Who do you think will win MoCo county exec?

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Jawando appears to be the only NIMBY candidate, so he’s got my money and my vote. Let’s get back to proper and sane planning.

Agree. On Reddit subs, it seems that the developer shills are out in full force with anti jawando silliness which signals to me that jawando is my guy. As usual, the YIMBYs fail to realize that while they are the most vocal, they are not in the majority.

If you could get two of the candidates to give you a million dollars in tax abatements a year in exchange for forgoing maybe $75k in revenue a year by providing a little deeply affordable housing among the MPDUs that you have to provide anyway, you’d have your shills out in force too. Especially if the third candidate wanted more affordable housing and prevailing wage in exchange for that big a subsidy. This comes down to who’s more likely to keep the subsidies flowing while gutting renter protections. The developers spend big because they expect Friedson or Glass to deliver big for them. You can’t even honestly call any if this pro-growth. It’s all about extracting higher margins from what they already own.

I thought the developers won't benefit from the tax abatements, only the land speculators will

Make it make sense

The metro one was done for a builder that already had development rights so for them it worked as a bailout after they made a bad land deal. No one else has used it yet because they didn’t have development rights already. For any future deals, the tax abatement will be capitalized into the land and function as a subsidy for the landowner, in this case WMATA.

However you think the PILOT is distributed you can’t plausibly claim that a $1.1 million tax abatement every year for 15 years is a good trade for 16 MPDUs affordable at 50 percent AMI instead of 70 percent AMI. We wouldn’t even have that concession or the affordable housing concession in the office PILOT if Evan Glass hadn’t proposed them. Friedson was willing to give these subsidies away for nothing. To the extent these are good policies, it’s because of Glass, not Friedson. Glass gets this better than Friedson does. Anyone who’s truly for affordable housing should vote Glass not Friedson. If you’re for developers making more money, vote Friedson.

For the revenue that the county forgoes on the WMATA PILOT, it could have bought at least twice as many condos, rented them out, and still had money to spare. The math on Andrew Friedson’s subsidies never maths. He’s either not very smart or he’s lying. Which do you think it is?

Different poster here. No on the county purchasing condos and renting them out. First, we don’t pay taxes on our own property. So there would be no “reclaiming” any revenue stream. Second, that would make us landlords, responsible for maintenance and repairs. Which means hiring more staff. And everyone in county government knows we don’t appropriately manage our current county facilities/infrastructure. So we’d be slumlords.

Which is exactly why we are leveraging the private market to help build housing. It’s not perfect. No human system is. But it’s far better than a government-only solution.

$1.1 million in foregone taxes a year in exchange for a developer forgoing much less in revenue is a horrible deal for taxpayers. It would have been worse if Evan Glass hadn’t stepped up to fix these bills as much as he could. There’s a place for tax abatements in housing policy but we should be getting better deals that result in more affordable housing. The foregone revenue from these deals could be spent directly to alleviate housing shortages in market segments that the private sector will not serve. Friedson is too deferential to the private sector’s profit motives to get us good deals.

+1

Glass doesn't get a free pass, though. He's proposed and delivered poor-social-ROI incentives of his own.

The "incentives are needed to keep us competitive" thought, in the absence of a clear calculus that shows that societal ROI, and not just for beneficiaries who may be new to the county, but broadly for those whom the government, elected or otherwise, is supposed to represent, is the same kind of folly that sees largely negative effect from competition to attract a stadium or the like, lining a team owner's pocket on the backs of area residents. Find a good way of attracting economic development -- one that more clearly provides that societal benefit. That's the hard work that government officials are supposed to do.

To the question about Friedson, he's clearly not dumb and he's clearly a politician, so the reasonable conclusion is...

You want nothing but low income housing here, with rent stabilization. Which means we attract nothing but low income low skilled workers. A safety net is great. Building out nothing but safety net is horrible. It provides no middle housing. No incentivize to attract businesses that provide skilled jobs.

DP. Why aren’t people talking more about producing homes for sale? Lots of concern about rental production but no concern about the shortage of homes for sale. The production of homes for sale is even lower than rental production. Friedson, despite claiming to be anti-tax, has voted for raising impact taxes on single family homes and townhouses (more commonly built for purchase) while decreasing impact taxes on multifamily units (more commonly built as rentals).

The problem someone needs to fix is this:

People (and sometimes corporations) buying up houses they convert to rentals.

There are far too many regular people who own dozens of houses in our county. They are leveraging debt to build a real estate portfolio. We don’t need more rentals in SFH neighborhoods.

ICYMI: CE candidate Mithun Banerjee is one of these people. PNC is moving to foreclose on at least one of his properties. (Google the local news articles or many cases, including all the taxes he has failed to pay on his various properties).

So, no…I don’t want sweetheart deals for developers to build multifamily units in SFH neighborhoods…because I don’t want some regular guy who owns dozens of houses to increase his portfolio while cosplaying landlord.

Aim higher, MoCo.

Why would you have a problem with small landlords who often offer much better deals and flexibility for people with credit issues than large corporate investment firms? You have a weird fixation on “regular people” even though they are the best type of possible rental owner especially when compared to out of state investment groups.

I also can’t understand why you think that there is no need for SFH rentals in the county. Families need a place to stay as well and it’s better to pay 3k/month to live in the same neighborhood that would cost 6k/month to purchase. It seems to me like you just don’t like people who are not multi millionaires/large corporate interests. I prefer smaller scale markets and business relationships myself.

It would be even better if more people could get the housing and price stability afforded to owners. It would be better for those families to pay $3k/month as a mortgage instead of rent.

Not necessarily. If you are paycheck to paycheck, renting is better. You don't have unanticipated costs. Like paying for a new HVAC or roof.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Jawando appears to be the only NIMBY candidate, so he’s got my money and my vote. Let’s get back to proper and sane planning.

Agree. On Reddit subs, it seems that the developer shills are out in full force with anti jawando silliness which signals to me that jawando is my guy. As usual, the YIMBYs fail to realize that while they are the most vocal, they are not in the majority.

If you could get two of the candidates to give you a million dollars in tax abatements a year in exchange for forgoing maybe $75k in revenue a year by providing a little deeply affordable housing among the MPDUs that you have to provide anyway, you’d have your shills out in force too. Especially if the third candidate wanted more affordable housing and prevailing wage in exchange for that big a subsidy. This comes down to who’s more likely to keep the subsidies flowing while gutting renter protections. The developers spend big because they expect Friedson or Glass to deliver big for them. You can’t even honestly call any if this pro-growth. It’s all about extracting higher margins from what they already own.

I thought the developers won't benefit from the tax abatements, only the land speculators will

Make it make sense

The metro one was done for a builder that already had development rights so for them it worked as a bailout after they made a bad land deal. No one else has used it yet because they didn’t have development rights already. For any future deals, the tax abatement will be capitalized into the land and function as a subsidy for the landowner, in this case WMATA.

However you think the PILOT is distributed you can’t plausibly claim that a $1.1 million tax abatement every year for 15 years is a good trade for 16 MPDUs affordable at 50 percent AMI instead of 70 percent AMI. We wouldn’t even have that concession or the affordable housing concession in the office PILOT if Evan Glass hadn’t proposed them. Friedson was willing to give these subsidies away for nothing. To the extent these are good policies, it’s because of Glass, not Friedson. Glass gets this better than Friedson does. Anyone who’s truly for affordable housing should vote Glass not Friedson. If you’re for developers making more money, vote Friedson.

For the revenue that the county forgoes on the WMATA PILOT, it could have bought at least twice as many condos, rented them out, and still had money to spare. The math on Andrew Friedson’s subsidies never maths. He’s either not very smart or he’s lying. Which do you think it is?

Different poster here. No on the county purchasing condos and renting them out. First, we don’t pay taxes on our own property. So there would be no “reclaiming” any revenue stream. Second, that would make us landlords, responsible for maintenance and repairs. Which means hiring more staff. And everyone in county government knows we don’t appropriately manage our current county facilities/infrastructure. So we’d be slumlords.

Which is exactly why we are leveraging the private market to help build housing. It’s not perfect. No human system is. But it’s far better than a government-only solution.

$1.1 million in foregone taxes a year in exchange for a developer forgoing much less in revenue is a horrible deal for taxpayers. It would have been worse if Evan Glass hadn’t stepped up to fix these bills as much as he could. There’s a place for tax abatements in housing policy but we should be getting better deals that result in more affordable housing. The foregone revenue from these deals could be spent directly to alleviate housing shortages in market segments that the private sector will not serve. Friedson is too deferential to the private sector’s profit motives to get us good deals.

+1

Glass doesn't get a free pass, though. He's proposed and delivered poor-social-ROI incentives of his own.

The "incentives are needed to keep us competitive" thought, in the absence of a clear calculus that shows that societal ROI, and not just for beneficiaries who may be new to the county, but broadly for those whom the government, elected or otherwise, is supposed to represent, is the same kind of folly that sees largely negative effect from competition to attract a stadium or the like, lining a team owner's pocket on the backs of area residents. Find a good way of attracting economic development -- one that more clearly provides that societal benefit. That's the hard work that government officials are supposed to do.

To the question about Friedson, he's clearly not dumb and he's clearly a politician, so the reasonable conclusion is...

You want nothing but low income housing here, with rent stabilization. Which means we attract nothing but low income low skilled workers. A safety net is great. Building out nothing but safety net is horrible. It provides no middle housing. No incentivize to attract businesses that provide skilled jobs.

DP. Why aren’t people talking more about producing homes for sale? Lots of concern about rental production but no concern about the shortage of homes for sale. The production of homes for sale is even lower than rental production. Friedson, despite claiming to be anti-tax, has voted for raising impact taxes on single family homes and townhouses (more commonly built for purchase) while decreasing impact taxes on multifamily units (more commonly built as rentals).

The problem someone needs to fix is this:

People (and sometimes corporations) buying up houses they convert to rentals.

There are far too many regular people who own dozens of houses in our county. They are leveraging debt to build a real estate portfolio. We don’t need more rentals in SFH neighborhoods.

ICYMI: CE candidate Mithun Banerjee is one of these people. PNC is moving to foreclose on at least one of his properties. (Google the local news articles or many cases, including all the taxes he has failed to pay on his various properties).

So, no…I don’t want sweetheart deals for developers to build multifamily units in SFH neighborhoods…because I don’t want some regular guy who owns dozens of houses to increase his portfolio while cosplaying landlord.

Aim higher, MoCo.

Why would you have a problem with small landlords who often offer much better deals and flexibility for people with credit issues than large corporate investment firms? You have a weird fixation on “regular people” even though they are the best type of possible rental owner especially when compared to out of state investment groups.

I also can’t understand why you think that there is no need for SFH rentals in the county. Families need a place to stay as well and it’s better to pay 3k/month to live in the same neighborhood that would cost 6k/month to purchase. It seems to me like you just don’t like people who are not multi millionaires/large corporate interests. I prefer smaller scale markets and business relationships myself.

It would be even better if more people could get the housing and price stability afforded to owners. It would be better for those families to pay $3k/month as a mortgage instead of rent.

Not necessarily. If you are paycheck to paycheck, renting is better. You don't have unanticipated costs. Like paying for a new HVAC or roof.

I didn’t say everyone. I said more people. A lot of people who have good credit and stable finances are locked out of ownership right now. More people should be able to own their homes. They benefit personally and the housing market benefits because those people leave the renter pool, decreasing demand.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Jawando appears to be the only NIMBY candidate, so he’s got my money and my vote. Let’s get back to proper and sane planning.

Agree. On Reddit subs, it seems that the developer shills are out in full force with anti jawando silliness which signals to me that jawando is my guy. As usual, the YIMBYs fail to realize that while they are the most vocal, they are not in the majority.

If you could get two of the candidates to give you a million dollars in tax abatements a year in exchange for forgoing maybe $75k in revenue a year by providing a little deeply affordable housing among the MPDUs that you have to provide anyway, you’d have your shills out in force too. Especially if the third candidate wanted more affordable housing and prevailing wage in exchange for that big a subsidy. This comes down to who’s more likely to keep the subsidies flowing while gutting renter protections. The developers spend big because they expect Friedson or Glass to deliver big for them. You can’t even honestly call any if this pro-growth. It’s all about extracting higher margins from what they already own.

I thought the developers won't benefit from the tax abatements, only the land speculators will

Make it make sense

The metro one was done for a builder that already had development rights so for them it worked as a bailout after they made a bad land deal. No one else has used it yet because they didn’t have development rights already. For any future deals, the tax abatement will be capitalized into the land and function as a subsidy for the landowner, in this case WMATA.

However you think the PILOT is distributed you can’t plausibly claim that a $1.1 million tax abatement every year for 15 years is a good trade for 16 MPDUs affordable at 50 percent AMI instead of 70 percent AMI. We wouldn’t even have that concession or the affordable housing concession in the office PILOT if Evan Glass hadn’t proposed them. Friedson was willing to give these subsidies away for nothing. To the extent these are good policies, it’s because of Glass, not Friedson. Glass gets this better than Friedson does. Anyone who’s truly for affordable housing should vote Glass not Friedson. If you’re for developers making more money, vote Friedson.

For the revenue that the county forgoes on the WMATA PILOT, it could have bought at least twice as many condos, rented them out, and still had money to spare. The math on Andrew Friedson’s subsidies never maths. He’s either not very smart or he’s lying. Which do you think it is?

Different poster here. No on the county purchasing condos and renting them out. First, we don’t pay taxes on our own property. So there would be no “reclaiming” any revenue stream. Second, that would make us landlords, responsible for maintenance and repairs. Which means hiring more staff. And everyone in county government knows we don’t appropriately manage our current county facilities/infrastructure. So we’d be slumlords.

Which is exactly why we are leveraging the private market to help build housing. It’s not perfect. No human system is. But it’s far better than a government-only solution.

$1.1 million in foregone taxes a year in exchange for a developer forgoing much less in revenue is a horrible deal for taxpayers. It would have been worse if Evan Glass hadn’t stepped up to fix these bills as much as he could. There’s a place for tax abatements in housing policy but we should be getting better deals that result in more affordable housing. The foregone revenue from these deals could be spent directly to alleviate housing shortages in market segments that the private sector will not serve. Friedson is too deferential to the private sector’s profit motives to get us good deals.

+1

Glass doesn't get a free pass, though. He's proposed and delivered poor-social-ROI incentives of his own.

The "incentives are needed to keep us competitive" thought, in the absence of a clear calculus that shows that societal ROI, and not just for beneficiaries who may be new to the county, but broadly for those whom the government, elected or otherwise, is supposed to represent, is the same kind of folly that sees largely negative effect from competition to attract a stadium or the like, lining a team owner's pocket on the backs of area residents. Find a good way of attracting economic development -- one that more clearly provides that societal benefit. That's the hard work that government officials are supposed to do.

To the question about Friedson, he's clearly not dumb and he's clearly a politician, so the reasonable conclusion is...

You want nothing but low income housing here, with rent stabilization. Which means we attract nothing but low income low skilled workers. A safety net is great. Building out nothing but safety net is horrible. It provides no middle housing. No incentivize to attract businesses that provide skilled jobs.

DP. Why aren’t people talking more about producing homes for sale? Lots of concern about rental production but no concern about the shortage of homes for sale. The production of homes for sale is even lower than rental production. Friedson, despite claiming to be anti-tax, has voted for raising impact taxes on single family homes and townhouses (more commonly built for purchase) while decreasing impact taxes on multifamily units (more commonly built as rentals).

The problem someone needs to fix is this:

People (and sometimes corporations) buying up houses they convert to rentals.

There are far too many regular people who own dozens of houses in our county. They are leveraging debt to build a real estate portfolio. We don’t need more rentals in SFH neighborhoods.

ICYMI: CE candidate Mithun Banerjee is one of these people. PNC is moving to foreclose on at least one of his properties. (Google the local news articles or many cases, including all the taxes he has failed to pay on his various properties).

So, no…I don’t want sweetheart deals for developers to build multifamily units in SFH neighborhoods…because I don’t want some regular guy who owns dozens of houses to increase his portfolio while cosplaying landlord.

Aim higher, MoCo.

Why would you have a problem with small landlords who often offer much better deals and flexibility for people with credit issues than large corporate investment firms? You have a weird fixation on “regular people” even though they are the best type of possible rental owner especially when compared to out of state investment groups.

I also can’t understand why you think that there is no need for SFH rentals in the county. Families need a place to stay as well and it’s better to pay 3k/month to live in the same neighborhood that would cost 6k/month to purchase. It seems to me like you just don’t like people who are not multi millionaires/large corporate interests. I prefer smaller scale markets and business relationships myself.

It would be even better if more people could get the housing and price stability afforded to owners. It would be better for those families to pay $3k/month as a mortgage instead of rent.

Not necessarily. If you are paycheck to paycheck, renting is better. You don't have unanticipated costs. Like paying for a new HVAC or roof.

I didn’t say everyone. I said more people. A lot of people who have good credit and stable finances are locked out of ownership right now. More people should be able to own their homes. They benefit personally and the housing market benefits because those people leave the renter pool, decreasing demand.

Untrue. There are so many houses that cost $500K to $600K that are perfectly livable. The median HHI is $170K. How are those people "locked out"? If people are poor savers and bad at managing their finances, then they are not good candidates for ownership. And frankly, building new housing won't help their situation because it will be even more expensive, and there isn't enough land to build so much supply to make any dent in prices in the places where people actually want to live.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Jawando appears to be the only NIMBY candidate, so he’s got my money and my vote. Let’s get back to proper and sane planning.

Agree. On Reddit subs, it seems that the developer shills are out in full force with anti jawando silliness which signals to me that jawando is my guy. As usual, the YIMBYs fail to realize that while they are the most vocal, they are not in the majority.

If you could get two of the candidates to give you a million dollars in tax abatements a year in exchange for forgoing maybe $75k in revenue a year by providing a little deeply affordable housing among the MPDUs that you have to provide anyway, you’d have your shills out in force too. Especially if the third candidate wanted more affordable housing and prevailing wage in exchange for that big a subsidy. This comes down to who’s more likely to keep the subsidies flowing while gutting renter protections. The developers spend big because they expect Friedson or Glass to deliver big for them. You can’t even honestly call any if this pro-growth. It’s all about extracting higher margins from what they already own.

I thought the developers won't benefit from the tax abatements, only the land speculators will

Make it make sense

The metro one was done for a builder that already had development rights so for them it worked as a bailout after they made a bad land deal. No one else has used it yet because they didn’t have development rights already. For any future deals, the tax abatement will be capitalized into the land and function as a subsidy for the landowner, in this case WMATA.

However you think the PILOT is distributed you can’t plausibly claim that a $1.1 million tax abatement every year for 15 years is a good trade for 16 MPDUs affordable at 50 percent AMI instead of 70 percent AMI. We wouldn’t even have that concession or the affordable housing concession in the office PILOT if Evan Glass hadn’t proposed them. Friedson was willing to give these subsidies away for nothing. To the extent these are good policies, it’s because of Glass, not Friedson. Glass gets this better than Friedson does. Anyone who’s truly for affordable housing should vote Glass not Friedson. If you’re for developers making more money, vote Friedson.

For the revenue that the county forgoes on the WMATA PILOT, it could have bought at least twice as many condos, rented them out, and still had money to spare. The math on Andrew Friedson’s subsidies never maths. He’s either not very smart or he’s lying. Which do you think it is?

Different poster here. No on the county purchasing condos and renting them out. First, we don’t pay taxes on our own property. So there would be no “reclaiming” any revenue stream. Second, that would make us landlords, responsible for maintenance and repairs. Which means hiring more staff. And everyone in county government knows we don’t appropriately manage our current county facilities/infrastructure. So we’d be slumlords.

Which is exactly why we are leveraging the private market to help build housing. It’s not perfect. No human system is. But it’s far better than a government-only solution.

$1.1 million in foregone taxes a year in exchange for a developer forgoing much less in revenue is a horrible deal for taxpayers. It would have been worse if Evan Glass hadn’t stepped up to fix these bills as much as he could. There’s a place for tax abatements in housing policy but we should be getting better deals that result in more affordable housing. The foregone revenue from these deals could be spent directly to alleviate housing shortages in market segments that the private sector will not serve. Friedson is too deferential to the private sector’s profit motives to get us good deals.

+1

Glass doesn't get a free pass, though. He's proposed and delivered poor-social-ROI incentives of his own.

The "incentives are needed to keep us competitive" thought, in the absence of a clear calculus that shows that societal ROI, and not just for beneficiaries who may be new to the county, but broadly for those whom the government, elected or otherwise, is supposed to represent, is the same kind of folly that sees largely negative effect from competition to attract a stadium or the like, lining a team owner's pocket on the backs of area residents. Find a good way of attracting economic development -- one that more clearly provides that societal benefit. That's the hard work that government officials are supposed to do.

To the question about Friedson, he's clearly not dumb and he's clearly a politician, so the reasonable conclusion is...

You want nothing but low income housing here, with rent stabilization. Which means we attract nothing but low income low skilled workers. A safety net is great. Building out nothing but safety net is horrible. It provides no middle housing. No incentivize to attract businesses that provide skilled jobs.

DP. Why aren’t people talking more about producing homes for sale? Lots of concern about rental production but no concern about the shortage of homes for sale. The production of homes for sale is even lower than rental production. Friedson, despite claiming to be anti-tax, has voted for raising impact taxes on single family homes and townhouses (more commonly built for purchase) while decreasing impact taxes on multifamily units (more commonly built as rentals).

The problem someone needs to fix is this:

People (and sometimes corporations) buying up houses they convert to rentals.

There are far too many regular people who own dozens of houses in our county. They are leveraging debt to build a real estate portfolio. We don’t need more rentals in SFH neighborhoods.

ICYMI: CE candidate Mithun Banerjee is one of these people. PNC is moving to foreclose on at least one of his properties. (Google the local news articles or many cases, including all the taxes he has failed to pay on his various properties).

So, no…I don’t want sweetheart deals for developers to build multifamily units in SFH neighborhoods…because I don’t want some regular guy who owns dozens of houses to increase his portfolio while cosplaying landlord.

Aim higher, MoCo.

Why would you have a problem with small landlords who often offer much better deals and flexibility for people with credit issues than large corporate investment firms? You have a weird fixation on “regular people” even though they are the best type of possible rental owner especially when compared to out of state investment groups.

I also can’t understand why you think that there is no need for SFH rentals in the county. Families need a place to stay as well and it’s better to pay 3k/month to live in the same neighborhood that would cost 6k/month to purchase. It seems to me like you just don’t like people who are not multi millionaires/large corporate interests. I prefer smaller scale markets and business relationships myself.

It would be even better if more people could get the housing and price stability afforded to owners. It would be better for those families to pay $3k/month as a mortgage instead of rent.

Not necessarily. If you are paycheck to paycheck, renting is better. You don't have unanticipated costs. Like paying for a new HVAC or roof.

I didn’t say everyone. I said more people. A lot of people who have good credit and stable finances are locked out of ownership right now. More people should be able to own their homes. They benefit personally and the housing market benefits because those people leave the renter pool, decreasing demand.

Untrue. There are so many houses that cost $500K to $600K that are perfectly livable. The median HHI is $170K. How are those people "locked out"? If people are poor savers and bad at managing their finances, then they are not good candidates for ownership. And frankly, building new housing won't help their situation because it will be even more expensive, and there isn't enough land to build so much supply to make any dent in prices in the places where people actually want to live.

There aren’t a long of houses on the market in that price range. In the first quarter a little over 2,000 homes were sold at all price ranges. The median price was $650,000. The county has almost 400,000 households. 2,000 sales in a county this populous is nothing. For some reason there’s a group of people who want to close off home ownership and just add rentals. I don’t get it. Home ownership used to be the foundation of opportunity in this county.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Jawando appears to be the only NIMBY candidate, so he’s got my money and my vote. Let’s get back to proper and sane planning.

Agree. On Reddit subs, it seems that the developer shills are out in full force with anti jawando silliness which signals to me that jawando is my guy. As usual, the YIMBYs fail to realize that while they are the most vocal, they are not in the majority.

If you could get two of the candidates to give you a million dollars in tax abatements a year in exchange for forgoing maybe $75k in revenue a year by providing a little deeply affordable housing among the MPDUs that you have to provide anyway, you’d have your shills out in force too. Especially if the third candidate wanted more affordable housing and prevailing wage in exchange for that big a subsidy. This comes down to who’s more likely to keep the subsidies flowing while gutting renter protections. The developers spend big because they expect Friedson or Glass to deliver big for them. You can’t even honestly call any if this pro-growth. It’s all about extracting higher margins from what they already own.

I thought the developers won't benefit from the tax abatements, only the land speculators will

Make it make sense

The metro one was done for a builder that already had development rights so for them it worked as a bailout after they made a bad land deal. No one else has used it yet because they didn’t have development rights already. For any future deals, the tax abatement will be capitalized into the land and function as a subsidy for the landowner, in this case WMATA.

However you think the PILOT is distributed you can’t plausibly claim that a $1.1 million tax abatement every year for 15 years is a good trade for 16 MPDUs affordable at 50 percent AMI instead of 70 percent AMI. We wouldn’t even have that concession or the affordable housing concession in the office PILOT if Evan Glass hadn’t proposed them. Friedson was willing to give these subsidies away for nothing. To the extent these are good policies, it’s because of Glass, not Friedson. Glass gets this better than Friedson does. Anyone who’s truly for affordable housing should vote Glass not Friedson. If you’re for developers making more money, vote Friedson.

For the revenue that the county forgoes on the WMATA PILOT, it could have bought at least twice as many condos, rented them out, and still had money to spare. The math on Andrew Friedson’s subsidies never maths. He’s either not very smart or he’s lying. Which do you think it is?

Different poster here. No on the county purchasing condos and renting them out. First, we don’t pay taxes on our own property. So there would be no “reclaiming” any revenue stream. Second, that would make us landlords, responsible for maintenance and repairs. Which means hiring more staff. And everyone in county government knows we don’t appropriately manage our current county facilities/infrastructure. So we’d be slumlords.

Which is exactly why we are leveraging the private market to help build housing. It’s not perfect. No human system is. But it’s far better than a government-only solution.

$1.1 million in foregone taxes a year in exchange for a developer forgoing much less in revenue is a horrible deal for taxpayers. It would have been worse if Evan Glass hadn’t stepped up to fix these bills as much as he could. There’s a place for tax abatements in housing policy but we should be getting better deals that result in more affordable housing. The foregone revenue from these deals could be spent directly to alleviate housing shortages in market segments that the private sector will not serve. Friedson is too deferential to the private sector’s profit motives to get us good deals.

+1

Glass doesn't get a free pass, though. He's proposed and delivered poor-social-ROI incentives of his own.

The "incentives are needed to keep us competitive" thought, in the absence of a clear calculus that shows that societal ROI, and not just for beneficiaries who may be new to the county, but broadly for those whom the government, elected or otherwise, is supposed to represent, is the same kind of folly that sees largely negative effect from competition to attract a stadium or the like, lining a team owner's pocket on the backs of area residents. Find a good way of attracting economic development -- one that more clearly provides that societal benefit. That's the hard work that government officials are supposed to do.

To the question about Friedson, he's clearly not dumb and he's clearly a politician, so the reasonable conclusion is...

You want nothing but low income housing here, with rent stabilization. Which means we attract nothing but low income low skilled workers. A safety net is great. Building out nothing but safety net is horrible. It provides no middle housing. No incentivize to attract businesses that provide skilled jobs.

DP. Why aren’t people talking more about producing homes for sale? Lots of concern about rental production but no concern about the shortage of homes for sale. The production of homes for sale is even lower than rental production. Friedson, despite claiming to be anti-tax, has voted for raising impact taxes on single family homes and townhouses (more commonly built for purchase) while decreasing impact taxes on multifamily units (more commonly built as rentals).

The problem someone needs to fix is this:

People (and sometimes corporations) buying up houses they convert to rentals.

There are far too many regular people who own dozens of houses in our county. They are leveraging debt to build a real estate portfolio. We don’t need more rentals in SFH neighborhoods.

ICYMI: CE candidate Mithun Banerjee is one of these people. PNC is moving to foreclose on at least one of his properties. (Google the local news articles or many cases, including all the taxes he has failed to pay on his various properties).

So, no…I don’t want sweetheart deals for developers to build multifamily units in SFH neighborhoods…because I don’t want some regular guy who owns dozens of houses to increase his portfolio while cosplaying landlord.

Aim higher, MoCo.

Why would you have a problem with small landlords who often offer much better deals and flexibility for people with credit issues than large corporate investment firms? You have a weird fixation on “regular people” even though they are the best type of possible rental owner especially when compared to out of state investment groups.

I also can’t understand why you think that there is no need for SFH rentals in the county. Families need a place to stay as well and it’s better to pay 3k/month to live in the same neighborhood that would cost 6k/month to purchase. It seems to me like you just don’t like people who are not multi millionaires/large corporate interests. I prefer smaller scale markets and business relationships myself.

It would be even better if more people could get the housing and price stability afforded to owners. It would be better for those families to pay $3k/month as a mortgage instead of rent.

Not necessarily. If you are paycheck to paycheck, renting is better. You don't have unanticipated costs. Like paying for a new HVAC or roof.

I didn’t say everyone. I said more people. A lot of people who have good credit and stable finances are locked out of ownership right now. More people should be able to own their homes. They benefit personally and the housing market benefits because those people leave the renter pool, decreasing demand.

Untrue. There are so many houses that cost $500K to $600K that are perfectly livable. The median HHI is $170K. How are those people "locked out"? If people are poor savers and bad at managing their finances, then they are not good candidates for ownership. And frankly, building new housing won't help their situation because it will be even more expensive, and there isn't enough land to build so much supply to make any dent in prices in the places where people actually want to live.

There aren’t a long of houses on the market in that price range. In the first quarter a little over 2,000 homes were sold at all price ranges. The median price was $650,000. The county has almost 400,000 households. 2,000 sales in a county this populous is nothing. For some reason there’s a group of people who want to close off home ownership and just add rentals. I don’t get it. Home ownership used to be the foundation of opportunity in this county.

There's no space to build SFHs, and if they do get built, they'll cost at least $1.3 million in an area like Silver Spring. Do you think people really want their dream of homeownership to be fulfilled through buying a unit in a fourplex? We need to be realistic that a fourplex unit in, say, Wheaton, is probably not going to meaningfully appreciate in value, and meanwhile people will dump tons of money into the mortgage, property taxes, and HOA fees. The YIMBYs are selling people on financial disaster by pushing this idea that people should live in a newly built shoebox, as opposed to a SFH (which by far has the best appreciation potential).

BTW, there are lots of SFHs on the market up to $600K in price. The fact that there were only 2000 sales in that range is a signal that there isn't even enough demand for the existing houses that are being put on the market. Most people just don't know how to save money, and homeownership (including annual property taxes of $5K or more, plus the unexpected costs like $15K for HVAC or roof replacement) is a bad decision for them. We live in an era of instant gratification where everyone seems to think they deserve a brand new house with their nonprofit salary in their 20s, as opposed to diligently saving money to buy a SFH when they are further along in their careers.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Jawando appears to be the only NIMBY candidate, so he’s got my money and my vote. Let’s get back to proper and sane planning.

Agree. On Reddit subs, it seems that the developer shills are out in full force with anti jawando silliness which signals to me that jawando is my guy. As usual, the YIMBYs fail to realize that while they are the most vocal, they are not in the majority.

If you could get two of the candidates to give you a million dollars in tax abatements a year in exchange for forgoing maybe $75k in revenue a year by providing a little deeply affordable housing among the MPDUs that you have to provide anyway, you’d have your shills out in force too. Especially if the third candidate wanted more affordable housing and prevailing wage in exchange for that big a subsidy. This comes down to who’s more likely to keep the subsidies flowing while gutting renter protections. The developers spend big because they expect Friedson or Glass to deliver big for them. You can’t even honestly call any if this pro-growth. It’s all about extracting higher margins from what they already own.

I thought the developers won't benefit from the tax abatements, only the land speculators will

Make it make sense

The metro one was done for a builder that already had development rights so for them it worked as a bailout after they made a bad land deal. No one else has used it yet because they didn’t have development rights already. For any future deals, the tax abatement will be capitalized into the land and function as a subsidy for the landowner, in this case WMATA.

However you think the PILOT is distributed you can’t plausibly claim that a $1.1 million tax abatement every year for 15 years is a good trade for 16 MPDUs affordable at 50 percent AMI instead of 70 percent AMI. We wouldn’t even have that concession or the affordable housing concession in the office PILOT if Evan Glass hadn’t proposed them. Friedson was willing to give these subsidies away for nothing. To the extent these are good policies, it’s because of Glass, not Friedson. Glass gets this better than Friedson does. Anyone who’s truly for affordable housing should vote Glass not Friedson. If you’re for developers making more money, vote Friedson.

For the revenue that the county forgoes on the WMATA PILOT, it could have bought at least twice as many condos, rented them out, and still had money to spare. The math on Andrew Friedson’s subsidies never maths. He’s either not very smart or he’s lying. Which do you think it is?

Different poster here. No on the county purchasing condos and renting them out. First, we don’t pay taxes on our own property. So there would be no “reclaiming” any revenue stream. Second, that would make us landlords, responsible for maintenance and repairs. Which means hiring more staff. And everyone in county government knows we don’t appropriately manage our current county facilities/infrastructure. So we’d be slumlords.

Which is exactly why we are leveraging the private market to help build housing. It’s not perfect. No human system is. But it’s far better than a government-only solution.

$1.1 million in foregone taxes a year in exchange for a developer forgoing much less in revenue is a horrible deal for taxpayers. It would have been worse if Evan Glass hadn’t stepped up to fix these bills as much as he could. There’s a place for tax abatements in housing policy but we should be getting better deals that result in more affordable housing. The foregone revenue from these deals could be spent directly to alleviate housing shortages in market segments that the private sector will not serve. Friedson is too deferential to the private sector’s profit motives to get us good deals.

+1

Glass doesn't get a free pass, though. He's proposed and delivered poor-social-ROI incentives of his own.

The "incentives are needed to keep us competitive" thought, in the absence of a clear calculus that shows that societal ROI, and not just for beneficiaries who may be new to the county, but broadly for those whom the government, elected or otherwise, is supposed to represent, is the same kind of folly that sees largely negative effect from competition to attract a stadium or the like, lining a team owner's pocket on the backs of area residents. Find a good way of attracting economic development -- one that more clearly provides that societal benefit. That's the hard work that government officials are supposed to do.

To the question about Friedson, he's clearly not dumb and he's clearly a politician, so the reasonable conclusion is...

You want nothing but low income housing here, with rent stabilization. Which means we attract nothing but low income low skilled workers. A safety net is great. Building out nothing but safety net is horrible. It provides no middle housing. No incentivize to attract businesses that provide skilled jobs.

DP. Why aren’t people talking more about producing homes for sale? Lots of concern about rental production but no concern about the shortage of homes for sale. The production of homes for sale is even lower than rental production. Friedson, despite claiming to be anti-tax, has voted for raising impact taxes on single family homes and townhouses (more commonly built for purchase) while decreasing impact taxes on multifamily units (more commonly built as rentals).

The problem someone needs to fix is this:

People (and sometimes corporations) buying up houses they convert to rentals.

There are far too many regular people who own dozens of houses in our county. They are leveraging debt to build a real estate portfolio. We don’t need more rentals in SFH neighborhoods.

ICYMI: CE candidate Mithun Banerjee is one of these people. PNC is moving to foreclose on at least one of his properties. (Google the local news articles or many cases, including all the taxes he has failed to pay on his various properties).

So, no…I don’t want sweetheart deals for developers to build multifamily units in SFH neighborhoods…because I don’t want some regular guy who owns dozens of houses to increase his portfolio while cosplaying landlord.

Aim higher, MoCo.

Why would you have a problem with small landlords who often offer much better deals and flexibility for people with credit issues than large corporate investment firms? You have a weird fixation on “regular people” even though they are the best type of possible rental owner especially when compared to out of state investment groups.

I also can’t understand why you think that there is no need for SFH rentals in the county. Families need a place to stay as well and it’s better to pay 3k/month to live in the same neighborhood that would cost 6k/month to purchase. It seems to me like you just don’t like people who are not multi millionaires/large corporate interests. I prefer smaller scale markets and business relationships myself.

It would be even better if more people could get the housing and price stability afforded to owners. It would be better for those families to pay $3k/month as a mortgage instead of rent.

Not necessarily. If you are paycheck to paycheck, renting is better. You don't have unanticipated costs. Like paying for a new HVAC or roof.

I didn’t say everyone. I said more people. A lot of people who have good credit and stable finances are locked out of ownership right now. More people should be able to own their homes. They benefit personally and the housing market benefits because those people leave the renter pool, decreasing demand.

Untrue. There are so many houses that cost $500K to $600K that are perfectly livable. The median HHI is $170K. How are those people "locked out"? If people are poor savers and bad at managing their finances, then they are not good candidates for ownership. And frankly, building new housing won't help their situation because it will be even more expensive, and there isn't enough land to build so much supply to make any dent in prices in the places where people actually want to live.

There aren’t a long of houses on the market in that price range. In the first quarter a little over 2,000 homes were sold at all price ranges. The median price was $650,000. The county has almost 400,000 households. 2,000 sales in a county this populous is nothing. For some reason there’s a group of people who want to close off home ownership and just add rentals. I don’t get it. Home ownership used to be the foundation of opportunity in this county.

There's no space to build SFHs, and if they do get built, they'll cost at least $1.3 million in an area like Silver Spring. Do you think people really want their dream of homeownership to be fulfilled through buying a unit in a fourplex? We need to be realistic that a fourplex unit in, say, Wheaton, is probably not going to meaningfully appreciate in value, and meanwhile people will dump tons of money into the mortgage, property taxes, and HOA fees. The YIMBYs are selling people on financial disaster by pushing this idea that people should live in a newly built shoebox, as opposed to a SFH (which by far has the best appreciation potential).

BTW, there are lots of SFHs on the market up to $600K in price. The fact that there were only 2000 sales in that range is a signal that there isn't even enough demand for the existing houses that are being put on the market. Most people just don't know how to save money, and homeownership (including annual property taxes of $5K or more, plus the unexpected costs like $15K for HVAC or roof replacement) is a bad decision for them. We live in an era of instant gratification where everyone seems to think they deserve a brand new house with their nonprofit salary in their 20s, as opposed to diligently saving money to buy a SFH when they are further along in their careers.

Ever hear of townhouses? Or maybe condos? You think the young lawyers and scientists who live in apartments can’t manage their money? Building only rentals only helps landlords.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Jawando appears to be the only NIMBY candidate, so he’s got my money and my vote. Let’s get back to proper and sane planning.

Agree. On Reddit subs, it seems that the developer shills are out in full force with anti jawando silliness which signals to me that jawando is my guy. As usual, the YIMBYs fail to realize that while they are the most vocal, they are not in the majority.

If you could get two of the candidates to give you a million dollars in tax abatements a year in exchange for forgoing maybe $75k in revenue a year by providing a little deeply affordable housing among the MPDUs that you have to provide anyway, you’d have your shills out in force too. Especially if the third candidate wanted more affordable housing and prevailing wage in exchange for that big a subsidy. This comes down to who’s more likely to keep the subsidies flowing while gutting renter protections. The developers spend big because they expect Friedson or Glass to deliver big for them. You can’t even honestly call any if this pro-growth. It’s all about extracting higher margins from what they already own.

I thought the developers won't benefit from the tax abatements, only the land speculators will

Make it make sense

The metro one was done for a builder that already had development rights so for them it worked as a bailout after they made a bad land deal. No one else has used it yet because they didn’t have development rights already. For any future deals, the tax abatement will be capitalized into the land and function as a subsidy for the landowner, in this case WMATA.

However you think the PILOT is distributed you can’t plausibly claim that a $1.1 million tax abatement every year for 15 years is a good trade for 16 MPDUs affordable at 50 percent AMI instead of 70 percent AMI. We wouldn’t even have that concession or the affordable housing concession in the office PILOT if Evan Glass hadn’t proposed them. Friedson was willing to give these subsidies away for nothing. To the extent these are good policies, it’s because of Glass, not Friedson. Glass gets this better than Friedson does. Anyone who’s truly for affordable housing should vote Glass not Friedson. If you’re for developers making more money, vote Friedson.

For the revenue that the county forgoes on the WMATA PILOT, it could have bought at least twice as many condos, rented them out, and still had money to spare. The math on Andrew Friedson’s subsidies never maths. He’s either not very smart or he’s lying. Which do you think it is?

Different poster here. No on the county purchasing condos and renting them out. First, we don’t pay taxes on our own property. So there would be no “reclaiming” any revenue stream. Second, that would make us landlords, responsible for maintenance and repairs. Which means hiring more staff. And everyone in county government knows we don’t appropriately manage our current county facilities/infrastructure. So we’d be slumlords.

Which is exactly why we are leveraging the private market to help build housing. It’s not perfect. No human system is. But it’s far better than a government-only solution.

$1.1 million in foregone taxes a year in exchange for a developer forgoing much less in revenue is a horrible deal for taxpayers. It would have been worse if Evan Glass hadn’t stepped up to fix these bills as much as he could. There’s a place for tax abatements in housing policy but we should be getting better deals that result in more affordable housing. The foregone revenue from these deals could be spent directly to alleviate housing shortages in market segments that the private sector will not serve. Friedson is too deferential to the private sector’s profit motives to get us good deals.

+1

Glass doesn't get a free pass, though. He's proposed and delivered poor-social-ROI incentives of his own.

The "incentives are needed to keep us competitive" thought, in the absence of a clear calculus that shows that societal ROI, and not just for beneficiaries who may be new to the county, but broadly for those whom the government, elected or otherwise, is supposed to represent, is the same kind of folly that sees largely negative effect from competition to attract a stadium or the like, lining a team owner's pocket on the backs of area residents. Find a good way of attracting economic development -- one that more clearly provides that societal benefit. That's the hard work that government officials are supposed to do.

To the question about Friedson, he's clearly not dumb and he's clearly a politician, so the reasonable conclusion is...

You want nothing but low income housing here, with rent stabilization. Which means we attract nothing but low income low skilled workers. A safety net is great. Building out nothing but safety net is horrible. It provides no middle housing. No incentivize to attract businesses that provide skilled jobs.

DP. Why aren’t people talking more about producing homes for sale? Lots of concern about rental production but no concern about the shortage of homes for sale. The production of homes for sale is even lower than rental production. Friedson, despite claiming to be anti-tax, has voted for raising impact taxes on single family homes and townhouses (more commonly built for purchase) while decreasing impact taxes on multifamily units (more commonly built as rentals).

The problem someone needs to fix is this:

People (and sometimes corporations) buying up houses they convert to rentals.

There are far too many regular people who own dozens of houses in our county. They are leveraging debt to build a real estate portfolio. We don’t need more rentals in SFH neighborhoods.

ICYMI: CE candidate Mithun Banerjee is one of these people. PNC is moving to foreclose on at least one of his properties. (Google the local news articles or many cases, including all the taxes he has failed to pay on his various properties).

So, no…I don’t want sweetheart deals for developers to build multifamily units in SFH neighborhoods…because I don’t want some regular guy who owns dozens of houses to increase his portfolio while cosplaying landlord.

Aim higher, MoCo.

Why would you have a problem with small landlords who often offer much better deals and flexibility for people with credit issues than large corporate investment firms? You have a weird fixation on “regular people” even though they are the best type of possible rental owner especially when compared to out of state investment groups.

I also can’t understand why you think that there is no need for SFH rentals in the county. Families need a place to stay as well and it’s better to pay 3k/month to live in the same neighborhood that would cost 6k/month to purchase. It seems to me like you just don’t like people who are not multi millionaires/large corporate interests. I prefer smaller scale markets and business relationships myself.

It would be even better if more people could get the housing and price stability afforded to owners. It would be better for those families to pay $3k/month as a mortgage instead of rent.

Not necessarily. If you are paycheck to paycheck, renting is better. You don't have unanticipated costs. Like paying for a new HVAC or roof.

I didn’t say everyone. I said more people. A lot of people who have good credit and stable finances are locked out of ownership right now. More people should be able to own their homes. They benefit personally and the housing market benefits because those people leave the renter pool, decreasing demand.

Untrue. There are so many houses that cost $500K to $600K that are perfectly livable. The median HHI is $170K. How are those people "locked out"? If people are poor savers and bad at managing their finances, then they are not good candidates for ownership. And frankly, building new housing won't help their situation because it will be even more expensive, and there isn't enough land to build so much supply to make any dent in prices in the places where people actually want to live.

There aren’t a long of houses on the market in that price range. In the first quarter a little over 2,000 homes were sold at all price ranges. The median price was $650,000. The county has almost 400,000 households. 2,000 sales in a county this populous is nothing. For some reason there’s a group of people who want to close off home ownership and just add rentals. I don’t get it. Home ownership used to be the foundation of opportunity in this county.

There's no space to build SFHs, and if they do get built, they'll cost at least $1.3 million in an area like Silver Spring. Do you think people really want their dream of homeownership to be fulfilled through buying a unit in a fourplex? We need to be realistic that a fourplex unit in, say, Wheaton, is probably not going to meaningfully appreciate in value, and meanwhile people will dump tons of money into the mortgage, property taxes, and HOA fees. The YIMBYs are selling people on financial disaster by pushing this idea that people should live in a newly built shoebox, as opposed to a SFH (which by far has the best appreciation potential).

BTW, there are lots of SFHs on the market up to $600K in price. The fact that there were only 2000 sales in that range is a signal that there isn't even enough demand for the existing houses that are being put on the market. Most people just don't know how to save money, and homeownership (including annual property taxes of $5K or more, plus the unexpected costs like $15K for HVAC or roof replacement) is a bad decision for them. We live in an era of instant gratification where everyone seems to think they deserve a brand new house with their nonprofit salary in their 20s, as opposed to diligently saving money to buy a SFH when they are further along in their careers.

Ever hear of townhouses? Or maybe condos? You think the young lawyers and scientists who live in apartments can’t manage their money? Building only rentals only helps landlords.

Is there really a shortage of townhouses and condos? Redfin shows about 1200 of them for sale right now in MoCo. I'm fine with them, but they have limited appeal.

[Anonymous]

Jawando recommended we take the SRO's out of schools and that the police should never be called to a school unless there is a life threatening situation at the school. Like when a kid shows up with a gun and kills a bunch of kids then the police will show up. This is how stupid he is.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Jawando recommended we take the SRO's out of schools and that the police should never be called to a school unless there is a life threatening situation at the school. Like when a kid shows up with a gun and kills a bunch of kids then the police will show up. This is how stupid he is.

All the candidates are stupid in many, many ways. I'm still trying to figure out which one is the least stupid in the ways that matter.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Jawando appears to be the only NIMBY candidate, so he’s got my money and my vote. Let’s get back to proper and sane planning.

Agree. On Reddit subs, it seems that the developer shills are out in full force with anti jawando silliness which signals to me that jawando is my guy. As usual, the YIMBYs fail to realize that while they are the most vocal, they are not in the majority.

If you could get two of the candidates to give you a million dollars in tax abatements a year in exchange for forgoing maybe $75k in revenue a year by providing a little deeply affordable housing among the MPDUs that you have to provide anyway, you’d have your shills out in force too. Especially if the third candidate wanted more affordable housing and prevailing wage in exchange for that big a subsidy. This comes down to who’s more likely to keep the subsidies flowing while gutting renter protections. The developers spend big because they expect Friedson or Glass to deliver big for them. You can’t even honestly call any if this pro-growth. It’s all about extracting higher margins from what they already own.

I thought the developers won't benefit from the tax abatements, only the land speculators will

Make it make sense

The metro one was done for a builder that already had development rights so for them it worked as a bailout after they made a bad land deal. No one else has used it yet because they didn’t have development rights already. For any future deals, the tax abatement will be capitalized into the land and function as a subsidy for the landowner, in this case WMATA.

However you think the PILOT is distributed you can’t plausibly claim that a $1.1 million tax abatement every year for 15 years is a good trade for 16 MPDUs affordable at 50 percent AMI instead of 70 percent AMI. We wouldn’t even have that concession or the affordable housing concession in the office PILOT if Evan Glass hadn’t proposed them. Friedson was willing to give these subsidies away for nothing. To the extent these are good policies, it’s because of Glass, not Friedson. Glass gets this better than Friedson does. Anyone who’s truly for affordable housing should vote Glass not Friedson. If you’re for developers making more money, vote Friedson.

For the revenue that the county forgoes on the WMATA PILOT, it could have bought at least twice as many condos, rented them out, and still had money to spare. The math on Andrew Friedson’s subsidies never maths. He’s either not very smart or he’s lying. Which do you think it is?

Different poster here. No on the county purchasing condos and renting them out. First, we don’t pay taxes on our own property. So there would be no “reclaiming” any revenue stream. Second, that would make us landlords, responsible for maintenance and repairs. Which means hiring more staff. And everyone in county government knows we don’t appropriately manage our current county facilities/infrastructure. So we’d be slumlords.

Which is exactly why we are leveraging the private market to help build housing. It’s not perfect. No human system is. But it’s far better than a government-only solution.

$1.1 million in foregone taxes a year in exchange for a developer forgoing much less in revenue is a horrible deal for taxpayers. It would have been worse if Evan Glass hadn’t stepped up to fix these bills as much as he could. There’s a place for tax abatements in housing policy but we should be getting better deals that result in more affordable housing. The foregone revenue from these deals could be spent directly to alleviate housing shortages in market segments that the private sector will not serve. Friedson is too deferential to the private sector’s profit motives to get us good deals.

+1

Glass doesn't get a free pass, though. He's proposed and delivered poor-social-ROI incentives of his own.

The "incentives are needed to keep us competitive" thought, in the absence of a clear calculus that shows that societal ROI, and not just for beneficiaries who may be new to the county, but broadly for those whom the government, elected or otherwise, is supposed to represent, is the same kind of folly that sees largely negative effect from competition to attract a stadium or the like, lining a team owner's pocket on the backs of area residents. Find a good way of attracting economic development -- one that more clearly provides that societal benefit. That's the hard work that government officials are supposed to do.

To the question about Friedson, he's clearly not dumb and he's clearly a politician, so the reasonable conclusion is...

You want nothing but low income housing here, with rent stabilization. Which means we attract nothing but low income low skilled workers. A safety net is great. Building out nothing but safety net is horrible. It provides no middle housing. No incentivize to attract businesses that provide skilled jobs.

DP. Why aren’t people talking more about producing homes for sale? Lots of concern about rental production but no concern about the shortage of homes for sale. The production of homes for sale is even lower than rental production. Friedson, despite claiming to be anti-tax, has voted for raising impact taxes on single family homes and townhouses (more commonly built for purchase) while decreasing impact taxes on multifamily units (more commonly built as rentals).

The problem someone needs to fix is this:

People (and sometimes corporations) buying up houses they convert to rentals.

There are far too many regular people who own dozens of houses in our county. They are leveraging debt to build a real estate portfolio. We don’t need more rentals in SFH neighborhoods.

ICYMI: CE candidate Mithun Banerjee is one of these people. PNC is moving to foreclose on at least one of his properties. (Google the local news articles or many cases, including all the taxes he has failed to pay on his various properties).

So, no…I don’t want sweetheart deals for developers to build multifamily units in SFH neighborhoods…because I don’t want some regular guy who owns dozens of houses to increase his portfolio while cosplaying landlord.

Aim higher, MoCo.

Why would you have a problem with small landlords who often offer much better deals and flexibility for people with credit issues than large corporate investment firms? You have a weird fixation on “regular people” even though they are the best type of possible rental owner especially when compared to out of state investment groups.

I also can’t understand why you think that there is no need for SFH rentals in the county. Families need a place to stay as well and it’s better to pay 3k/month to live in the same neighborhood that would cost 6k/month to purchase. It seems to me like you just don’t like people who are not multi millionaires/large corporate interests. I prefer smaller scale markets and business relationships myself.

It would be even better if more people could get the housing and price stability afforded to owners. It would be better for those families to pay $3k/month as a mortgage instead of rent.

Not necessarily. If you are paycheck to paycheck, renting is better. You don't have unanticipated costs. Like paying for a new HVAC or roof.

I didn’t say everyone. I said more people. A lot of people who have good credit and stable finances are locked out of ownership right now. More people should be able to own their homes. They benefit personally and the housing market benefits because those people leave the renter pool, decreasing demand.

Untrue. There are so many houses that cost $500K to $600K that are perfectly livable. The median HHI is $170K. How are those people "locked out"? If people are poor savers and bad at managing their finances, then they are not good candidates for ownership. And frankly, building new housing won't help their situation because it will be even more expensive, and there isn't enough land to build so much supply to make any dent in prices in the places where people actually want to live.

There aren’t a long of houses on the market in that price range. In the first quarter a little over 2,000 homes were sold at all price ranges. The median price was $650,000. The county has almost 400,000 households. 2,000 sales in a county this populous is nothing. For some reason there’s a group of people who want to close off home ownership and just add rentals. I don’t get it. Home ownership used to be the foundation of opportunity in this county.

There's no space to build SFHs, and if they do get built, they'll cost at least $1.3 million in an area like Silver Spring. Do you think people really want their dream of homeownership to be fulfilled through buying a unit in a fourplex? We need to be realistic that a fourplex unit in, say, Wheaton, is probably not going to meaningfully appreciate in value, and meanwhile people will dump tons of money into the mortgage, property taxes, and HOA fees. The YIMBYs are selling people on financial disaster by pushing this idea that people should live in a newly built shoebox, as opposed to a SFH (which by far has the best appreciation potential).

BTW, there are lots of SFHs on the market up to $600K in price. The fact that there were only 2000 sales in that range is a signal that there isn't even enough demand for the existing houses that are being put on the market. Most people just don't know how to save money, and homeownership (including annual property taxes of $5K or more, plus the unexpected costs like $15K for HVAC or roof replacement) is a bad decision for them. We live in an era of instant gratification where everyone seems to think they deserve a brand new house with their nonprofit salary in their 20s, as opposed to diligently saving money to buy a SFH when they are further along in their careers.

Ever hear of townhouses? Or maybe condos? You think the young lawyers and scientists who live in apartments can’t manage their money? Building only rentals only helps landlords.

Is there really a shortage of townhouses and condos? Redfin shows about 1200 of them for sale right now in MoCo. I'm fine with them, but they have limited appeal.

Yes there is a shortage of townhouses and condos. 1,200 units is less than 1 percent of the total housing stock, so it’s really nothing in terms of supply.

A lot of the arguments about why it’s fine to limit home ownership opportunities sound pretty paternalistic and not unlike those used to perpetuate some horrid economic systems.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Jawando appears to be the only NIMBY candidate, so he’s got my money and my vote. Let’s get back to proper and sane planning.

Agree. On Reddit subs, it seems that the developer shills are out in full force with anti jawando silliness which signals to me that jawando is my guy. As usual, the YIMBYs fail to realize that while they are the most vocal, they are not in the majority.

If you could get two of the candidates to give you a million dollars in tax abatements a year in exchange for forgoing maybe $75k in revenue a year by providing a little deeply affordable housing among the MPDUs that you have to provide anyway, you’d have your shills out in force too. Especially if the third candidate wanted more affordable housing and prevailing wage in exchange for that big a subsidy. This comes down to who’s more likely to keep the subsidies flowing while gutting renter protections. The developers spend big because they expect Friedson or Glass to deliver big for them. You can’t even honestly call any if this pro-growth. It’s all about extracting higher margins from what they already own.

I thought the developers won't benefit from the tax abatements, only the land speculators will

Make it make sense

The metro one was done for a builder that already had development rights so for them it worked as a bailout after they made a bad land deal. No one else has used it yet because they didn’t have development rights already. For any future deals, the tax abatement will be capitalized into the land and function as a subsidy for the landowner, in this case WMATA.

However you think the PILOT is distributed you can’t plausibly claim that a $1.1 million tax abatement every year for 15 years is a good trade for 16 MPDUs affordable at 50 percent AMI instead of 70 percent AMI. We wouldn’t even have that concession or the affordable housing concession in the office PILOT if Evan Glass hadn’t proposed them. Friedson was willing to give these subsidies away for nothing. To the extent these are good policies, it’s because of Glass, not Friedson. Glass gets this better than Friedson does. Anyone who’s truly for affordable housing should vote Glass not Friedson. If you’re for developers making more money, vote Friedson.

For the revenue that the county forgoes on the WMATA PILOT, it could have bought at least twice as many condos, rented them out, and still had money to spare. The math on Andrew Friedson’s subsidies never maths. He’s either not very smart or he’s lying. Which do you think it is?

Different poster here. No on the county purchasing condos and renting them out. First, we don’t pay taxes on our own property. So there would be no “reclaiming” any revenue stream. Second, that would make us landlords, responsible for maintenance and repairs. Which means hiring more staff. And everyone in county government knows we don’t appropriately manage our current county facilities/infrastructure. So we’d be slumlords.

Which is exactly why we are leveraging the private market to help build housing. It’s not perfect. No human system is. But it’s far better than a government-only solution.

$1.1 million in foregone taxes a year in exchange for a developer forgoing much less in revenue is a horrible deal for taxpayers. It would have been worse if Evan Glass hadn’t stepped up to fix these bills as much as he could. There’s a place for tax abatements in housing policy but we should be getting better deals that result in more affordable housing. The foregone revenue from these deals could be spent directly to alleviate housing shortages in market segments that the private sector will not serve. Friedson is too deferential to the private sector’s profit motives to get us good deals.

+1

Glass doesn't get a free pass, though. He's proposed and delivered poor-social-ROI incentives of his own.

The "incentives are needed to keep us competitive" thought, in the absence of a clear calculus that shows that societal ROI, and not just for beneficiaries who may be new to the county, but broadly for those whom the government, elected or otherwise, is supposed to represent, is the same kind of folly that sees largely negative effect from competition to attract a stadium or the like, lining a team owner's pocket on the backs of area residents. Find a good way of attracting economic development -- one that more clearly provides that societal benefit. That's the hard work that government officials are supposed to do.

To the question about Friedson, he's clearly not dumb and he's clearly a politician, so the reasonable conclusion is...

You want nothing but low income housing here, with rent stabilization. Which means we attract nothing but low income low skilled workers. A safety net is great. Building out nothing but safety net is horrible. It provides no middle housing. No incentivize to attract businesses that provide skilled jobs.

DP. Why aren’t people talking more about producing homes for sale? Lots of concern about rental production but no concern about the shortage of homes for sale. The production of homes for sale is even lower than rental production. Friedson, despite claiming to be anti-tax, has voted for raising impact taxes on single family homes and townhouses (more commonly built for purchase) while decreasing impact taxes on multifamily units (more commonly built as rentals).

The problem someone needs to fix is this:

People (and sometimes corporations) buying up houses they convert to rentals.

There are far too many regular people who own dozens of houses in our county. They are leveraging debt to build a real estate portfolio. We don’t need more rentals in SFH neighborhoods.

ICYMI: CE candidate Mithun Banerjee is one of these people. PNC is moving to foreclose on at least one of his properties. (Google the local news articles or many cases, including all the taxes he has failed to pay on his various properties).

So, no…I don’t want sweetheart deals for developers to build multifamily units in SFH neighborhoods…because I don’t want some regular guy who owns dozens of houses to increase his portfolio while cosplaying landlord.

Aim higher, MoCo.

Why would you have a problem with small landlords who often offer much better deals and flexibility for people with credit issues than large corporate investment firms? You have a weird fixation on “regular people” even though they are the best type of possible rental owner especially when compared to out of state investment groups.

I also can’t understand why you think that there is no need for SFH rentals in the county. Families need a place to stay as well and it’s better to pay 3k/month to live in the same neighborhood that would cost 6k/month to purchase. It seems to me like you just don’t like people who are not multi millionaires/large corporate interests. I prefer smaller scale markets and business relationships myself.

It would be even better if more people could get the housing and price stability afforded to owners. It would be better for those families to pay $3k/month as a mortgage instead of rent.

Not necessarily. If you are paycheck to paycheck, renting is better. You don't have unanticipated costs. Like paying for a new HVAC or roof.

I didn’t say everyone. I said more people. A lot of people who have good credit and stable finances are locked out of ownership right now. More people should be able to own their homes. They benefit personally and the housing market benefits because those people leave the renter pool, decreasing demand.

Untrue. There are so many houses that cost $500K to $600K that are perfectly livable. The median HHI is $170K. How are those people "locked out"? If people are poor savers and bad at managing their finances, then they are not good candidates for ownership. And frankly, building new housing won't help their situation because it will be even more expensive, and there isn't enough land to build so much supply to make any dent in prices in the places where people actually want to live.

There aren’t a long of houses on the market in that price range. In the first quarter a little over 2,000 homes were sold at all price ranges. The median price was $650,000. The county has almost 400,000 households. 2,000 sales in a county this populous is nothing. For some reason there’s a group of people who want to close off home ownership and just add rentals. I don’t get it. Home ownership used to be the foundation of opportunity in this county.

There's no space to build SFHs, and if they do get built, they'll cost at least $1.3 million in an area like Silver Spring. Do you think people really want their dream of homeownership to be fulfilled through buying a unit in a fourplex? We need to be realistic that a fourplex unit in, say, Wheaton, is probably not going to meaningfully appreciate in value, and meanwhile people will dump tons of money into the mortgage, property taxes, and HOA fees. The YIMBYs are selling people on financial disaster by pushing this idea that people should live in a newly built shoebox, as opposed to a SFH (which by far has the best appreciation potential).

BTW, there are lots of SFHs on the market up to $600K in price. The fact that there were only 2000 sales in that range is a signal that there isn't even enough demand for the existing houses that are being put on the market. Most people just don't know how to save money, and homeownership (including annual property taxes of $5K or more, plus the unexpected costs like $15K for HVAC or roof replacement) is a bad decision for them. We live in an era of instant gratification where everyone seems to think they deserve a brand new house with their nonprofit salary in their 20s, as opposed to diligently saving money to buy a SFH when they are further along in their careers.

Ever hear of townhouses? Or maybe condos? You think the young lawyers and scientists who live in apartments can’t manage their money? Building only rentals only helps landlords.

Is there really a shortage of townhouses and condos? Redfin shows about 1200 of them for sale right now in MoCo. I'm fine with them, but they have limited appeal.

Yes there is a shortage of townhouses and condos. 1,200 units is less than 1 percent of the total housing stock, so it’s really nothing in terms of supply.

A lot of the arguments about why it’s fine to limit home ownership opportunities sound pretty paternalistic and not unlike those used to perpetuate some horrid economic systems.

The market for condos isn't awesome. In the older buildings there are major financial issues. It can be extremely risky financially for anyone. Even if you buy in a relatively new building, they can easily become mismanaged and the owners often have little recourse in these cases.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Jawando appears to be the only NIMBY candidate, so he’s got my money and my vote. Let’s get back to proper and sane planning.

Agree. On Reddit subs, it seems that the developer shills are out in full force with anti jawando silliness which signals to me that jawando is my guy. As usual, the YIMBYs fail to realize that while they are the most vocal, they are not in the majority.

If you could get two of the candidates to give you a million dollars in tax abatements a year in exchange for forgoing maybe $75k in revenue a year by providing a little deeply affordable housing among the MPDUs that you have to provide anyway, you’d have your shills out in force too. Especially if the third candidate wanted more affordable housing and prevailing wage in exchange for that big a subsidy. This comes down to who’s more likely to keep the subsidies flowing while gutting renter protections. The developers spend big because they expect Friedson or Glass to deliver big for them. You can’t even honestly call any if this pro-growth. It’s all about extracting higher margins from what they already own.

I thought the developers won't benefit from the tax abatements, only the land speculators will

Make it make sense

The metro one was done for a builder that already had development rights so for them it worked as a bailout after they made a bad land deal. No one else has used it yet because they didn’t have development rights already. For any future deals, the tax abatement will be capitalized into the land and function as a subsidy for the landowner, in this case WMATA.

However you think the PILOT is distributed you can’t plausibly claim that a $1.1 million tax abatement every year for 15 years is a good trade for 16 MPDUs affordable at 50 percent AMI instead of 70 percent AMI. We wouldn’t even have that concession or the affordable housing concession in the office PILOT if Evan Glass hadn’t proposed them. Friedson was willing to give these subsidies away for nothing. To the extent these are good policies, it’s because of Glass, not Friedson. Glass gets this better than Friedson does. Anyone who’s truly for affordable housing should vote Glass not Friedson. If you’re for developers making more money, vote Friedson.

For the revenue that the county forgoes on the WMATA PILOT, it could have bought at least twice as many condos, rented them out, and still had money to spare. The math on Andrew Friedson’s subsidies never maths. He’s either not very smart or he’s lying. Which do you think it is?

Different poster here. No on the county purchasing condos and renting them out. First, we don’t pay taxes on our own property. So there would be no “reclaiming” any revenue stream. Second, that would make us landlords, responsible for maintenance and repairs. Which means hiring more staff. And everyone in county government knows we don’t appropriately manage our current county facilities/infrastructure. So we’d be slumlords.

Which is exactly why we are leveraging the private market to help build housing. It’s not perfect. No human system is. But it’s far better than a government-only solution.

$1.1 million in foregone taxes a year in exchange for a developer forgoing much less in revenue is a horrible deal for taxpayers. It would have been worse if Evan Glass hadn’t stepped up to fix these bills as much as he could. There’s a place for tax abatements in housing policy but we should be getting better deals that result in more affordable housing. The foregone revenue from these deals could be spent directly to alleviate housing shortages in market segments that the private sector will not serve. Friedson is too deferential to the private sector’s profit motives to get us good deals.

+1

Glass doesn't get a free pass, though. He's proposed and delivered poor-social-ROI incentives of his own.

The "incentives are needed to keep us competitive" thought, in the absence of a clear calculus that shows that societal ROI, and not just for beneficiaries who may be new to the county, but broadly for those whom the government, elected or otherwise, is supposed to represent, is the same kind of folly that sees largely negative effect from competition to attract a stadium or the like, lining a team owner's pocket on the backs of area residents. Find a good way of attracting economic development -- one that more clearly provides that societal benefit. That's the hard work that government officials are supposed to do.

To the question about Friedson, he's clearly not dumb and he's clearly a politician, so the reasonable conclusion is...

You want nothing but low income housing here, with rent stabilization. Which means we attract nothing but low income low skilled workers. A safety net is great. Building out nothing but safety net is horrible. It provides no middle housing. No incentivize to attract businesses that provide skilled jobs.

DP. Why aren’t people talking more about producing homes for sale? Lots of concern about rental production but no concern about the shortage of homes for sale. The production of homes for sale is even lower than rental production. Friedson, despite claiming to be anti-tax, has voted for raising impact taxes on single family homes and townhouses (more commonly built for purchase) while decreasing impact taxes on multifamily units (more commonly built as rentals).

The problem someone needs to fix is this:

People (and sometimes corporations) buying up houses they convert to rentals.

There are far too many regular people who own dozens of houses in our county. They are leveraging debt to build a real estate portfolio. We don’t need more rentals in SFH neighborhoods.

ICYMI: CE candidate Mithun Banerjee is one of these people. PNC is moving to foreclose on at least one of his properties. (Google the local news articles or many cases, including all the taxes he has failed to pay on his various properties).

So, no…I don’t want sweetheart deals for developers to build multifamily units in SFH neighborhoods…because I don’t want some regular guy who owns dozens of houses to increase his portfolio while cosplaying landlord.

Aim higher, MoCo.

Why would you have a problem with small landlords who often offer much better deals and flexibility for people with credit issues than large corporate investment firms? You have a weird fixation on “regular people” even though they are the best type of possible rental owner especially when compared to out of state investment groups.

I also can’t understand why you think that there is no need for SFH rentals in the county. Families need a place to stay as well and it’s better to pay 3k/month to live in the same neighborhood that would cost 6k/month to purchase. It seems to me like you just don’t like people who are not multi millionaires/large corporate interests. I prefer smaller scale markets and business relationships myself.

It would be even better if more people could get the housing and price stability afforded to owners. It would be better for those families to pay $3k/month as a mortgage instead of rent.

Not necessarily. If you are paycheck to paycheck, renting is better. You don't have unanticipated costs. Like paying for a new HVAC or roof.

I didn’t say everyone. I said more people. A lot of people who have good credit and stable finances are locked out of ownership right now. More people should be able to own their homes. They benefit personally and the housing market benefits because those people leave the renter pool, decreasing demand.

Untrue. There are so many houses that cost $500K to $600K that are perfectly livable. The median HHI is $170K. How are those people "locked out"? If people are poor savers and bad at managing their finances, then they are not good candidates for ownership. And frankly, building new housing won't help their situation because it will be even more expensive, and there isn't enough land to build so much supply to make any dent in prices in the places where people actually want to live.

There aren’t a long of houses on the market in that price range. In the first quarter a little over 2,000 homes were sold at all price ranges. The median price was $650,000. The county has almost 400,000 households. 2,000 sales in a county this populous is nothing. For some reason there’s a group of people who want to close off home ownership and just add rentals. I don’t get it. Home ownership used to be the foundation of opportunity in this county.

There's no space to build SFHs, and if they do get built, they'll cost at least $1.3 million in an area like Silver Spring. Do you think people really want their dream of homeownership to be fulfilled through buying a unit in a fourplex? We need to be realistic that a fourplex unit in, say, Wheaton, is probably not going to meaningfully appreciate in value, and meanwhile people will dump tons of money into the mortgage, property taxes, and HOA fees. The YIMBYs are selling people on financial disaster by pushing this idea that people should live in a newly built shoebox, as opposed to a SFH (which by far has the best appreciation potential).

BTW, there are lots of SFHs on the market up to $600K in price. The fact that there were only 2000 sales in that range is a signal that there isn't even enough demand for the existing houses that are being put on the market. Most people just don't know how to save money, and homeownership (including annual property taxes of $5K or more, plus the unexpected costs like $15K for HVAC or roof replacement) is a bad decision for them. We live in an era of instant gratification where everyone seems to think they deserve a brand new house with their nonprofit salary in their 20s, as opposed to diligently saving money to buy a SFH when they are further along in their careers.

Ever hear of townhouses? Or maybe condos? You think the young lawyers and scientists who live in apartments can’t manage their money? Building only rentals only helps landlords.

Is there really a shortage of townhouses and condos? Redfin shows about 1200 of them for sale right now in MoCo. I'm fine with them, but they have limited appeal.

Yes there is a shortage of townhouses and condos. 1,200 units is less than 1 percent of the total housing stock, so it’s really nothing in terms of supply.

A lot of the arguments about why it’s fine to limit home ownership opportunities sound pretty paternalistic and not unlike those used to perpetuate some horrid economic systems.

What is the ideal supply? And if people can't afford what's already on the market, why would they be able to afford something brand new? There are plenty of townhouses in good condition for $350K with low HOA fees. I genuinely don't understand why this supply is inadequate. Your talk about "paternalism" is classic developer gaslighting, so let's try to stick to the facts.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Jawando appears to be the only NIMBY candidate, so he’s got my money and my vote. Let’s get back to proper and sane planning.

Agree. On Reddit subs, it seems that the developer shills are out in full force with anti jawando silliness which signals to me that jawando is my guy. As usual, the YIMBYs fail to realize that while they are the most vocal, they are not in the majority.

Affordable Maryland’s ad and website look like amateur productions and are clearly misleading. They haven’t even paid attention to any of the polling on housing, which shows clear support for more housing near metro (something Jawando proposed) and clear opposition to sprawl like Friedson’s countywide upzoning.

It’s actually something Jawando voted against. https://apps.montgomerycountymd.gov/ccllims/BillDetailsPage?RecordId=2668

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Jawando appears to be the only NIMBY candidate, so he’s got my money and my vote. Let’s get back to proper and sane planning.

Agree. On Reddit subs, it seems that the developer shills are out in full force with anti jawando silliness which signals to me that jawando is my guy. As usual, the YIMBYs fail to realize that while they are the most vocal, they are not in the majority.

Affordable Maryland’s ad and website look like amateur productions and are clearly misleading. They haven’t even paid attention to any of the polling on housing, which shows clear support for more housing near metro (something Jawando proposed) and clear opposition to sprawl like Friedson’s countywide upzoning.

It’s actually something Jawando voted against. https://apps.montgomerycountymd.gov/ccllims/BillDetailsPage?RecordId=2668

Try to pay more attention. During his first term, Jawando proposed allowing house-sized multifamily housing development in neighborhoods near metro stations while keeping in place setback and height limits for redevelopment. The public testimony on the Jawando bill was mostly favorable. Friedson would not even give it a work session in the committee. Had Friedson voted to move the bill forward, it would have gone back to the council for a vote. It was pretty NIMBY of Friedson, or maybe he just didn’t want to vote for something he wouldn’t get credit for.

This year Friedson did a countywide upzoning bill, increasing allowable density on lots all over the county, close to Metro or not, except in Potomac, where a lot of Friedson’s donors live. Most of the lots that Friedson’s bill upzoned are not within walking distance of metro stations or stores or restaurants. Friedson had originally been advocating a proposal to ban single family zoning everywhere, except in Potomac, of course. Friedson’s bill doesn’t stay true to the “compact development” principle and targets some of the most affordable single family homes in the county for redevelopment into apartments.

Upzoning near metro made a lot more sense than what we ended up with.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Jawando appears to be the only NIMBY candidate, so he’s got my money and my vote. Let’s get back to proper and sane planning.

Agree. On Reddit subs, it seems that the developer shills are out in full force with anti jawando silliness which signals to me that jawando is my guy. As usual, the YIMBYs fail to realize that while they are the most vocal, they are not in the majority.

If you could get two of the candidates to give you a million dollars in tax abatements a year in exchange for forgoing maybe $75k in revenue a year by providing a little deeply affordable housing among the MPDUs that you have to provide anyway, you’d have your shills out in force too. Especially if the third candidate wanted more affordable housing and prevailing wage in exchange for that big a subsidy. This comes down to who’s more likely to keep the subsidies flowing while gutting renter protections. The developers spend big because they expect Friedson or Glass to deliver big for them. You can’t even honestly call any if this pro-growth. It’s all about extracting higher margins from what they already own.

I thought the developers won't benefit from the tax abatements, only the land speculators will

Make it make sense

The metro one was done for a builder that already had development rights so for them it worked as a bailout after they made a bad land deal. No one else has used it yet because they didn’t have development rights already. For any future deals, the tax abatement will be capitalized into the land and function as a subsidy for the landowner, in this case WMATA.

However you think the PILOT is distributed you can’t plausibly claim that a $1.1 million tax abatement every year for 15 years is a good trade for 16 MPDUs affordable at 50 percent AMI instead of 70 percent AMI. We wouldn’t even have that concession or the affordable housing concession in the office PILOT if Evan Glass hadn’t proposed them. Friedson was willing to give these subsidies away for nothing. To the extent these are good policies, it’s because of Glass, not Friedson. Glass gets this better than Friedson does. Anyone who’s truly for affordable housing should vote Glass not Friedson. If you’re for developers making more money, vote Friedson.

For the revenue that the county forgoes on the WMATA PILOT, it could have bought at least twice as many condos, rented them out, and still had money to spare. The math on Andrew Friedson’s subsidies never maths. He’s either not very smart or he’s lying. Which do you think it is?

Different poster here. No on the county purchasing condos and renting them out. First, we don’t pay taxes on our own property. So there would be no “reclaiming” any revenue stream. Second, that would make us landlords, responsible for maintenance and repairs. Which means hiring more staff. And everyone in county government knows we don’t appropriately manage our current county facilities/infrastructure. So we’d be slumlords.

Which is exactly why we are leveraging the private market to help build housing. It’s not perfect. No human system is. But it’s far better than a government-only solution.

$1.1 million in foregone taxes a year in exchange for a developer forgoing much less in revenue is a horrible deal for taxpayers. It would have been worse if Evan Glass hadn’t stepped up to fix these bills as much as he could. There’s a place for tax abatements in housing policy but we should be getting better deals that result in more affordable housing. The foregone revenue from these deals could be spent directly to alleviate housing shortages in market segments that the private sector will not serve. Friedson is too deferential to the private sector’s profit motives to get us good deals.

+1

Glass doesn't get a free pass, though. He's proposed and delivered poor-social-ROI incentives of his own.

The "incentives are needed to keep us competitive" thought, in the absence of a clear calculus that shows that societal ROI, and not just for beneficiaries who may be new to the county, but broadly for those whom the government, elected or otherwise, is supposed to represent, is the same kind of folly that sees largely negative effect from competition to attract a stadium or the like, lining a team owner's pocket on the backs of area residents. Find a good way of attracting economic development -- one that more clearly provides that societal benefit. That's the hard work that government officials are supposed to do.

To the question about Friedson, he's clearly not dumb and he's clearly a politician, so the reasonable conclusion is...

You want nothing but low income housing here, with rent stabilization. Which means we attract nothing but low income low skilled workers. A safety net is great. Building out nothing but safety net is horrible. It provides no middle housing. No incentivize to attract businesses that provide skilled jobs.

DP. Why aren’t people talking more about producing homes for sale? Lots of concern about rental production but no concern about the shortage of homes for sale. The production of homes for sale is even lower than rental production. Friedson, despite claiming to be anti-tax, has voted for raising impact taxes on single family homes and townhouses (more commonly built for purchase) while decreasing impact taxes on multifamily units (more commonly built as rentals).

The problem someone needs to fix is this:

People (and sometimes corporations) buying up houses they convert to rentals.

There are far too many regular people who own dozens of houses in our county. They are leveraging debt to build a real estate portfolio. We don’t need more rentals in SFH neighborhoods.

ICYMI: CE candidate Mithun Banerjee is one of these people. PNC is moving to foreclose on at least one of his properties. (Google the local news articles or many cases, including all the taxes he has failed to pay on his various properties).

So, no…I don’t want sweetheart deals for developers to build multifamily units in SFH neighborhoods…because I don’t want some regular guy who owns dozens of houses to increase his portfolio while cosplaying landlord.

Aim higher, MoCo.

Why would you have a problem with small landlords who often offer much better deals and flexibility for people with credit issues than large corporate investment firms? You have a weird fixation on “regular people” even though they are the best type of possible rental owner especially when compared to out of state investment groups.

I also can’t understand why you think that there is no need for SFH rentals in the county. Families need a place to stay as well and it’s better to pay 3k/month to live in the same neighborhood that would cost 6k/month to purchase. It seems to me like you just don’t like people who are not multi millionaires/large corporate interests. I prefer smaller scale markets and business relationships myself.

It would be even better if more people could get the housing and price stability afforded to owners. It would be better for those families to pay $3k/month as a mortgage instead of rent.

Not necessarily. If you are paycheck to paycheck, renting is better. You don't have unanticipated costs. Like paying for a new HVAC or roof.

I didn’t say everyone. I said more people. A lot of people who have good credit and stable finances are locked out of ownership right now. More people should be able to own their homes. They benefit personally and the housing market benefits because those people leave the renter pool, decreasing demand.

Untrue. There are so many houses that cost $500K to $600K that are perfectly livable. The median HHI is $170K. How are those people "locked out"? If people are poor savers and bad at managing their finances, then they are not good candidates for ownership. And frankly, building new housing won't help their situation because it will be even more expensive, and there isn't enough land to build so much supply to make any dent in prices in the places where people actually want to live.

There aren’t a long of houses on the market in that price range. In the first quarter a little over 2,000 homes were sold at all price ranges. The median price was $650,000. The county has almost 400,000 households. 2,000 sales in a county this populous is nothing. For some reason there’s a group of people who want to close off home ownership and just add rentals. I don’t get it. Home ownership used to be the foundation of opportunity in this county.

There's no space to build SFHs, and if they do get built, they'll cost at least $1.3 million in an area like Silver Spring. Do you think people really want their dream of homeownership to be fulfilled through buying a unit in a fourplex? We need to be realistic that a fourplex unit in, say, Wheaton, is probably not going to meaningfully appreciate in value, and meanwhile people will dump tons of money into the mortgage, property taxes, and HOA fees. The YIMBYs are selling people on financial disaster by pushing this idea that people should live in a newly built shoebox, as opposed to a SFH (which by far has the best appreciation potential).

BTW, there are lots of SFHs on the market up to $600K in price. The fact that there were only 2000 sales in that range is a signal that there isn't even enough demand for the existing houses that are being put on the market. Most people just don't know how to save money, and homeownership (including annual property taxes of $5K or more, plus the unexpected costs like $15K for HVAC or roof replacement) is a bad decision for them. We live in an era of instant gratification where everyone seems to think they deserve a brand new house with their nonprofit salary in their 20s, as opposed to diligently saving money to buy a SFH when they are further along in their careers.

Ever hear of townhouses? Or maybe condos? You think the young lawyers and scientists who live in apartments can’t manage their money? Building only rentals only helps landlords.

Is there really a shortage of townhouses and condos? Redfin shows about 1200 of them for sale right now in MoCo. I'm fine with them, but they have limited appeal.

Yes there is a shortage of townhouses and condos. 1,200 units is less than 1 percent of the total housing stock, so it’s really nothing in terms of supply.

A lot of the arguments about why it’s fine to limit home ownership opportunities sound pretty paternalistic and not unlike those used to perpetuate some horrid economic systems.

What is the ideal supply? And if people can't afford what's already on the market, why would they be able to afford something brand new? There are plenty of townhouses in good condition for $350K with low HOA fees. I genuinely don't understand why this supply is inadequate. Your talk about "paternalism" is classic developer gaslighting, so let's try to stick to the facts.

Some people who are looking to move out of apartments can afford the low seven-figure townhouses if not more. They work at law firms, lobbying firms, and other high-paying jobs. Even a couple of GS-13s could easily afford $6,000 in monthly housing costs.

A lot of the paternalistic talk comes from developers now because they’d rather build rentals than houses for sale, and they justify that decision by claiming their tenants aren’t smart enough to own houses.