MoCo county exec thoughts?
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Anonymous
You're looking for a moderate. Long gone from both parties. |
Anonymous
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Friedsen is the closest thing to a moderate.
Yes the developers have him in their pocket, but of the 3 candidates he is the most likely to be "not terrible" and maybe even an improvement on Elrich (who actually announced he wanted ANOTHER 6% property tax hike over the weekend!!) |
Anonymous
DP. We don't agree on the approach suggested. The Econ 101 reference supplies more rhetorical support than robust, given complex issues at hand varied stakeholders and highly differential impacts. |
Anonymous
Friedson is not a moderate. He will do anything that advances the interests of those you note for whom he works. Jawando is not a moderate. He will do anything that advances his own political career. Glass is not a moderate. He will do anything that supports his ideology. Pick your poison. |
Anonymous
| Can Nancy Floreen run again? |
Anonymous
Fair point, DP. But I think one could say the same about your claim that the “YIMBYs dislike [Jawando] because he’s pro-consumer.” Would you be willing to expand a little on what kind of approach you would support to the housing affordability crisis? The example provided in the post to which you most directly replied seems to be an example of Jawando rejecting an inoffensive, pragmatic suggestion to a problem that has been roiling the county for years. Track records should matter. |
Anonymous
We need competition policy. That starts with going after price fixing and establishing modest rent stabilization (the second is done already; Friedson will probably prevent the first from moving through PHP because his donors make money from price fixing). To add to those policies, we should revise the tax regime so that land speculation is really expensive. This should be done through targeted property tax measures and through recordation tax changes. All these things should be done in combination with permitting reforms, plan approval reforms, and targeted upzoning in residential neighborhoods close to metro stations. The various PILOTs should all be repealed because they just make land more expensive. Bill 29-20 was nothing more than a bailout for Five Square, which subsequently donated more than $10k to Friedson. They made a bad land deal and claimed they couldn’t be profitable if they had to pay property taxes. When the county bails out developers who make bad deals, the county effectively props up land prices. Better to let the developer fail and have the building rights be repriced at market value at auction. Moreover, bill 29-20 provided major benefits to the private developer but little public benefit. We got two eight-story towers with astronomical rents. To the extent the subsidy passed through to renters, it was only to renters around 200 percent AMI. We shouldn’t be subsidizing housing at that income level. Jawando was fiscally responsible and smart to oppose. If you think housing is Econ 101, you either forgot Econ 101 or you didn’t take it. |
Anonymous
Agree re: price fixing and competition policy. A little hurt by the disgusting ad hominem attack at the end, but whatever. You probably have a lot going on. Bill 29-20 explicitly requires that 25% of the moderately priced dwelling units be reserved for individuals with 50% or less of the area median income. This seems like textbook public benefit. Thanks for sharing your point of view. Let’s keep it civil going forward. |
Anonymous
+1 |
Anonymous
That’s 50 percent of the 15 percent MPDUs which otherwise would have been affordable at 65-70 percent AMI. The price for this subsidy won’t be known until the developer builds out, but it’s easily going to average more than $1 million a year for a few dozen MPDUs, half of which will be deeply affordable. I thinking our housing dollars could have been better spent because that’s a lot of money to pay for a few dozen units. For $1 million a year; the county could rent many more units at market rate and then sublet at a discount. So there’s “little public benefit” from the special MPDU requirement (which Friedson opposed), and if you consider ways in which the money funding the subsidy could have been spent on housing more effectively, bill 29-20 has negative public benefit. The county has been doing supply side since Doug Duncan. It’s time to bring in some other tools to the table because supply side hasn’t worked. Friedson definitely won’t do that because the other tools take money away from his donors, who love supply side because they get the subsidies directly. Glass isn’t creative enough so he’s not the guy other either. Jawando is the best choice to try some different things to balance the housing market more in favor of consumers. |
Anonymous
That DP to whom you replied. "DP" = different poster -- I did not make the claim mentioned, nor did I provide the cited example. FWIW, I seem to agree with much of that with which another poster has responded in the interim, except the particular conclusion about Jawando and the minor Econ 101 ad hominem. |
Anonymous
Genuine question, is there causal (and not just associative) evidence that land speculation is increasing prices? And what role do really high incomes play in the market, since MANY people can afford the high prices. Additionally, it costs more to build these days, so builders have to recoup costs. And make a fair profit. I have no idea what type of profit they make, and perhaps they are gouging buyers for no reason other than they can. Or maybe it's the slow process to approve new housing developments -- the longer it takes, the more their financing costs them (and then us). Are there any studies on what new housing developments are providing in terms of profits for the homebuilders? I truly don't know because I don't follow this. |
Anonymous
There are plenty of academic papers on speculation’s role in driving up housing prices. For example: https://www.huduser.gov/portal/periodicals/cityscape/vol26num1/ch8.pdf. The biggest problem with Friedson’s PILOTs is that they’ve effectively provided insurance for land speculators. Making housing more affordable requires a market adjustment. If land prices stay high, the market won’t adjust because of the profit realities that you describe above. When tax policy bails out people who paid too much for land or who held onto land too long, the market won’t adjust. Gross margins for publicly traded residential real estate firms have been running 50 to 60 percent the past few years. Private firms’ margins probably are similar or perhaps even a bit higher. Otherwise, they’d be starved for capital. The biggest barrier to accelerating housing production is the developers themselves. They trickle units onto the market to create scarcity and keep prices high. For decades, the pipeline of approved projects has been more than deep enough to meet demand. During that time, effective rents have increased 2.1 percent a year on average. If the market had delivered more units, prices would be lower. |
Anonymous
| Well Jawando just got shredded by his fellow councilmembers for treating them like *^%# on the Unmask Ice bill. He called for it to be scheduled next week, leapfrogging a committee meeting on it, and drew the ire of almost all the councilmembers. A couple were crying they were so mad. Said he never once reached out to any of them to discuss the bill. |
Anonymous
Best Summary... all are bad choices. |