants zoning.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:As a middle class person with a family who actually does live in an apartment (gasp) in NE DC (shocked silence), I just want to point out that actually there are thousands and thousands of homeless or under housed people in the area. I know because they hang out in my neighborhood.

I have zero issues living in an apartment but it seems obvious to me that we don't have enough low- and middle-income housing that is either close to commercial corridors or accessible to reliable transit. My spouse and I have also done the math on moving further out and commuting so that we could afford a SFH with a yard. For starters, everything further out is also more expensive than it used to be. And second, this would necessitate owning two cars, a major expense. And third it would require additional childcare to cover the hours we'd both spend commuting, at least three days a week. So it doesn't really work out even assuming we could find a SFH for 500k or less.

We are presently looking for jobs in another city where yes, pay is lower overall, but also where housing is much cheaper. I don't think we're the only middle-income family I'm this situation.

My spouse is a civil engineer and I am a preschool teacher.

Exactly. Personal decisions. You've now made the wise decision to move to another area with a lower COL so that you can buy. Literally proves my point. There is no crisis. There's only bloated expectations and entitlement.

Good luck when you can't find experienced teachers or civil engineers in the DMV because they all moved to Columbus and St. Louis and Philly where they can afford to own a SFH with okay schools close in.

It will be great when the city is just wealthy people, poor people, and a bunch of young professionals passing through on their way to other things. Have fun with that.

If we couldn't find teachers and civil engineers, etc., yes that would be a problem. But the fact is we don't have this problem at all. All service needs are met! There is literally no problem at all.

Do you read the educational forum? Teaching needs are not adequately met, at least in Fairfax County. As a former teacher, I couldn’t afford a tent in the town where I taught, so we moved. When I return to education, my expertise, gained from Fairfax County training, will benefit students that compete against DMV kids for college spots.

Look on the county websites. Lots of vacancies that 15 years ago would not have been there. As a woman, with a masters I stopped working as my entire county salary would have gone to child care and that was 15 years ago for one child. These jobs are not easily filled.

+1, it's genuinely hard to fill a lot of these roles. Another thing that happens is that you can hire freshly minted professionals into these jobs, but then they leave 5-10 years later because they have, or want to have, kids and they can't share a condo with a roommate anymore to save money. It is genuinely becoming critical because 10 years ago these folks had a decent number of options -- Wheaton, Rockville, parts of Alexandria, PG County. Now a 2 bedroom, one bathroom bungalow in Wheaton runs 500-600k, which at current interest rates is not affordable for a family of 3 with an HHI of 160k, especially when factoring in the cost of both commuting and childcare. When educated professionals can't afford 1200 square foot unrenovated homes outside the beltway, where the schools are so-so anyway, what do you expect them to do? Commute in from Howard County? At that point they will just get jobs in HoCo or Baltimore.

People in this thread keep saying "the market will correct" by raising wages, but that's not always what happens. Another option is to lower standards, and for cash strapped organizations (which includes most state and municipal government, including most school districts), they will often opt to go the other direction and lower entry standards. That means hiring less qualified, less educated, and less experienced people to perform the same jobs. So congrats! Your teachers and bridge inspectors won't be as good anymore. Surely that won't have any impact on your quality of life. Same thing with the people who manage the bureaucracy of government. You want to complain about your tax assessment? Good luck, because the assessor's office is understaffed with a 3 year backlog, and the people in charge can barely string three sentences together.

But you know, good luck with that. DC is going to be great when it's a few thousand very wealthy people and then millions of people living in poverty, with no middle class to speak of. What could go wrong?

Stop trying to buy a home then, idiots. Of you make $160k, go buy a condo or townhome in an affordable area. You realize billions of people with families make it work on the planet? What's wrong with living in a condo?

Here's a condo for below $190k with 3 bedrooms, which is plenty for a family of 4:

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/8830-Piney-Branch-Rd-APT-507-Silver-Spring-MD-20903/37325973_zpid/


Again, so many stupid expectations. Heaven forbid you live within your means.

That condo has a $1,126/mo HOA fee. That's why it's so cheap. It's not worth buying because it will never appreciated because that fee is likely to go up, not down. You would be better off renting.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I love that OP is defining entitlement as wanting to be able to afford housing on your salary.

I think it's entitled for people who already own houses to think they can dictate what happens to all the land around them, in order to ensure they can one day sell their home for 3-4x what they paid for it.

But I guess we just get to define words however we want now.

Except there is affordable housing, it's just that peoples' expectations don't match reality. Oh my God, so you can't afford a 3 or 4 bedroom home with a yard and a garage in your salary. Boo hoo. Who said you were entitled to that because you exist and work a job? Go buy a condo for less than $200k.

Of course no one ever wants to tell people they need to reset their expectations and Iive within their means because everyone is entitled to anything they want these days.

Maybe if you just keep saying this stuff over and over, ignoring all the rational arguments that undermine your premise, it will magically become true?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:As a middle class person with a family who actually does live in an apartment (gasp) in NE DC (shocked silence), I just want to point out that actually there are thousands and thousands of homeless or under housed people in the area. I know because they hang out in my neighborhood.

I have zero issues living in an apartment but it seems obvious to me that we don't have enough low- and middle-income housing that is either close to commercial corridors or accessible to reliable transit. My spouse and I have also done the math on moving further out and commuting so that we could afford a SFH with a yard. For starters, everything further out is also more expensive than it used to be. And second, this would necessitate owning two cars, a major expense. And third it would require additional childcare to cover the hours we'd both spend commuting, at least three days a week. So it doesn't really work out even assuming we could find a SFH for 500k or less.

We are presently looking for jobs in another city where yes, pay is lower overall, but also where housing is much cheaper. I don't think we're the only middle-income family I'm this situation.

My spouse is a civil engineer and I am a preschool teacher.

Exactly. Personal decisions. You've now made the wise decision to move to another area with a lower COL so that you can buy. Literally proves my point. There is no crisis. There's only bloated expectations and entitlement.

Good luck when you can't find experienced teachers or civil engineers in the DMV because they all moved to Columbus and St. Louis and Philly where they can afford to own a SFH with okay schools close in.

It will be great when the city is just wealthy people, poor people, and a bunch of young professionals passing through on their way to other things. Have fun with that.

If we couldn't find teachers and civil engineers, etc., yes that would be a problem. But the fact is we don't have this problem at all. All service needs are met! There is literally no problem at all.

Do you read the educational forum? Teaching needs are not adequately met, at least in Fairfax County. As a former teacher, I couldn’t afford a tent in the town where I taught, so we moved. When I return to education, my expertise, gained from Fairfax County training, will benefit students that compete against DMV kids for college spots.

Look on the county websites. Lots of vacancies that 15 years ago would not have been there. As a woman, with a masters I stopped working as my entire county salary would have gone to child care and that was 15 years ago for one child. These jobs are not easily filled.

+1, it's genuinely hard to fill a lot of these roles. Another thing that happens is that you can hire freshly minted professionals into these jobs, but then they leave 5-10 years later because they have, or want to have, kids and they can't share a condo with a roommate anymore to save money. It is genuinely becoming critical because 10 years ago these folks had a decent number of options -- Wheaton, Rockville, parts of Alexandria, PG County. Now a 2 bedroom, one bathroom bungalow in Wheaton runs 500-600k, which at current interest rates is not affordable for a family of 3 with an HHI of 160k, especially when factoring in the cost of both commuting and childcare. When educated professionals can't afford 1200 square foot unrenovated homes outside the beltway, where the schools are so-so anyway, what do you expect them to do? Commute in from Howard County? At that point they will just get jobs in HoCo or Baltimore.

People in this thread keep saying "the market will correct" by raising wages, but that's not always what happens. Another option is to lower standards, and for cash strapped organizations (which includes most state and municipal government, including most school districts), they will often opt to go the other direction and lower entry standards. That means hiring less qualified, less educated, and less experienced people to perform the same jobs. So congrats! Your teachers and bridge inspectors won't be as good anymore. Surely that won't have any impact on your quality of life. Same thing with the people who manage the bureaucracy of government. You want to complain about your tax assessment? Good luck, because the assessor's office is understaffed with a 3 year backlog, and the people in charge can barely string three sentences together.

But you know, good luck with that. DC is going to be great when it's a few thousand very wealthy people and then millions of people living in poverty, with no middle class to speak of. What could go wrong?

Stop trying to buy a home then, idiots. Of you make $160k, go buy a condo or townhome in an affordable area. You realize billions of people with families make it work on the planet? What's wrong with living in a condo?

Here's a condo for below $190k with 3 bedrooms, which is plenty for a family of 4:

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/8830-Piney-Branch-Rd-APT-507-Silver-Spring-MD-20903/37325973_zpid/


Again, so many stupid expectations. Heaven forbid you live within your means.

That condo has a $1,126/mo HOA fee. That's why it's so cheap. It's not worth buying because it will never appreciated because that fee is likely to go up, not down. You would be better off renting.

"Please check with your lender regarding current FHA condo complex approval." is another red flag. Looks like the Pineway Towers condos are in trouble.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Context for this thread: https://homebay.com/inflation-housing-market/
"To understand just how expensive homes have become, let’s run through some comparisons on what our childhood homes would cost today.

Spending $100,000 on a home in January 1990 would equate to spending $377,724 on a home today. For everyday living costs, $100,000 spent on goods and services in 1990 would require $231,081 to get the same amount of goods today.

Spending $100,000 on a home in January 2020 would equate to spending $142,249 on a home today, while spending $100,000 on goods and services just three years ago would require $113,739 today."

Using national median home price doesn't account for difference in stock (larger homes, higher level of appliances, code-related and materials improvements). That rolls forward both with new home sales (direct new construction) amd with dwelling upgrades/additions/replacements.

Even using Case-Shiller indices, which try to track same-property sales, would not provide a proper measure for comparison to non-housing inflation because the nature of communities in growing MSAs changes, and that contributes to home value.

Would the experience of living in Garrett Park in 1990 be close to the experience of living in, say, Derwood today? It wouldn't be the same as living in Garrett Park today, as insular as that community might be. Meanwhile, a 5 pound bag of sugar today provides much the same experience as was the case in 1990.

On top of that, the way housing purchases are financed provides its own underlying variation to demand, and then valur/prices. Down payment requirements are typically less than in 1990, resale holds greater after-tax gain due to enacted exemptions, etc., etc. This is among the reasons that they use "owners' equivalent rent" in inflation calculations, but that, itself, wouldn't take into account housing stock changes well enough, and certainly not community-experience change or financing-value change, to get to a bag-of-sugar to bag-of-sugar analysis of the relative necessary burden of housing from one decade to another.

For the record, the change in OER in US cities (includes areas around cities) from 1/1990 to 1/2024 was about 185% compared to the 142% for all CPI (presumably the 131% noted above was CPI ex-housing, and likely the better comparator). This is much less than that 277% increase in national median home price, and within some amount of reason when considering the unaccounted factors noted above.

Much greater inflation has come in medical services (a disastrous consequence of the system shifts from the late 80s onward that introduced significant middle-man costs at great profit to insurers), tuition and child care (both huge suppy/demand issues).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:As pp stated, its not just about “burger flippers”. To function, a healthy and effective society needs teachers, firefighters, EMTs, healthcare workers, sanitation workers, etc. These are not high paying jobs. These employees need somewhere to live.

I am a nurse ($128k fwiw). The VAST majority of my fellow nurses live in places like Howard County, Olney, Urbana, Clarksburg, Rockville …. if they’re married with kids and have a 4-bedroom home. The single, no-kids nurses live in DC and Arlington.

I have never once, in 7 years, met another RN in the DMV who just couldn’t afford to live here within 40 minutes of work at a DC/Montgomery County hospital. In fact, we tend to do pretty well, take vacations, have our kids in travel sports (if married), eat out all the time (the single ones).

Maybe the couples living in a 3000 sq ft newer build house in Olney would prefer to live in NWDC. It doesn’t follow that their dreams have been crushed and they’re living in hardship.

I’ve never understood why RNs and similar are always lumped in with minimum wage workers. But honestly, even they can get a couple of roommates and rent in an older building in a first-ring suburb. How I know? My son does exactly this with an intern’s $17/hr wage.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:As pp stated, its not just about “burger flippers”. To function, a healthy and effective society needs teachers, firefighters, EMTs, healthcare workers, sanitation workers, etc. These are not high paying jobs. These employees need somewhere to live.

I am a nurse ($128k fwiw). The VAST majority of my fellow nurses live in places like Howard County, Olney, Urbana, Clarksburg, Rockville …. if they’re married with kids and have a 4-bedroom home. The single, no-kids nurses live in DC and Arlington.

I have never once, in 7 years, met another RN in the DMV who just couldn’t afford to live here within 40 minutes of work at a DC/Montgomery County hospital. In fact, we tend to do pretty well, take vacations, have our kids in travel sports (if married), eat out all the time (the single ones).

Maybe the couples living in a 3000 sq ft newer build house in Olney would prefer to live in NWDC. It doesn’t follow that their dreams have been crushed and they’re living in hardship.

I’ve never understood why RNs and similar are always lumped in with minimum wage workers. But honestly, even they can get a couple of roommates and rent in an older building in a first-ring suburb. How I know? My son does exactly this with an intern’s $17/hr wage.

Yes, families can definitely get a couple of other families and illegally rent in a small older "single-family" house outside the Beltway, or illegally double up with another family in a two-bedroom apartment in a rental complex in Gaithersburg. What is this evidence of? It's evidence of a housing shortage. Plus, at least on line, the same posters who oppose pro-housing policies, such as zoning changes, also demand stricter code enforcement against these types of illegal housing arrangements.

https://www.dcnewsnow.com/news/local-news/maryland/montgomery-county/12-people-displaced-after-house-fire-in-wheaton-glenmont/

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Signed, a boomer that got their housing for 3 blueberries back in 1940 from a Sears catalog. Go talk to young people, even high earners, on how difficult it is to buy a house nowadays.

Reading OP is fundamental. Young people may have to make the very tough decision to not live in Arlington or Chevy Chase. They may have to: rent; commute from Gaithersburg (via the existing mass transit because climate); transfer jobs to Omaha; buy a condo in Arlington or Chevy Chase and live like most of Europe or NYC or urban Asia already does

Or, the voters of Montgomery County might decide to elect elected officials who believe Montgomery County will be better off if Montgomery County is a place where young people want to and can afford to live, and enact housing, land use, and transportation policies accordingly.

They can rent one of the many many many apartments on the market currently in MoCo!! WITH public transit nearby!

See? No crisis

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I love that OP is defining entitlement as wanting to be able to afford housing on your salary.

I think it's entitled for people who already own houses to think they can dictate what happens to all the land around them, in order to ensure they can one day sell their home for 3-4x what they paid for it.

But I guess we just get to define words however we want now.

Nice try. Let’s help you out here. Entitlement happens when your ABC salary affords you ABC housing — which definitely exists already in your metro area — but YOU want XYZ type housing in the same general zip codes because it’s nicer than the ABC housing you are able to afford with your salary and life choices.

Rather than accept your readily available ABC housing, you demand that others (not you) change so you can obtain your nicer XYZ housing.


That is entitled

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I love that OP is defining entitlement as wanting to be able to afford housing on your salary.

I think it's entitled for people who already own houses to think they can dictate what happens to all the land around them, in order to ensure they can one day sell their home for 3-4x what they paid for it.

But I guess we just get to define words however we want now.

Nice try. Let’s help you out here. Entitlement happens when your ABC salary affords you ABC housing — which definitely exists already in your metro area — but YOU want XYZ type housing in the same general zip codes because it’s nicer than the ABC housing you are able to afford with your salary and life choices.

Rather than accept your readily available ABC housing, you demand that others (not you) change so you can obtain your nicer XYZ housing.


That is entitled

Entitled is believing you have a say over private property you don't own.