I wouldn’t worry too much. There are plenty of areas not near metro that attract the riff raff. Bethesda is not that interesting esp compared to national harbor, rio center and the wharf.
The purple line may start low on ridership but will grow. I for one will use it to avoid looping thru DC to get from my house to Bethesda. |
What's the problem with the jobs these residents already have? The unemployment rate in MOCO is like 2.7%. |
Most of them leave the county to work in Fairfax or DC. It’s why housing production in MoCo is sluggish and the lack of a business base forces the county to keep raising property tax rates. It also causes horrendous traffic that’s bad for the environment. |
According to various state and federal agencies, the American Legion/Cabin John Bridge will need to be completely replaced within the next 6 years. Maybe, just as Va, DC, and Md planned with the Wilson Bridge rebuild many years ago, the new American Legion Bridge will have room for future high capacity rapid transit of some kind (metro rail, rapid bus, etc.) between Bethesda and Tysons. Metro Rail would be nice, but that will likely have to wait until the high priority Metro Bloop is up and running. |
And they pay income and property taxes in MOCo. I just said there will be apartments along transit.... |
It would be tragic for us if you were in a position to influence decisions, though I fear you might be because this sounds so much like the drivel we get from planning and the council. People are at best a break-even proposition on average. Some pay taxes but they all consume a lot of services, especially if they moved here for the schools. Businesses pay a lot of taxes but consume little in the way of services. It’s hard to make a local government budget work without growing commercial real estate taxes. |
So now the complaint is we need commercial real estate (not jobs). So we go back to the pont already made: we have apartments and commercial real estate being built along purple line stops. |
If the commercial real estate tax base is growing it necessarily means you also have declining office vacancies, more office construction, and more jobs. We have apartments (the worst kind of development for the tax base because they’re under-assessed and usually cash flow negative from the government’s perspective) but not much commercial office because the business environment is terrible in MoCo. The point you’re missing is that the Purple Line is very unlikely to result in job growth because of other factors suppressing job growth along the Purple Line, so we will never realize the value of the investment. The lack of job growth will also cause housing production to underperform and hurt government revenue, eventually resulting in a reduction in services. |
DP. Isn’t a new technology park with lots of future jobs planned for the Purple Line stops just east of the UMD campus? And I think PG County is positioning New Carrollton as a center for high income jobs, i.e., offices and supporting infrastructure. But what’s with the old Discovery Media HQ building in Silver Spring? Is it now part of Children’s Hospital? I was hoping some other HQ would relocate there. |
It's going to be tough to sell growth to someone that doesn't want the county to grow. |
It's a job that pays a lot more than $7.25 an hour. |
The parking lot at silver spring metro would like a word. And so would Hogan’s 495 expansion 😒 |
The parking lot at the Silver Spring metro station cost $11 billion? I also don’t think that you realized that Virginia is extending the HOT lanes to the American Legion Bridge. If Maryland does not do something, traffic will be backed up on 495 for miles and miles and miles all of the time, every single day. You anti-highway folks are such NIMBYs that you have no clue about the negative consequences and related economic effects. You probably have some idiotic rationale for why stifling congestion is actually good. |
The funny thing about left YIMBYs is that they only want housing growth, they only want it on the most expensive land, and they only want the most expensive types of construction. No one has done more damage to this county’s economy than the left YIMBY/Smart Growth movement and they’ve left a terrible budget mess that continues to get worse. |
I actually think most people supported the 495 widening in Maryland to match Virginia’s project to ease traffic. And when the bridge is rebuilt, in addition to the road widening, space should be left over for some future high capacity rapid transit. That’s how the Wilson Bridge was rebuilt. Only a very small minority of disgruntled people were truly against the beltway widening; many of these fights are to score political points. |