Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:I can't stand these YIMBY do gooder twerps. They want to raze all SFHs to build dense crap. They love standing on their moral pedestals when they're too stupid to realize they're destroying the middle class and doing the bidding of the billionaires for free. Owning a home is pretty much the ONLY wealth vehicle the middle class has left. But the do gooders want to raze your homes and build giant apartment complexes next to them. Absolutely no one wants to live next to that junk. The middle class will flee, and guess what, developers come in taking all the homes and building a whole bunch of rental crap.
In their infinite wisdom, the YIMBYs and affordable housing idiots are sweeping the last leg of wealth out that is left for the middle class. They ate going to turn the entire counry into permarenters for life. And over time the middle class will be far worse off, because no one will be able to own anything, then they'll still jack up your rents on you in the end. The biggest thing elitists want to control now is land and property ownership. And all these clownshow housing morons are obtaining it for them by ruining your neighborhoods with their amazingly stupid zoning plans.
Not sure if this is bait, but no elected officials seriously want to raze all SFHs in Montgomery County. The AHSI (which I assume you’re referring to) only applies to specific areas within the county near transit corridors. There’s a wealth of literature showing that increasing supply (building more housing) brings down prices. NIMBYs on the council are promoting their exclusionary policies in the name of alleviating economic inequality, and I am not falling for it, nor are many people on the council and perhaps our next executive.
Friedson’s original version of the AHSI was far more expansive and would have eliminated single family zoning everywhere except Potomac and the agricultural area. When he realized it was unpopular, he tried to bait other executive candidates into joining him. Friedson probably had the votes to end single family zoning, but he knew he couldn’t be the only executive candidate to vote for it and still have a chance at winning.
Your supply story is more complicated. The only places where builders added enough supply to drive down prices are places that had much higher rent and price increases than we did (think 15 percent in a year). Our rental market is in balance over the long term (2.1 percent annual rent growth over decades, with rents dropping slightly in the recent period). Our sales market is constrained, but the YIMBYs here haven’t done anything to help that market along. In fact, they’ve consistently advocated shifting tax burden from landlords to homeowners.
On top of that, the YIMBYs have consistently misidentified land use rules and taxes as the primary supply constraints. The primary supply constraint here is demand.