Who do you think will win MoCo county exec?

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:Observation: This thread is almost entirely focused on the YIMBY/NIMBY debate. I'm sure DCUM is not a representative sample, but it surprises me that there aren't a lot of other issues that come up in making this decision....

It’s so important for me because it signals what a person prioritizes. I think YIMBYs will send us down a path where we attract moochers. There is enough housing as is in Moco (including enough affordable housing) and we don’t need to be attracting and housing every low income person in the DMV. As a PP indicated, Moco has the most affordable housing by far in this area (and you get great schools also), and people who claim otherwise are ignoring reality. Just check Redfin and Zillow and you can see this for yourself (keeping in mind that the median HHI in Moco is $170k).

The goal should be jobs and economic development, and only when that happens should we discuss building more housing. Anyone who is a YIMBY fails to understand this basic concept.

If this happens, developers will race in to build more housing. Housing follows jobs, not the other way around.

That's the way it should work. But in Moco, the government distorts things by giving tax breaks and handouts to developers, and by providing incentives to moochers to live here, and so the housing gets build without the jobs to support it.

Actually it doesn’t. There’s been almost no growth in the housing stock since Doug Duncan was executive. These handouts just bumped up profits for the developers who got them.

Do we live in the same Moco? I frequent DTSS and downtown Bethesda, and there's been an explosion of new apartment buildings everywhere. And for more upscale, there have been higher-end multifamily projects in Potomac, Bethesda, and Strathmore. And that's just what comes to mind from the past several years.

DP here

PP is throwing sh&t at the wall to see what sticks. Obviously, there has been a lot of housing construction in MoCo over the last several years.

Obviously, you haven’t looked at the data. In 2020 there were about 404,000 housing units in the county. In 2025, there were about 408,000. That’s less than a 1,000 units a year. These big apartment buildings don’t have that many units and the landlords had some of these buildings partially reclassified as hotels so that they could put some units on the short-term rental market and avoid creating a supply glut in the regular rental market.

Yet the YIMBYs want more of the same policies that resulted in this very slow growth and outright market manipulation by landlords so that they could delay rent decreases (which have now happened).

Sounds like you are using data from the American Community Survey to track housing construction. Nobody serious uses that data for that.

Show me some more reliable numbers then. The county does a poor job tracking this, even though adding supply is supposedly the main goal of all these giveaways. You would think the people who championed the giveaways would do a better job of measuring their programs against their stated goals, or maybe their goals are different from their stated goals and these policies’ advocates measure their success in campaign donations instead of units built.

The ACS is still better than “I saw some bulldozers and a crane.” Regardless of which dataset you use, growth is still very slow.

At some point the YIMBYs need to explain why their approach hasn’t worked here or prove that it has. We’ve given full tax abatements to apartments at metro stations for more than five years. About 400 units have been added (all at just one station) as a result. We’ve cut impact taxes for apartments several times in the past six years. Little development occurred as a result. The burden is on those who advocated these policies to show ROI. Not bothering to measure ROI doesn’t cut it.

https://hit.housingand.org/jurisdictions/montgomery

18,000 units from 2019 to 2025 years is about 3,000 a year. That’s less than 1 percent annual growth. You think that’s good? What happened to rents and sale prices from 2019-2024? If the county exceeded its production targets as your link says, rents and sale prices must have dropped a lot based on what the YIMBYs promised.

Feel free to share a link to where "YIMBY's'" said prices and rents would go down if they exceeded their production targets. Like an actual quote with a reference.

Dude, the whole premise of all these policies is that more housing will be built and prices will go down. Andrew Friedson himself made these claims. So has Planning. Did rents and prices drop or not? People supported these policies because they wanted some economic relief. Did you deliver relief or not? If not, when will it work or how much more time should we keep doing this before we try something else?

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Observation: This thread is almost entirely focused on the YIMBY/NIMBY debate. I'm sure DCUM is not a representative sample, but it surprises me that there aren't a lot of other issues that come up in making this decision....

It’s so important for me because it signals what a person prioritizes. I think YIMBYs will send us down a path where we attract moochers. There is enough housing as is in Moco (including enough affordable housing) and we don’t need to be attracting and housing every low income person in the DMV. As a PP indicated, Moco has the most affordable housing by far in this area (and you get great schools also), and people who claim otherwise are ignoring reality. Just check Redfin and Zillow and you can see this for yourself (keeping in mind that the median HHI in Moco is $170k).

The goal should be jobs and economic development, and only when that happens should we discuss building more housing. Anyone who is a YIMBY fails to understand this basic concept.

If this happens, developers will race in to build more housing. Housing follows jobs, not the other way around.

That's the way it should work. But in Moco, the government distorts things by giving tax breaks and handouts to developers, and by providing incentives to moochers to live here, and so the housing gets build without the jobs to support it.

Actually it doesn’t. There’s been almost no growth in the housing stock since Doug Duncan was executive. These handouts just bumped up profits for the developers who got them.

Do we live in the same Moco? I frequent DTSS and downtown Bethesda, and there's been an explosion of new apartment buildings everywhere. And for more upscale, there have been higher-end multifamily projects in Potomac, Bethesda, and Strathmore. And that's just what comes to mind from the past several years.

DP here

PP is throwing sh&t at the wall to see what sticks. Obviously, there has been a lot of housing construction in MoCo over the last several years.

Obviously, you haven’t looked at the data. In 2020 there were about 404,000 housing units in the county. In 2025, there were about 408,000. That’s less than a 1,000 units a year. These big apartment buildings don’t have that many units and the landlords had some of these buildings partially reclassified as hotels so that they could put some units on the short-term rental market and avoid creating a supply glut in the regular rental market.

Yet the YIMBYs want more of the same policies that resulted in this very slow growth and outright market manipulation by landlords so that they could delay rent decreases (which have now happened).

Sounds like you are using data from the American Community Survey to track housing construction. Nobody serious uses that data for that.

Show me some more reliable numbers then. The county does a poor job tracking this, even though adding supply is supposedly the main goal of all these giveaways. You would think the people who championed the giveaways would do a better job of measuring their programs against their stated goals, or maybe their goals are different from their stated goals and these policies’ advocates measure their success in campaign donations instead of units built.

The ACS is still better than “I saw some bulldozers and a crane.” Regardless of which dataset you use, growth is still very slow.

At some point the YIMBYs need to explain why their approach hasn’t worked here or prove that it has. We’ve given full tax abatements to apartments at metro stations for more than five years. About 400 units have been added (all at just one station) as a result. We’ve cut impact taxes for apartments several times in the past six years. Little development occurred as a result. The burden is on those who advocated these policies to show ROI. Not bothering to measure ROI doesn’t cut it.

https://hit.housingand.org/jurisdictions/montgomery

18,000 units from 2019 to 2025 years is about 3,000 a year. That’s less than 1 percent annual growth. You think that’s good? What happened to rents and sale prices from 2019-2024? If the county exceeded its production targets as your link says, rents and sale prices must have dropped a lot based on what the YIMBYs promised.

1% per year seems really good to me. Is there some sort of benchmark that leads you to conclude that it’s bad?

We were adding about 1 percent a year before the big subsidies for market rate housing, which we did because YIMBYs said we weren’t adding enough housing. If 1 percent a year is really good, and product hasn’t increased, maybe we should stop doing the subsidies for market rate housing.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Observation: This thread is almost entirely focused on the YIMBY/NIMBY debate. I'm sure DCUM is not a representative sample, but it surprises me that there aren't a lot of other issues that come up in making this decision....

It’s so important for me because it signals what a person prioritizes. I think YIMBYs will send us down a path where we attract moochers. There is enough housing as is in Moco (including enough affordable housing) and we don’t need to be attracting and housing every low income person in the DMV. As a PP indicated, Moco has the most affordable housing by far in this area (and you get great schools also), and people who claim otherwise are ignoring reality. Just check Redfin and Zillow and you can see this for yourself (keeping in mind that the median HHI in Moco is $170k).

The goal should be jobs and economic development, and only when that happens should we discuss building more housing. Anyone who is a YIMBY fails to understand this basic concept.

If this happens, developers will race in to build more housing. Housing follows jobs, not the other way around.

That's the way it should work. But in Moco, the government distorts things by giving tax breaks and handouts to developers, and by providing incentives to moochers to live here, and so the housing gets build without the jobs to support it.

Actually it doesn’t. There’s been almost no growth in the housing stock since Doug Duncan was executive. These handouts just bumped up profits for the developers who got them.

Do we live in the same Moco? I frequent DTSS and downtown Bethesda, and there's been an explosion of new apartment buildings everywhere. And for more upscale, there have been higher-end multifamily projects in Potomac, Bethesda, and Strathmore. And that's just what comes to mind from the past several years.

DP here

PP is throwing sh&t at the wall to see what sticks. Obviously, there has been a lot of housing construction in MoCo over the last several years.

Obviously, you haven’t looked at the data. In 2020 there were about 404,000 housing units in the county. In 2025, there were about 408,000. That’s less than a 1,000 units a year. These big apartment buildings don’t have that many units and the landlords had some of these buildings partially reclassified as hotels so that they could put some units on the short-term rental market and avoid creating a supply glut in the regular rental market.

Yet the YIMBYs want more of the same policies that resulted in this very slow growth and outright market manipulation by landlords so that they could delay rent decreases (which have now happened).

Sounds like you are using data from the American Community Survey to track housing construction. Nobody serious uses that data for that.

Show me some more reliable numbers then. The county does a poor job tracking this, even though adding supply is supposedly the main goal of all these giveaways. You would think the people who championed the giveaways would do a better job of measuring their programs against their stated goals, or maybe their goals are different from their stated goals and these policies’ advocates measure their success in campaign donations instead of units built.

The ACS is still better than “I saw some bulldozers and a crane.” Regardless of which dataset you use, growth is still very slow.

At some point the YIMBYs need to explain why their approach hasn’t worked here or prove that it has. We’ve given full tax abatements to apartments at metro stations for more than five years. About 400 units have been added (all at just one station) as a result. We’ve cut impact taxes for apartments several times in the past six years. Little development occurred as a result. The burden is on those who advocated these policies to show ROI. Not bothering to measure ROI doesn’t cut it.

https://hit.housingand.org/jurisdictions/montgomery

18,000 units from 2019 to 2025 years is about 3,000 a year. That’s less than 1 percent annual growth. You think that’s good? What happened to rents and sale prices from 2019-2024? If the county exceeded its production targets as your link says, rents and sale prices must have dropped a lot based on what the YIMBYs promised.

1% per year seems really good to me. Is there some sort of benchmark that leads you to conclude that it’s bad?

We were adding about 1 percent a year before the big subsidies for market rate housing, which we did because YIMBYs said we weren’t adding enough housing. If 1 percent a year is really good, and product hasn’t increased, maybe we should stop doing the subsidies for market rate housing.

Which big subsidies for market rate housing?

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Observation: This thread is almost entirely focused on the YIMBY/NIMBY debate. I'm sure DCUM is not a representative sample, but it surprises me that there aren't a lot of other issues that come up in making this decision....

It’s so important for me because it signals what a person prioritizes. I think YIMBYs will send us down a path where we attract moochers. There is enough housing as is in Moco (including enough affordable housing) and we don’t need to be attracting and housing every low income person in the DMV. As a PP indicated, Moco has the most affordable housing by far in this area (and you get great schools also), and people who claim otherwise are ignoring reality. Just check Redfin and Zillow and you can see this for yourself (keeping in mind that the median HHI in Moco is $170k).

The goal should be jobs and economic development, and only when that happens should we discuss building more housing. Anyone who is a YIMBY fails to understand this basic concept.

If this happens, developers will race in to build more housing. Housing follows jobs, not the other way around.

That's the way it should work. But in Moco, the government distorts things by giving tax breaks and handouts to developers, and by providing incentives to moochers to live here, and so the housing gets build without the jobs to support it.

Actually it doesn’t. There’s been almost no growth in the housing stock since Doug Duncan was executive. These handouts just bumped up profits for the developers who got them.

Do we live in the same Moco? I frequent DTSS and downtown Bethesda, and there's been an explosion of new apartment buildings everywhere. And for more upscale, there have been higher-end multifamily projects in Potomac, Bethesda, and Strathmore. And that's just what comes to mind from the past several years.

DP here

PP is throwing sh&t at the wall to see what sticks. Obviously, there has been a lot of housing construction in MoCo over the last several years.

Obviously, you haven’t looked at the data. In 2020 there were about 404,000 housing units in the county. In 2025, there were about 408,000. That’s less than a 1,000 units a year. These big apartment buildings don’t have that many units and the landlords had some of these buildings partially reclassified as hotels so that they could put some units on the short-term rental market and avoid creating a supply glut in the regular rental market.

Yet the YIMBYs want more of the same policies that resulted in this very slow growth and outright market manipulation by landlords so that they could delay rent decreases (which have now happened).

Sounds like you are using data from the American Community Survey to track housing construction. Nobody serious uses that data for that.

Show me some more reliable numbers then. The county does a poor job tracking this, even though adding supply is supposedly the main goal of all these giveaways. You would think the people who championed the giveaways would do a better job of measuring their programs against their stated goals, or maybe their goals are different from their stated goals and these policies’ advocates measure their success in campaign donations instead of units built.

The ACS is still better than “I saw some bulldozers and a crane.” Regardless of which dataset you use, growth is still very slow.

At some point the YIMBYs need to explain why their approach hasn’t worked here or prove that it has. We’ve given full tax abatements to apartments at metro stations for more than five years. About 400 units have been added (all at just one station) as a result. We’ve cut impact taxes for apartments several times in the past six years. Little development occurred as a result. The burden is on those who advocated these policies to show ROI. Not bothering to measure ROI doesn’t cut it.

https://hit.housingand.org/jurisdictions/montgomery

18,000 units from 2019 to 2025 years is about 3,000 a year. That’s less than 1 percent annual growth. You think that’s good? What happened to rents and sale prices from 2019-2024? If the county exceeded its production targets as your link says, rents and sale prices must have dropped a lot based on what the YIMBYs promised.

1% per year seems really good to me. Is there some sort of benchmark that leads you to conclude that it’s bad?

We were adding about 1 percent a year before the big subsidies for market rate housing, which we did because YIMBYs said we weren’t adding enough housing. If 1 percent a year is really good, and product hasn’t increased, maybe we should stop doing the subsidies for market rate housing.

Which big subsidies for market rate housing?

Friedson’s 100 percent tax abatements and impact fee cuts for starters. They didn’t seem to generate much housing but they have generated a lot of donations to his campaign, so maybe they’re still a win for him?

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Observation: This thread is almost entirely focused on the YIMBY/NIMBY debate. I'm sure DCUM is not a representative sample, but it surprises me that there aren't a lot of other issues that come up in making this decision....

It’s so important for me because it signals what a person prioritizes. I think YIMBYs will send us down a path where we attract moochers. There is enough housing as is in Moco (including enough affordable housing) and we don’t need to be attracting and housing every low income person in the DMV. As a PP indicated, Moco has the most affordable housing by far in this area (and you get great schools also), and people who claim otherwise are ignoring reality. Just check Redfin and Zillow and you can see this for yourself (keeping in mind that the median HHI in Moco is $170k).

The goal should be jobs and economic development, and only when that happens should we discuss building more housing. Anyone who is a YIMBY fails to understand this basic concept.

If this happens, developers will race in to build more housing. Housing follows jobs, not the other way around.

That's the way it should work. But in Moco, the government distorts things by giving tax breaks and handouts to developers, and by providing incentives to moochers to live here, and so the housing gets build without the jobs to support it.

Actually it doesn’t. There’s been almost no growth in the housing stock since Doug Duncan was executive. These handouts just bumped up profits for the developers who got them.

Do we live in the same Moco? I frequent DTSS and downtown Bethesda, and there's been an explosion of new apartment buildings everywhere. And for more upscale, there have been higher-end multifamily projects in Potomac, Bethesda, and Strathmore. And that's just what comes to mind from the past several years.

DP here

PP is throwing sh&t at the wall to see what sticks. Obviously, there has been a lot of housing construction in MoCo over the last several years.

Obviously, you haven’t looked at the data. In 2020 there were about 404,000 housing units in the county. In 2025, there were about 408,000. That’s less than a 1,000 units a year. These big apartment buildings don’t have that many units and the landlords had some of these buildings partially reclassified as hotels so that they could put some units on the short-term rental market and avoid creating a supply glut in the regular rental market.

Yet the YIMBYs want more of the same policies that resulted in this very slow growth and outright market manipulation by landlords so that they could delay rent decreases (which have now happened).

Sounds like you are using data from the American Community Survey to track housing construction. Nobody serious uses that data for that.

Show me some more reliable numbers then. The county does a poor job tracking this, even though adding supply is supposedly the main goal of all these giveaways. You would think the people who championed the giveaways would do a better job of measuring their programs against their stated goals, or maybe their goals are different from their stated goals and these policies’ advocates measure their success in campaign donations instead of units built.

The ACS is still better than “I saw some bulldozers and a crane.” Regardless of which dataset you use, growth is still very slow.

At some point the YIMBYs need to explain why their approach hasn’t worked here or prove that it has. We’ve given full tax abatements to apartments at metro stations for more than five years. About 400 units have been added (all at just one station) as a result. We’ve cut impact taxes for apartments several times in the past six years. Little development occurred as a result. The burden is on those who advocated these policies to show ROI. Not bothering to measure ROI doesn’t cut it.

https://hit.housingand.org/jurisdictions/montgomery

18,000 units from 2019 to 2025 years is about 3,000 a year. That’s less than 1 percent annual growth. You think that’s good? What happened to rents and sale prices from 2019-2024? If the county exceeded its production targets as your link says, rents and sale prices must have dropped a lot based on what the YIMBYs promised.

1% per year seems really good to me. Is there some sort of benchmark that leads you to conclude that it’s bad?

We were adding about 1 percent a year before the big subsidies for market rate housing, which we did because YIMBYs said we weren’t adding enough housing. If 1 percent a year is really good, and product hasn’t increased, maybe we should stop doing the subsidies for market rate housing.

Which big subsidies for market rate housing?

Friedson’s 100 percent tax abatements and impact fee cuts for starters. They didn’t seem to generate much housing but they have generated a lot of donations to his campaign, so maybe they’re still a win for him?

The tax abatements that have actually been used so far are all for projects with large percentages of affordable units

[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:Observation: This thread is almost entirely focused on the YIMBY/NIMBY debate. I'm sure DCUM is not a representative sample, but it surprises me that there aren't a lot of other issues that come up in making this decision....

It’s so important for me because it signals what a person prioritizes. I think YIMBYs will send us down a path where we attract moochers. There is enough housing as is in Moco (including enough affordable housing) and we don’t need to be attracting and housing every low income person in the DMV. As a PP indicated, Moco has the most affordable housing by far in this area (and you get great schools also), and people who claim otherwise are ignoring reality. Just check Redfin and Zillow and you can see this for yourself (keeping in mind that the median HHI in Moco is $170k).

The goal should be jobs and economic development, and only when that happens should we discuss building more housing. Anyone who is a YIMBY fails to understand this basic concept.

If this happens, developers will race in to build more housing. Housing follows jobs, not the other way around.

That's the way it should work. But in Moco, the government distorts things by giving tax breaks and handouts to developers, and by providing incentives to moochers to live here, and so the housing gets build without the jobs to support it.

Actually it doesn’t. There’s been almost no growth in the housing stock since Doug Duncan was executive. These handouts just bumped up profits for the developers who got them.

Do we live in the same Moco? I frequent DTSS and downtown Bethesda, and there's been an explosion of new apartment buildings everywhere. And for more upscale, there have been higher-end multifamily projects in Potomac, Bethesda, and Strathmore. And that's just what comes to mind from the past several years.

DP here

PP is throwing sh&t at the wall to see what sticks. Obviously, there has been a lot of housing construction in MoCo over the last several years.

Obviously, you haven’t looked at the data. In 2020 there were about 404,000 housing units in the county. In 2025, there were about 408,000. That’s less than a 1,000 units a year. These big apartment buildings don’t have that many units and the landlords had some of these buildings partially reclassified as hotels so that they could put some units on the short-term rental market and avoid creating a supply glut in the regular rental market.

Yet the YIMBYs want more of the same policies that resulted in this very slow growth and outright market manipulation by landlords so that they could delay rent decreases (which have now happened).

Sounds like you are using data from the American Community Survey to track housing construction. Nobody serious uses that data for that.

Show me some more reliable numbers then. The county does a poor job tracking this, even though adding supply is supposedly the main goal of all these giveaways. You would think the people who championed the giveaways would do a better job of measuring their programs against their stated goals, or maybe their goals are different from their stated goals and these policies’ advocates measure their success in campaign donations instead of units built.

The ACS is still better than “I saw some bulldozers and a crane.” Regardless of which dataset you use, growth is still very slow.

At some point the YIMBYs need to explain why their approach hasn’t worked here or prove that it has. We’ve given full tax abatements to apartments at metro stations for more than five years. About 400 units have been added (all at just one station) as a result. We’ve cut impact taxes for apartments several times in the past six years. Little development occurred as a result. The burden is on those who advocated these policies to show ROI. Not bothering to measure ROI doesn’t cut it.

https://hit.housingand.org/jurisdictions/montgomery

18,000 units from 2019 to 2025 years is about 3,000 a year. That’s less than 1 percent annual growth. You think that’s good? What happened to rents and sale prices from 2019-2024? If the county exceeded its production targets as your link says, rents and sale prices must have dropped a lot based on what the YIMBYs promised.

1% per year seems really good to me. Is there some sort of benchmark that leads you to conclude that it’s bad?

I looked up Arlington, and they average 700-1000 new units per year in an inventory of 125k. So also below 1%. Why should Montgomery county be adding more units than Arlington when Arlington has more economic development?

NP here. And I'll start by saying I haven't read too much of this thread.

But I will say that Arlington County is MUCH smaller geographically than MoCo. There is open land in MoCo. I lived in Arlington in the mid-1990s and land was at a premium then.

[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:Observation: This thread is almost entirely focused on the YIMBY/NIMBY debate. I'm sure DCUM is not a representative sample, but it surprises me that there aren't a lot of other issues that come up in making this decision....

It’s so important for me because it signals what a person prioritizes. I think YIMBYs will send us down a path where we attract moochers. There is enough housing as is in Moco (including enough affordable housing) and we don’t need to be attracting and housing every low income person in the DMV. As a PP indicated, Moco has the most affordable housing by far in this area (and you get great schools also), and people who claim otherwise are ignoring reality. Just check Redfin and Zillow and you can see this for yourself (keeping in mind that the median HHI in Moco is $170k).

The goal should be jobs and economic development, and only when that happens should we discuss building more housing. Anyone who is a YIMBY fails to understand this basic concept.

If this happens, developers will race in to build more housing. Housing follows jobs, not the other way around.

That's the way it should work. But in Moco, the government distorts things by giving tax breaks and handouts to developers, and by providing incentives to moochers to live here, and so the housing gets build without the jobs to support it.

Actually it doesn’t. There’s been almost no growth in the housing stock since Doug Duncan was executive. These handouts just bumped up profits for the developers who got them.

Do we live in the same Moco? I frequent DTSS and downtown Bethesda, and there's been an explosion of new apartment buildings everywhere. And for more upscale, there have been higher-end multifamily projects in Potomac, Bethesda, and Strathmore. And that's just what comes to mind from the past several years.

DP here

PP is throwing sh&t at the wall to see what sticks. Obviously, there has been a lot of housing construction in MoCo over the last several years.

Obviously, you haven’t looked at the data. In 2020 there were about 404,000 housing units in the county. In 2025, there were about 408,000. That’s less than a 1,000 units a year. These big apartment buildings don’t have that many units and the landlords had some of these buildings partially reclassified as hotels so that they could put some units on the short-term rental market and avoid creating a supply glut in the regular rental market.

Yet the YIMBYs want more of the same policies that resulted in this very slow growth and outright market manipulation by landlords so that they could delay rent decreases (which have now happened).

Sounds like you are using data from the American Community Survey to track housing construction. Nobody serious uses that data for that.

Show me some more reliable numbers then. The county does a poor job tracking this, even though adding supply is supposedly the main goal of all these giveaways. You would think the people who championed the giveaways would do a better job of measuring their programs against their stated goals, or maybe their goals are different from their stated goals and these policies’ advocates measure their success in campaign donations instead of units built.

The ACS is still better than “I saw some bulldozers and a crane.” Regardless of which dataset you use, growth is still very slow.

At some point the YIMBYs need to explain why their approach hasn’t worked here or prove that it has. We’ve given full tax abatements to apartments at metro stations for more than five years. About 400 units have been added (all at just one station) as a result. We’ve cut impact taxes for apartments several times in the past six years. Little development occurred as a result. The burden is on those who advocated these policies to show ROI. Not bothering to measure ROI doesn’t cut it.

https://hit.housingand.org/jurisdictions/montgomery

18,000 units from 2019 to 2025 years is about 3,000 a year. That’s less than 1 percent annual growth. You think that’s good? What happened to rents and sale prices from 2019-2024? If the county exceeded its production targets as your link says, rents and sale prices must have dropped a lot based on what the YIMBYs promised.

1% per year seems really good to me. Is there some sort of benchmark that leads you to conclude that it’s bad?

I looked up Arlington, and they average 700-1000 new units per year in an inventory of 125k. So also below 1%. Why should Montgomery county be adding more units than Arlington when Arlington has more economic development?

NP here. And I'll start by saying I haven't read too much of this thread.

But I will say that Arlington County is MUCH smaller geographically than MoCo. There is open land in MoCo. I lived in Arlington in the mid-1990s and land was at a premium then.

I mean one thing that is clear is that MoCo isn't growing economically. Arlington is. That is a huge issue and Elrich hasn't helped much. It's one of the big reasons I won't be voting for Jawando since he is courting the same constituents and therefore will take a similar approach.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:Observation: This thread is almost entirely focused on the YIMBY/NIMBY debate. I'm sure DCUM is not a representative sample, but it surprises me that there aren't a lot of other issues that come up in making this decision....

It’s so important for me because it signals what a person prioritizes. I think YIMBYs will send us down a path where we attract moochers. There is enough housing as is in Moco (including enough affordable housing) and we don’t need to be attracting and housing every low income person in the DMV. As a PP indicated, Moco has the most affordable housing by far in this area (and you get great schools also), and people who claim otherwise are ignoring reality. Just check Redfin and Zillow and you can see this for yourself (keeping in mind that the median HHI in Moco is $170k).

The goal should be jobs and economic development, and only when that happens should we discuss building more housing. Anyone who is a YIMBY fails to understand this basic concept.

If this happens, developers will race in to build more housing. Housing follows jobs, not the other way around.

That's the way it should work. But in Moco, the government distorts things by giving tax breaks and handouts to developers, and by providing incentives to moochers to live here, and so the housing gets build without the jobs to support it.

Actually it doesn’t. There’s been almost no growth in the housing stock since Doug Duncan was executive. These handouts just bumped up profits for the developers who got them.

Do we live in the same Moco? I frequent DTSS and downtown Bethesda, and there's been an explosion of new apartment buildings everywhere. And for more upscale, there have been higher-end multifamily projects in Potomac, Bethesda, and Strathmore. And that's just what comes to mind from the past several years.

DP here

PP is throwing sh&t at the wall to see what sticks. Obviously, there has been a lot of housing construction in MoCo over the last several years.

Obviously, you haven’t looked at the data. In 2020 there were about 404,000 housing units in the county. In 2025, there were about 408,000. That’s less than a 1,000 units a year. These big apartment buildings don’t have that many units and the landlords had some of these buildings partially reclassified as hotels so that they could put some units on the short-term rental market and avoid creating a supply glut in the regular rental market.

Yet the YIMBYs want more of the same policies that resulted in this very slow growth and outright market manipulation by landlords so that they could delay rent decreases (which have now happened).

Sounds like you are using data from the American Community Survey to track housing construction. Nobody serious uses that data for that.

Show me some more reliable numbers then. The county does a poor job tracking this, even though adding supply is supposedly the main goal of all these giveaways. You would think the people who championed the giveaways would do a better job of measuring their programs against their stated goals, or maybe their goals are different from their stated goals and these policies’ advocates measure their success in campaign donations instead of units built.

The ACS is still better than “I saw some bulldozers and a crane.” Regardless of which dataset you use, growth is still very slow.

At some point the YIMBYs need to explain why their approach hasn’t worked here or prove that it has. We’ve given full tax abatements to apartments at metro stations for more than five years. About 400 units have been added (all at just one station) as a result. We’ve cut impact taxes for apartments several times in the past six years. Little development occurred as a result. The burden is on those who advocated these policies to show ROI. Not bothering to measure ROI doesn’t cut it.

https://hit.housingand.org/jurisdictions/montgomery

18,000 units from 2019 to 2025 years is about 3,000 a year. That’s less than 1 percent annual growth. You think that’s good? What happened to rents and sale prices from 2019-2024? If the county exceeded its production targets as your link says, rents and sale prices must have dropped a lot based on what the YIMBYs promised.

Feel free to share a link to where "YIMBY's'" said prices and rents would go down if they exceeded their production targets. Like an actual quote with a reference.

So, the one poorly thought out thing that they hang their hats on isn’t true?

Color me shocked.

[Anonymous]

Looks like the real estate developer super PAC attack ads are winning.

https://montgomeryperspective.com/2026/06/04/affordable-maryland-pac-claims-anti-jawando-tv-ads-are-working/?fbclid=IwdGRjcASOsOFleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZAo2NjI4NTY4Mzc5AAEeRcj5GKGGS-bsNYlwD3XQQyinCaO0DIeiN2CfJvLolaI82NXwmyotJfjaDuI_aem_3QHA433nmR7MlEFFfRqDdw

I’m sure that data center super PACs will be next. How fun for our county.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Observation: This thread is almost entirely focused on the YIMBY/NIMBY debate. I'm sure DCUM is not a representative sample, but it surprises me that there aren't a lot of other issues that come up in making this decision....

It’s so important for me because it signals what a person prioritizes. I think YIMBYs will send us down a path where we attract moochers. There is enough housing as is in Moco (including enough affordable housing) and we don’t need to be attracting and housing every low income person in the DMV. As a PP indicated, Moco has the most affordable housing by far in this area (and you get great schools also), and people who claim otherwise are ignoring reality. Just check Redfin and Zillow and you can see this for yourself (keeping in mind that the median HHI in Moco is $170k).

The goal should be jobs and economic development, and only when that happens should we discuss building more housing. Anyone who is a YIMBY fails to understand this basic concept.

If this happens, developers will race in to build more housing. Housing follows jobs, not the other way around.

That's the way it should work. But in Moco, the government distorts things by giving tax breaks and handouts to developers, and by providing incentives to moochers to live here, and so the housing gets build without the jobs to support it.

Actually it doesn’t. There’s been almost no growth in the housing stock since Doug Duncan was executive. These handouts just bumped up profits for the developers who got them.

Do we live in the same Moco? I frequent DTSS and downtown Bethesda, and there's been an explosion of new apartment buildings everywhere. And for more upscale, there have been higher-end multifamily projects in Potomac, Bethesda, and Strathmore. And that's just what comes to mind from the past several years.

DP here

PP is throwing sh&t at the wall to see what sticks. Obviously, there has been a lot of housing construction in MoCo over the last several years.

Obviously, you haven’t looked at the data. In 2020 there were about 404,000 housing units in the county. In 2025, there were about 408,000. That’s less than a 1,000 units a year. These big apartment buildings don’t have that many units and the landlords had some of these buildings partially reclassified as hotels so that they could put some units on the short-term rental market and avoid creating a supply glut in the regular rental market.

Yet the YIMBYs want more of the same policies that resulted in this very slow growth and outright market manipulation by landlords so that they could delay rent decreases (which have now happened).

Sounds like you are using data from the American Community Survey to track housing construction. Nobody serious uses that data for that.

Show me some more reliable numbers then. The county does a poor job tracking this, even though adding supply is supposedly the main goal of all these giveaways. You would think the people who championed the giveaways would do a better job of measuring their programs against their stated goals, or maybe their goals are different from their stated goals and these policies’ advocates measure their success in campaign donations instead of units built.

The ACS is still better than “I saw some bulldozers and a crane.” Regardless of which dataset you use, growth is still very slow.

At some point the YIMBYs need to explain why their approach hasn’t worked here or prove that it has. We’ve given full tax abatements to apartments at metro stations for more than five years. About 400 units have been added (all at just one station) as a result. We’ve cut impact taxes for apartments several times in the past six years. Little development occurred as a result. The burden is on those who advocated these policies to show ROI. Not bothering to measure ROI doesn’t cut it.

https://hit.housingand.org/jurisdictions/montgomery

18,000 units from 2019 to 2025 years is about 3,000 a year. That’s less than 1 percent annual growth. You think that’s good? What happened to rents and sale prices from 2019-2024? If the county exceeded its production targets as your link says, rents and sale prices must have dropped a lot based on what the YIMBYs promised.

1% per year seems really good to me. Is there some sort of benchmark that leads you to conclude that it’s bad?

We were adding about 1 percent a year before the big subsidies for market rate housing, which we did because YIMBYs said we weren’t adding enough housing. If 1 percent a year is really good, and product hasn’t increased, maybe we should stop doing the subsidies for market rate housing.

Which big subsidies for market rate housing?

Friedson’s 100 percent tax abatements and impact fee cuts for starters. They didn’t seem to generate much housing but they have generated a lot of donations to his campaign, so maybe they’re still a win for him?

The tax abatements that have actually been used so far are all for projects with large percentages of affordable units

Wrong. High rises at metro had the standard 15 percent. But the developer gave the max to Friedson so I guess that’s a win, right?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Looks like the real estate developer super PAC attack ads are winning.

https://montgomeryperspective.com/2026/06/04/affordable-maryland-pac-claims-anti-jawando-tv-ads-are-working/?fbclid=IwdGRjcASOsOFleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZAo2NjI4NTY4Mzc5AAEeRcj5GKGGS-bsNYlwD3XQQyinCaO0DIeiN2CfJvLolaI82NXwmyotJfjaDuI_aem_3QHA433nmR7MlEFFfRqDdw

I’m sure that data center super PACs will be next. How fun for our county.

Gross. That’s not the place that I thought we were.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Looks like the real estate developer super PAC attack ads are winning.

https://montgomeryperspective.com/2026/06/04/affordable-maryland-pac-claims-anti-jawando-tv-ads-are-working/?fbclid=IwdGRjcASOsOFleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZAo2NjI4NTY4Mzc5AAEeRcj5GKGGS-bsNYlwD3XQQyinCaO0DIeiN2CfJvLolaI82NXwmyotJfjaDuI_aem_3QHA433nmR7MlEFFfRqDdw

I’m sure that data center super PACs will be next. How fun for our county.

Gross. That’s not the place that I thought we were.

Those ads are extremely dumb and deceptive but it is not surprising to me at all that they are working - voters here are really not knowledgeable about local politics or the basic structure of how the council and the school system work and what they each have authority over.

- Friedson supporter

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Looks like the real estate developer super PAC attack ads are winning.

https://montgomeryperspective.com/2026/06/04/affordable-maryland-pac-claims-anti-jawando-tv-ads-are-working/?fbclid=IwdGRjcASOsOFleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZAo2NjI4NTY4Mzc5AAEeRcj5GKGGS-bsNYlwD3XQQyinCaO0DIeiN2CfJvLolaI82NXwmyotJfjaDuI_aem_3QHA433nmR7MlEFFfRqDdw

I’m sure that data center super PACs will be next. How fun for our county.

Gross. That’s not the place that I thought we were.

Those ads are extremely dumb and deceptive but it is not surprising to me at all that they are working - voters here are really not knowledgeable about local politics or the basic structure of how the council and the school system work and what they each have authority over.

- Friedson supporter

I wasn’t in this for anyone but I just donated to Jawando after reading the memo.

[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:Observation: This thread is almost entirely focused on the YIMBY/NIMBY debate. I'm sure DCUM is not a representative sample, but it surprises me that there aren't a lot of other issues that come up in making this decision....

It’s so important for me because it signals what a person prioritizes. I think YIMBYs will send us down a path where we attract moochers. There is enough housing as is in Moco (including enough affordable housing) and we don’t need to be attracting and housing every low income person in the DMV. As a PP indicated, Moco has the most affordable housing by far in this area (and you get great schools also), and people who claim otherwise are ignoring reality. Just check Redfin and Zillow and you can see this for yourself (keeping in mind that the median HHI in Moco is $170k).

The goal should be jobs and economic development, and only when that happens should we discuss building more housing. Anyone who is a YIMBY fails to understand this basic concept.

If this happens, developers will race in to build more housing. Housing follows jobs, not the other way around.

That's the way it should work. But in Moco, the government distorts things by giving tax breaks and handouts to developers, and by providing incentives to moochers to live here, and so the housing gets build without the jobs to support it.

Actually it doesn’t. There’s been almost no growth in the housing stock since Doug Duncan was executive. These handouts just bumped up profits for the developers who got them.

Do we live in the same Moco? I frequent DTSS and downtown Bethesda, and there's been an explosion of new apartment buildings everywhere. And for more upscale, there have been higher-end multifamily projects in Potomac, Bethesda, and Strathmore. And that's just what comes to mind from the past several years.

DP here

PP is throwing sh&t at the wall to see what sticks. Obviously, there has been a lot of housing construction in MoCo over the last several years.

Obviously, you haven’t looked at the data. In 2020 there were about 404,000 housing units in the county. In 2025, there were about 408,000. That’s less than a 1,000 units a year. These big apartment buildings don’t have that many units and the landlords had some of these buildings partially reclassified as hotels so that they could put some units on the short-term rental market and avoid creating a supply glut in the regular rental market.

Yet the YIMBYs want more of the same policies that resulted in this very slow growth and outright market manipulation by landlords so that they could delay rent decreases (which have now happened).

Sounds like you are using data from the American Community Survey to track housing construction. Nobody serious uses that data for that.

Show me some more reliable numbers then. The county does a poor job tracking this, even though adding supply is supposedly the main goal of all these giveaways. You would think the people who championed the giveaways would do a better job of measuring their programs against their stated goals, or maybe their goals are different from their stated goals and these policies’ advocates measure their success in campaign donations instead of units built.

The ACS is still better than “I saw some bulldozers and a crane.” Regardless of which dataset you use, growth is still very slow.

At some point the YIMBYs need to explain why their approach hasn’t worked here or prove that it has. We’ve given full tax abatements to apartments at metro stations for more than five years. About 400 units have been added (all at just one station) as a result. We’ve cut impact taxes for apartments several times in the past six years. Little development occurred as a result. The burden is on those who advocated these policies to show ROI. Not bothering to measure ROI doesn’t cut it.

https://hit.housingand.org/jurisdictions/montgomery

18,000 units from 2019 to 2025 years is about 3,000 a year. That’s less than 1 percent annual growth. You think that’s good? What happened to rents and sale prices from 2019-2024? If the county exceeded its production targets as your link says, rents and sale prices must have dropped a lot based on what the YIMBYs promised.

1% per year seems really good to me. Is there some sort of benchmark that leads you to conclude that it’s bad?

I looked up Arlington, and they average 700-1000 new units per year in an inventory of 125k. So also below 1%. Why should Montgomery county be adding more units than Arlington when Arlington has more economic development?

NP here. And I'll start by saying I haven't read too much of this thread.

But I will say that Arlington County is MUCH smaller geographically than MoCo. There is open land in MoCo. I lived in Arlington in the mid-1990s and land was at a premium then.

But we’re doing percentages and the percentages are about the same. Plus when people talk about building more housing in Moco, they’re almost always referring to places like Bethesda and silver spring which are already incredibly overdeveloped, not the far out places that have more buildable land.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Looks like the real estate developer super PAC attack ads are winning.

https://montgomeryperspective.com/2026/06/04/affordable-maryland-pac-claims-anti-jawando-tv-ads-are-working/?fbclid=IwdGRjcASOsOFleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZAo2NjI4NTY4Mzc5AAEeRcj5GKGGS-bsNYlwD3XQQyinCaO0DIeiN2CfJvLolaI82NXwmyotJfjaDuI_aem_3QHA433nmR7MlEFFfRqDdw

I’m sure that data center super PACs will be next. How fun for our county.

Gross. That’s not the place that I thought we were.

Those ads are extremely dumb and deceptive but it is not surprising to me at all that they are working - voters here are really not knowledgeable about local politics or the basic structure of how the council and the school system work and what they each have authority over.

- Friedson supporter

I wasn’t in this for anyone but I just donated to Jawando after reading the memo.

Good idea.