Anonymous wrote:I was looking at the Google Map someone made of the Purple Line route. It looks like it will really benefit Univ of Md with three stops and the connection to Metro. I think the Purple Line will raise the profile of the school among prospective applicants (especially those from out of state who would marvel at the novelty of the thing). That’s what happened when the Portland Streetcar famously built the line through the plaza of Portland State University 25 years ago.
Funny how UMD initially fought the Purple Line and tried to block it, like Duke University did with their proposed light rail.
UMD is definitely going to be boosted by the PL. The main immediate benefit will be a more regular connection from the metro station than the current shuttles. But also, UMD is expanding into the Discovery Disctrict, and there's two stops there. Students, faculty, and staff will have free rides in the 5 stops around UMD, so I expect those to be heavily used (that portion will also be the slowest part of the PL due to all the students crossing the tracks, hopefully they will be safe).
And I didn't even mention the increased ease to go to, or commute from, SS and Bethesday. I fully expect the PL will become a critical part of the regional infrastructure a few short years after opening.
Commuting from Bethesda will take one hour on the Purple Line, station to station. That will not be a favored option by anyone who cares about their time.
Correction, 35 min to the edge of campus on Adelphi Rd, 39 to the middle of campus.
And how much time to get to Bethesda station from home? From a lot of Bethesda you can do that same trip from your house in 30 minutes.
If your point is that someone will live in an apartment in downtown Bethesda, anyone that can afford that rent values their time and no one that values their time would waste it pointlessly on the Purple Line.
The people who livei n apartments in downtown Bethesda are not the primary targeted demographics for the purple line. The purple line will be primarily for people who live in PG County, Takoma Park, Silver Spring, White Oak who have to travel to work over in the Bethesda area. People that can't afford to live in an apartment in downtown Bethesda, but who have to work in Montgomery County. These are people who have spent hours on busses or on the Metro to go down into the city and back out the other way, or people who have to negotiate with a family member for use of a shared car. Going the other way, it is for people who live in Montgomery county, but are going to school at UMD. This will get a ton of cars off of the overly congested Beltway and East-West Highway and get those roads less crowded for those who will still commute by car.
What are these jobs you speak of? Bethesda has attracted one major employer in the past two decades and that employer is having trouble filling its office. More recently, landlords have torn down office buildings to put up housing for people who commute to DC. The number of commuters at UMCP has dropped by about half in the past two decades and a lot of those still come from north of campus, not east or west.
The Purple Line is solving problems from 20 or 30 years ago. How many years will it take to break even under even the most favorable benefit calculations? The money would have been better spent creating a better link with NoVa and getting Walter Reed and NIH commuters off of 355.
What are these jobs? The minimum wage workers at Giant, Safetway and Trader's Joes. The barristas who make your lattes at Starbucks. The janitorial staff for the various businesses and buildings in Bethesda. People who work at the desk or housekeeping at the Hyatt Regency and the Hilton. Those who work at the Dunkin Donuts and the clerks at the gas stations and convenience stores. Nannies for local families. There are thousands of low income staff at many of the businesses in the Bethesda and Chevy Chase area who can't really afford to live in the Bethesda/Chevy Chase area. A significant number live in PG county or eastern Montgomery County and may commute via the green line down and the red line back out. Or take busses. But WMATA has been cutting many bus lines over recent years. My spouse now has full-time telework because my spouse cannot drive to work and the bus that spouse used to take to work was canceled by WMATA.
I have this feeling that you live in Montgomery County and are a NIMBY. I live in PG County and the Purple Line is very popular in PG County as one more way to make jobs in Montgomery County more accessible. I know a number of people who work in lower wage positions in Silver Spring or Bethesda areas who can't wait for the line to open up to solve some of their commuting issues. These people cannot afford to live in Bethesda and right now and looking forward to having a new mode of public transportation that goes around the beltway rather than as a spoke into town.
Do you think those jobs are going to generate 74,000 trips a day? That was the usage assumption when the Purple Line was approved.
And why do you focus on low wage workers? I’ll bet you’re a NIMBY who doesn’t want to live near poor people and you just expect them to commute from other places to make your latte and clean your bathrooms.
Think about all the trips you make that aren't (1) the trip from home to work or (2) the trip from work to home. Even after covid. If you want to know what's outdated, it's the assumption that the only trips that count are the work commute trips.
Errands aren’t going to drive ridership to the projected level. Only the presence of new major employers will do that. Instead of making up unrealistic claims about people doing their errands using the purple line, focus on improving business conditions so that Bethesda and Silver Spring attract more jobs. None of the things that the left YIMBYs want will happen without more jobs and yet at every turn you ignore the problem or support ideas that make it worse.
Exactly. And the Purple Line on its own will not attract new businesses. What will attract new businesses is better access to NOVA. Yet the left YIMBYs are NIMBY when it comes to that issue, which should be a priority for economic development.
There is literally new economic development going on at Chevy Chase lake where there will be a purple line stop. Amazon Fresh, apartments, ice cream, wine, etc...
You seem to have a lot of trouble understanding the scale of development and job growth necessary to justify the Purple Line. The Amazon Fresh doesn’t even employ cashiers and the ice cream store only has 2-3 people working in it at a time.
Are you looking for make work or for economic development? Like very few people work at an apartment building but those are good to develop right on top of a transit stop.
And where will the new jobs for the new residents be on the Purple Line? You seem to envision economic growth without jobs. It doesn’t work that way. You need new jobs. A lot of new jobs that pay high salaries.
Unless the left YIMBYs get behind repealing the energy tax and the local minimum wage (just to start) and some pro-business policies, there will be no jobs and the Purple Line will be a huge loser that underperforms even on the easy things like driving housing supply growth.
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.
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.
It's going to be tough to sell growth to someone that doesn't want the county to grow.
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.
Imagine that. Putting housing where there is a lot of demand for it.
There’s a lot of demand for housing in a lot of places, not only the places you approve of it. We underperform on housing production because developers view MoCo as higher risk and prefer to build in places with job growth. Your approach to growth has created a hot mess and a housing crisis. That’s great for big corporate landlords because they’ve secured enough market power to fix prices but it’s terrible for everyone else.
Please don't limit it to my approval. Upzone it all.
The county is already doing that. It’ll all be multi-plexes up to 8 units for rent or purchase. Single family homes in the close in DC suburbs are going the way of the dodo. In a couple decades there won’t be many of them left.
And that's ok. (Assuming, for the sake of argument, that your statement is accurate about the county's actions, which it is NOT.)
The market plays a role. Toronto just got rid of single family zoning with lots of support. But the conversions will take decades of course. Nothing is overnight. A housing type that would better support families is low-rise, multistory flats with large, secure courtyard gardens that create safe outdoor places for families with kids. We see that all over Europe in some of the most desirable neighborhoods, but it just doesn’t fit with in U.S. zoning or building codes, so we’re stuck with the multi-plex compromise. The attractive bungalow courts of the west coast are another idea that has been largely rejected here on the east coast.
You just describe the projects, council estates, and little boxes made of ticky tacky. The reality never works out as well as the theory.
Yes, a lot of that is greenfield development, which our local YIMBYs oppose.
But it doesn't have to be greenfield development. (And it shouldn't be greenfield development.)
If you want what Austin has some of it has to be greenfield. Cheaper construction types on cheaper land yields cheaper housing, which limits the prices market will bear in infill areas.
Anonymous wrote:I was looking at the Google Map someone made of the Purple Line route. It looks like it will really benefit Univ of Md with three stops and the connection to Metro. I think the Purple Line will raise the profile of the school among prospective applicants (especially those from out of state who would marvel at the novelty of the thing). That’s what happened when the Portland Streetcar famously built the line through the plaza of Portland State University 25 years ago.
Funny how UMD initially fought the Purple Line and tried to block it, like Duke University did with their proposed light rail.
UMD is definitely going to be boosted by the PL. The main immediate benefit will be a more regular connection from the metro station than the current shuttles. But also, UMD is expanding into the Discovery Disctrict, and there's two stops there. Students, faculty, and staff will have free rides in the 5 stops around UMD, so I expect those to be heavily used (that portion will also be the slowest part of the PL due to all the students crossing the tracks, hopefully they will be safe).
And I didn't even mention the increased ease to go to, or commute from, SS and Bethesday. I fully expect the PL will become a critical part of the regional infrastructure a few short years after opening.
Commuting from Bethesda will take one hour on the Purple Line, station to station. That will not be a favored option by anyone who cares about their time.
Correction, 35 min to the edge of campus on Adelphi Rd, 39 to the middle of campus.
And how much time to get to Bethesda station from home? From a lot of Bethesda you can do that same trip from your house in 30 minutes.
If your point is that someone will live in an apartment in downtown Bethesda, anyone that can afford that rent values their time and no one that values their time would waste it pointlessly on the Purple Line.
The people who livei n apartments in downtown Bethesda are not the primary targeted demographics for the purple line. The purple line will be primarily for people who live in PG County, Takoma Park, Silver Spring, White Oak who have to travel to work over in the Bethesda area. People that can't afford to live in an apartment in downtown Bethesda, but who have to work in Montgomery County. These are people who have spent hours on busses or on the Metro to go down into the city and back out the other way, or people who have to negotiate with a family member for use of a shared car. Going the other way, it is for people who live in Montgomery county, but are going to school at UMD. This will get a ton of cars off of the overly congested Beltway and East-West Highway and get those roads less crowded for those who will still commute by car.
What are these jobs you speak of? Bethesda has attracted one major employer in the past two decades and that employer is having trouble filling its office. More recently, landlords have torn down office buildings to put up housing for people who commute to DC. The number of commuters at UMCP has dropped by about half in the past two decades and a lot of those still come from north of campus, not east or west.
The Purple Line is solving problems from 20 or 30 years ago. How many years will it take to break even under even the most favorable benefit calculations? The money would have been better spent creating a better link with NoVa and getting Walter Reed and NIH commuters off of 355.
What are these jobs? The minimum wage workers at Giant, Safetway and Trader's Joes. The barristas who make your lattes at Starbucks. The janitorial staff for the various businesses and buildings in Bethesda. People who work at the desk or housekeeping at the Hyatt Regency and the Hilton. Those who work at the Dunkin Donuts and the clerks at the gas stations and convenience stores. Nannies for local families. There are thousands of low income staff at many of the businesses in the Bethesda and Chevy Chase area who can't really afford to live in the Bethesda/Chevy Chase area. A significant number live in PG county or eastern Montgomery County and may commute via the green line down and the red line back out. Or take busses. But WMATA has been cutting many bus lines over recent years. My spouse now has full-time telework because my spouse cannot drive to work and the bus that spouse used to take to work was canceled by WMATA.
I have this feeling that you live in Montgomery County and are a NIMBY. I live in PG County and the Purple Line is very popular in PG County as one more way to make jobs in Montgomery County more accessible. I know a number of people who work in lower wage positions in Silver Spring or Bethesda areas who can't wait for the line to open up to solve some of their commuting issues. These people cannot afford to live in Bethesda and right now and looking forward to having a new mode of public transportation that goes around the beltway rather than as a spoke into town.
Do you think those jobs are going to generate 74,000 trips a day? That was the usage assumption when the Purple Line was approved.
And why do you focus on low wage workers? I’ll bet you’re a NIMBY who doesn’t want to live near poor people and you just expect them to commute from other places to make your latte and clean your bathrooms.
Think about all the trips you make that aren't (1) the trip from home to work or (2) the trip from work to home. Even after covid. If you want to know what's outdated, it's the assumption that the only trips that count are the work commute trips.
Errands aren’t going to drive ridership to the projected level. Only the presence of new major employers will do that. Instead of making up unrealistic claims about people doing their errands using the purple line, focus on improving business conditions so that Bethesda and Silver Spring attract more jobs. None of the things that the left YIMBYs want will happen without more jobs and yet at every turn you ignore the problem or support ideas that make it worse.
Exactly. And the Purple Line on its own will not attract new businesses. What will attract new businesses is better access to NOVA. Yet the left YIMBYs are NIMBY when it comes to that issue, which should be a priority for economic development.
There is literally new economic development going on at Chevy Chase lake where there will be a purple line stop. Amazon Fresh, apartments, ice cream, wine, etc...
You seem to have a lot of trouble understanding the scale of development and job growth necessary to justify the Purple Line. The Amazon Fresh doesn’t even employ cashiers and the ice cream store only has 2-3 people working in it at a time.
Are you looking for make work or for economic development? Like very few people work at an apartment building but those are good to develop right on top of a transit stop.
And where will the new jobs for the new residents be on the Purple Line? You seem to envision economic growth without jobs. It doesn’t work that way. You need new jobs. A lot of new jobs that pay high salaries.
Unless the left YIMBYs get behind repealing the energy tax and the local minimum wage (just to start) and some pro-business policies, there will be no jobs and the Purple Line will be a huge loser that underperforms even on the easy things like driving housing supply growth.
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.
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.
It's going to be tough to sell growth to someone that doesn't want the county to grow.
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.
Imagine that. Putting housing where there is a lot of demand for it.
There’s a lot of demand for housing in a lot of places, not only the places you approve of it. We underperform on housing production because developers view MoCo as higher risk and prefer to build in places with job growth. Your approach to growth has created a hot mess and a housing crisis. That’s great for big corporate landlords because they’ve secured enough market power to fix prices but it’s terrible for everyone else.
Please don't limit it to my approval. Upzone it all.
The county is already doing that. It’ll all be multi-plexes up to 8 units for rent or purchase. Single family homes in the close in DC suburbs are going the way of the dodo. In a couple decades there won’t be many of them left.
And that's ok. (Assuming, for the sake of argument, that your statement is accurate about the county's actions, which it is NOT.)
The market plays a role. Toronto just got rid of single family zoning with lots of support. But the conversions will take decades of course. Nothing is overnight. A housing type that would better support families is low-rise, multistory flats with large, secure courtyard gardens that create safe outdoor places for families with kids. We see that all over Europe in some of the most desirable neighborhoods, but it just doesn’t fit with in U.S. zoning or building codes, so we’re stuck with the multi-plex compromise. The attractive bungalow courts of the west coast are another idea that has been largely rejected here on the east coast.
You just describe the projects, council estates, and little boxes made of ticky tacky. The reality never works out as well as the theory.
Yes, a lot of that is greenfield development, which our local YIMBYs oppose.
But it doesn't have to be greenfield development. (And it shouldn't be greenfield development.)
If you want what Austin has some of it has to be greenfield. Cheaper construction types on cheaper land yields cheaper housing, which limits the prices market will bear in infill areas.
But I don't want what Austin has, except insofar as what Austin has is more housing. No, it doesn't have to be greenfield.
Anonymous wrote:I was looking at the Google Map someone made of the Purple Line route. It looks like it will really benefit Univ of Md with three stops and the connection to Metro. I think the Purple Line will raise the profile of the school among prospective applicants (especially those from out of state who would marvel at the novelty of the thing). That’s what happened when the Portland Streetcar famously built the line through the plaza of Portland State University 25 years ago.
Funny how UMD initially fought the Purple Line and tried to block it, like Duke University did with their proposed light rail.
UMD is definitely going to be boosted by the PL. The main immediate benefit will be a more regular connection from the metro station than the current shuttles. But also, UMD is expanding into the Discovery Disctrict, and there's two stops there. Students, faculty, and staff will have free rides in the 5 stops around UMD, so I expect those to be heavily used (that portion will also be the slowest part of the PL due to all the students crossing the tracks, hopefully they will be safe).
And I didn't even mention the increased ease to go to, or commute from, SS and Bethesday. I fully expect the PL will become a critical part of the regional infrastructure a few short years after opening.
Commuting from Bethesda will take one hour on the Purple Line, station to station. That will not be a favored option by anyone who cares about their time.
Correction, 35 min to the edge of campus on Adelphi Rd, 39 to the middle of campus.
And how much time to get to Bethesda station from home? From a lot of Bethesda you can do that same trip from your house in 30 minutes.
If your point is that someone will live in an apartment in downtown Bethesda, anyone that can afford that rent values their time and no one that values their time would waste it pointlessly on the Purple Line.
The people who livei n apartments in downtown Bethesda are not the primary targeted demographics for the purple line. The purple line will be primarily for people who live in PG County, Takoma Park, Silver Spring, White Oak who have to travel to work over in the Bethesda area. People that can't afford to live in an apartment in downtown Bethesda, but who have to work in Montgomery County. These are people who have spent hours on busses or on the Metro to go down into the city and back out the other way, or people who have to negotiate with a family member for use of a shared car. Going the other way, it is for people who live in Montgomery county, but are going to school at UMD. This will get a ton of cars off of the overly congested Beltway and East-West Highway and get those roads less crowded for those who will still commute by car.
What are these jobs you speak of? Bethesda has attracted one major employer in the past two decades and that employer is having trouble filling its office. More recently, landlords have torn down office buildings to put up housing for people who commute to DC. The number of commuters at UMCP has dropped by about half in the past two decades and a lot of those still come from north of campus, not east or west.
The Purple Line is solving problems from 20 or 30 years ago. How many years will it take to break even under even the most favorable benefit calculations? The money would have been better spent creating a better link with NoVa and getting Walter Reed and NIH commuters off of 355.
What are these jobs? The minimum wage workers at Giant, Safetway and Trader's Joes. The barristas who make your lattes at Starbucks. The janitorial staff for the various businesses and buildings in Bethesda. People who work at the desk or housekeeping at the Hyatt Regency and the Hilton. Those who work at the Dunkin Donuts and the clerks at the gas stations and convenience stores. Nannies for local families. There are thousands of low income staff at many of the businesses in the Bethesda and Chevy Chase area who can't really afford to live in the Bethesda/Chevy Chase area. A significant number live in PG county or eastern Montgomery County and may commute via the green line down and the red line back out. Or take busses. But WMATA has been cutting many bus lines over recent years. My spouse now has full-time telework because my spouse cannot drive to work and the bus that spouse used to take to work was canceled by WMATA.
I have this feeling that you live in Montgomery County and are a NIMBY. I live in PG County and the Purple Line is very popular in PG County as one more way to make jobs in Montgomery County more accessible. I know a number of people who work in lower wage positions in Silver Spring or Bethesda areas who can't wait for the line to open up to solve some of their commuting issues. These people cannot afford to live in Bethesda and right now and looking forward to having a new mode of public transportation that goes around the beltway rather than as a spoke into town.
Do you think those jobs are going to generate 74,000 trips a day? That was the usage assumption when the Purple Line was approved.
And why do you focus on low wage workers? I’ll bet you’re a NIMBY who doesn’t want to live near poor people and you just expect them to commute from other places to make your latte and clean your bathrooms.
Think about all the trips you make that aren't (1) the trip from home to work or (2) the trip from work to home. Even after covid. If you want to know what's outdated, it's the assumption that the only trips that count are the work commute trips.
Errands aren’t going to drive ridership to the projected level. Only the presence of new major employers will do that. Instead of making up unrealistic claims about people doing their errands using the purple line, focus on improving business conditions so that Bethesda and Silver Spring attract more jobs. None of the things that the left YIMBYs want will happen without more jobs and yet at every turn you ignore the problem or support ideas that make it worse.
Exactly. And the Purple Line on its own will not attract new businesses. What will attract new businesses is better access to NOVA. Yet the left YIMBYs are NIMBY when it comes to that issue, which should be a priority for economic development.
There is literally new economic development going on at Chevy Chase lake where there will be a purple line stop. Amazon Fresh, apartments, ice cream, wine, etc...
You seem to have a lot of trouble understanding the scale of development and job growth necessary to justify the Purple Line. The Amazon Fresh doesn’t even employ cashiers and the ice cream store only has 2-3 people working in it at a time.
Are you looking for make work or for economic development? Like very few people work at an apartment building but those are good to develop right on top of a transit stop.
And where will the new jobs for the new residents be on the Purple Line? You seem to envision economic growth without jobs. It doesn’t work that way. You need new jobs. A lot of new jobs that pay high salaries.
Unless the left YIMBYs get behind repealing the energy tax and the local minimum wage (just to start) and some pro-business policies, there will be no jobs and the Purple Line will be a huge loser that underperforms even on the easy things like driving housing supply growth.
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.
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.
It's going to be tough to sell growth to someone that doesn't want the county to grow.
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.
Imagine that. Putting housing where there is a lot of demand for it.
There’s a lot of demand for housing in a lot of places, not only the places you approve of it. We underperform on housing production because developers view MoCo as higher risk and prefer to build in places with job growth. Your approach to growth has created a hot mess and a housing crisis. That’s great for big corporate landlords because they’ve secured enough market power to fix prices but it’s terrible for everyone else.
Please don't limit it to my approval. Upzone it all.
You say that but then you’ll oppose the roads needed to make the new construction viable. You’re no better than a NIMBY.
DP. Upzone it all. Let the market decide whether or not it's viable without new roads.
If you oppose the roads for the housing, you also oppose the housing. You’re a NIMBY. Sorry, pal.
No, opposing roads is not opposing housing. Opposing roads is opposing roads.
Anonymous wrote:I was looking at the Google Map someone made of the Purple Line route. It looks like it will really benefit Univ of Md with three stops and the connection to Metro. I think the Purple Line will raise the profile of the school among prospective applicants (especially those from out of state who would marvel at the novelty of the thing). That’s what happened when the Portland Streetcar famously built the line through the plaza of Portland State University 25 years ago.
Funny how UMD initially fought the Purple Line and tried to block it, like Duke University did with their proposed light rail.
UMD is definitely going to be boosted by the PL. The main immediate benefit will be a more regular connection from the metro station than the current shuttles. But also, UMD is expanding into the Discovery Disctrict, and there's two stops there. Students, faculty, and staff will have free rides in the 5 stops around UMD, so I expect those to be heavily used (that portion will also be the slowest part of the PL due to all the students crossing the tracks, hopefully they will be safe).
And I didn't even mention the increased ease to go to, or commute from, SS and Bethesday. I fully expect the PL will become a critical part of the regional infrastructure a few short years after opening.
Commuting from Bethesda will take one hour on the Purple Line, station to station. That will not be a favored option by anyone who cares about their time.
Correction, 35 min to the edge of campus on Adelphi Rd, 39 to the middle of campus.
And how much time to get to Bethesda station from home? From a lot of Bethesda you can do that same trip from your house in 30 minutes.
If your point is that someone will live in an apartment in downtown Bethesda, anyone that can afford that rent values their time and no one that values their time would waste it pointlessly on the Purple Line.
The people who livei n apartments in downtown Bethesda are not the primary targeted demographics for the purple line. The purple line will be primarily for people who live in PG County, Takoma Park, Silver Spring, White Oak who have to travel to work over in the Bethesda area. People that can't afford to live in an apartment in downtown Bethesda, but who have to work in Montgomery County. These are people who have spent hours on busses or on the Metro to go down into the city and back out the other way, or people who have to negotiate with a family member for use of a shared car. Going the other way, it is for people who live in Montgomery county, but are going to school at UMD. This will get a ton of cars off of the overly congested Beltway and East-West Highway and get those roads less crowded for those who will still commute by car.
What are these jobs you speak of? Bethesda has attracted one major employer in the past two decades and that employer is having trouble filling its office. More recently, landlords have torn down office buildings to put up housing for people who commute to DC. The number of commuters at UMCP has dropped by about half in the past two decades and a lot of those still come from north of campus, not east or west.
The Purple Line is solving problems from 20 or 30 years ago. How many years will it take to break even under even the most favorable benefit calculations? The money would have been better spent creating a better link with NoVa and getting Walter Reed and NIH commuters off of 355.
What are these jobs? The minimum wage workers at Giant, Safetway and Trader's Joes. The barristas who make your lattes at Starbucks. The janitorial staff for the various businesses and buildings in Bethesda. People who work at the desk or housekeeping at the Hyatt Regency and the Hilton. Those who work at the Dunkin Donuts and the clerks at the gas stations and convenience stores. Nannies for local families. There are thousands of low income staff at many of the businesses in the Bethesda and Chevy Chase area who can't really afford to live in the Bethesda/Chevy Chase area. A significant number live in PG county or eastern Montgomery County and may commute via the green line down and the red line back out. Or take busses. But WMATA has been cutting many bus lines over recent years. My spouse now has full-time telework because my spouse cannot drive to work and the bus that spouse used to take to work was canceled by WMATA.
I have this feeling that you live in Montgomery County and are a NIMBY. I live in PG County and the Purple Line is very popular in PG County as one more way to make jobs in Montgomery County more accessible. I know a number of people who work in lower wage positions in Silver Spring or Bethesda areas who can't wait for the line to open up to solve some of their commuting issues. These people cannot afford to live in Bethesda and right now and looking forward to having a new mode of public transportation that goes around the beltway rather than as a spoke into town.
Do you think those jobs are going to generate 74,000 trips a day? That was the usage assumption when the Purple Line was approved.
And why do you focus on low wage workers? I’ll bet you’re a NIMBY who doesn’t want to live near poor people and you just expect them to commute from other places to make your latte and clean your bathrooms.
Think about all the trips you make that aren't (1) the trip from home to work or (2) the trip from work to home. Even after covid. If you want to know what's outdated, it's the assumption that the only trips that count are the work commute trips.
Errands aren’t going to drive ridership to the projected level. Only the presence of new major employers will do that. Instead of making up unrealistic claims about people doing their errands using the purple line, focus on improving business conditions so that Bethesda and Silver Spring attract more jobs. None of the things that the left YIMBYs want will happen without more jobs and yet at every turn you ignore the problem or support ideas that make it worse.
Exactly. And the Purple Line on its own will not attract new businesses. What will attract new businesses is better access to NOVA. Yet the left YIMBYs are NIMBY when it comes to that issue, which should be a priority for economic development.
There is literally new economic development going on at Chevy Chase lake where there will be a purple line stop. Amazon Fresh, apartments, ice cream, wine, etc...
You seem to have a lot of trouble understanding the scale of development and job growth necessary to justify the Purple Line. The Amazon Fresh doesn’t even employ cashiers and the ice cream store only has 2-3 people working in it at a time.
Are you looking for make work or for economic development? Like very few people work at an apartment building but those are good to develop right on top of a transit stop.
And where will the new jobs for the new residents be on the Purple Line? You seem to envision economic growth without jobs. It doesn’t work that way. You need new jobs. A lot of new jobs that pay high salaries.
Unless the left YIMBYs get behind repealing the energy tax and the local minimum wage (just to start) and some pro-business policies, there will be no jobs and the Purple Line will be a huge loser that underperforms even on the easy things like driving housing supply growth.
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.
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.
It's going to be tough to sell growth to someone that doesn't want the county to grow.
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.
Imagine that. Putting housing where there is a lot of demand for it.
There’s a lot of demand for housing in a lot of places, not only the places you approve of it. We underperform on housing production because developers view MoCo as higher risk and prefer to build in places with job growth. Your approach to growth has created a hot mess and a housing crisis. That’s great for big corporate landlords because they’ve secured enough market power to fix prices but it’s terrible for everyone else.
Please don't limit it to my approval. Upzone it all.
The county is already doing that. It’ll all be multi-plexes up to 8 units for rent or purchase. Single family homes in the close in DC suburbs are going the way of the dodo. In a couple decades there won’t be many of them left.
And that's ok. (Assuming, for the sake of argument, that your statement is accurate about the county's actions, which it is NOT.)
The market plays a role. Toronto just got rid of single family zoning with lots of support. But the conversions will take decades of course. Nothing is overnight. A housing type that would better support families is low-rise, multistory flats with large, secure courtyard gardens that create safe outdoor places for families with kids. We see that all over Europe in some of the most desirable neighborhoods, but it just doesn’t fit with in U.S. zoning or building codes, so we’re stuck with the multi-plex compromise. The attractive bungalow courts of the west coast are another idea that has been largely rejected here on the east coast.
You just describe the projects, council estates, and little boxes made of ticky tacky. The reality never works out as well as the theory.
Anonymous wrote:I was looking at the Google Map someone made of the Purple Line route. It looks like it will really benefit Univ of Md with three stops and the connection to Metro. I think the Purple Line will raise the profile of the school among prospective applicants (especially those from out of state who would marvel at the novelty of the thing). That’s what happened when the Portland Streetcar famously built the line through the plaza of Portland State University 25 years ago.
Funny how UMD initially fought the Purple Line and tried to block it, like Duke University did with their proposed light rail.
UMD is definitely going to be boosted by the PL. The main immediate benefit will be a more regular connection from the metro station than the current shuttles. But also, UMD is expanding into the Discovery Disctrict, and there's two stops there. Students, faculty, and staff will have free rides in the 5 stops around UMD, so I expect those to be heavily used (that portion will also be the slowest part of the PL due to all the students crossing the tracks, hopefully they will be safe).
And I didn't even mention the increased ease to go to, or commute from, SS and Bethesday. I fully expect the PL will become a critical part of the regional infrastructure a few short years after opening.
Commuting from Bethesda will take one hour on the Purple Line, station to station. That will not be a favored option by anyone who cares about their time.
Correction, 35 min to the edge of campus on Adelphi Rd, 39 to the middle of campus.
And how much time to get to Bethesda station from home? From a lot of Bethesda you can do that same trip from your house in 30 minutes.
If your point is that someone will live in an apartment in downtown Bethesda, anyone that can afford that rent values their time and no one that values their time would waste it pointlessly on the Purple Line.
The people who livei n apartments in downtown Bethesda are not the primary targeted demographics for the purple line. The purple line will be primarily for people who live in PG County, Takoma Park, Silver Spring, White Oak who have to travel to work over in the Bethesda area. People that can't afford to live in an apartment in downtown Bethesda, but who have to work in Montgomery County. These are people who have spent hours on busses or on the Metro to go down into the city and back out the other way, or people who have to negotiate with a family member for use of a shared car. Going the other way, it is for people who live in Montgomery county, but are going to school at UMD. This will get a ton of cars off of the overly congested Beltway and East-West Highway and get those roads less crowded for those who will still commute by car.
What are these jobs you speak of? Bethesda has attracted one major employer in the past two decades and that employer is having trouble filling its office. More recently, landlords have torn down office buildings to put up housing for people who commute to DC. The number of commuters at UMCP has dropped by about half in the past two decades and a lot of those still come from north of campus, not east or west.
The Purple Line is solving problems from 20 or 30 years ago. How many years will it take to break even under even the most favorable benefit calculations? The money would have been better spent creating a better link with NoVa and getting Walter Reed and NIH commuters off of 355.
What are these jobs? The minimum wage workers at Giant, Safetway and Trader's Joes. The barristas who make your lattes at Starbucks. The janitorial staff for the various businesses and buildings in Bethesda. People who work at the desk or housekeeping at the Hyatt Regency and the Hilton. Those who work at the Dunkin Donuts and the clerks at the gas stations and convenience stores. Nannies for local families. There are thousands of low income staff at many of the businesses in the Bethesda and Chevy Chase area who can't really afford to live in the Bethesda/Chevy Chase area. A significant number live in PG county or eastern Montgomery County and may commute via the green line down and the red line back out. Or take busses. But WMATA has been cutting many bus lines over recent years. My spouse now has full-time telework because my spouse cannot drive to work and the bus that spouse used to take to work was canceled by WMATA.
I have this feeling that you live in Montgomery County and are a NIMBY. I live in PG County and the Purple Line is very popular in PG County as one more way to make jobs in Montgomery County more accessible. I know a number of people who work in lower wage positions in Silver Spring or Bethesda areas who can't wait for the line to open up to solve some of their commuting issues. These people cannot afford to live in Bethesda and right now and looking forward to having a new mode of public transportation that goes around the beltway rather than as a spoke into town.
Do you think those jobs are going to generate 74,000 trips a day? That was the usage assumption when the Purple Line was approved.
And why do you focus on low wage workers? I’ll bet you’re a NIMBY who doesn’t want to live near poor people and you just expect them to commute from other places to make your latte and clean your bathrooms.
Think about all the trips you make that aren't (1) the trip from home to work or (2) the trip from work to home. Even after covid. If you want to know what's outdated, it's the assumption that the only trips that count are the work commute trips.
Errands aren’t going to drive ridership to the projected level. Only the presence of new major employers will do that. Instead of making up unrealistic claims about people doing their errands using the purple line, focus on improving business conditions so that Bethesda and Silver Spring attract more jobs. None of the things that the left YIMBYs want will happen without more jobs and yet at every turn you ignore the problem or support ideas that make it worse.
Exactly. And the Purple Line on its own will not attract new businesses. What will attract new businesses is better access to NOVA. Yet the left YIMBYs are NIMBY when it comes to that issue, which should be a priority for economic development.
There is literally new economic development going on at Chevy Chase lake where there will be a purple line stop. Amazon Fresh, apartments, ice cream, wine, etc...
You seem to have a lot of trouble understanding the scale of development and job growth necessary to justify the Purple Line. The Amazon Fresh doesn’t even employ cashiers and the ice cream store only has 2-3 people working in it at a time.
Are you looking for make work or for economic development? Like very few people work at an apartment building but those are good to develop right on top of a transit stop.
And where will the new jobs for the new residents be on the Purple Line? You seem to envision economic growth without jobs. It doesn’t work that way. You need new jobs. A lot of new jobs that pay high salaries.
Unless the left YIMBYs get behind repealing the energy tax and the local minimum wage (just to start) and some pro-business policies, there will be no jobs and the Purple Line will be a huge loser that underperforms even on the easy things like driving housing supply growth.
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.
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.
It's going to be tough to sell growth to someone that doesn't want the county to grow.
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.
Imagine that. Putting housing where there is a lot of demand for it.
There’s a lot of demand for housing in a lot of places, not only the places you approve of it. We underperform on housing production because developers view MoCo as higher risk and prefer to build in places with job growth. Your approach to growth has created a hot mess and a housing crisis. That’s great for big corporate landlords because they’ve secured enough market power to fix prices but it’s terrible for everyone else.
Please don't limit it to my approval. Upzone it all.
The county is already doing that. It’ll all be multi-plexes up to 8 units for rent or purchase. Single family homes in the close in DC suburbs are going the way of the dodo. In a couple decades there won’t be many of them left.
And that's ok. (Assuming, for the sake of argument, that your statement is accurate about the county's actions, which it is NOT.)
The market plays a role. Toronto just got rid of single family zoning with lots of support. But the conversions will take decades of course. Nothing is overnight. A housing type that would better support families is low-rise, multistory flats with large, secure courtyard gardens that create safe outdoor places for families with kids. We see that all over Europe in some of the most desirable neighborhoods, but it just doesn’t fit with in U.S. zoning or building codes, so we’re stuck with the multi-plex compromise. The attractive bungalow courts of the west coast are another idea that has been largely rejected here on the east coast.
You just describe the projects, council estates, and little boxes made of ticky tacky. The reality never works out as well as the theory.
Anonymous wrote:I was looking at the Google Map someone made of the Purple Line route. It looks like it will really benefit Univ of Md with three stops and the connection to Metro. I think the Purple Line will raise the profile of the school among prospective applicants (especially those from out of state who would marvel at the novelty of the thing). That’s what happened when the Portland Streetcar famously built the line through the plaza of Portland State University 25 years ago.
Funny how UMD initially fought the Purple Line and tried to block it, like Duke University did with their proposed light rail.
UMD is definitely going to be boosted by the PL. The main immediate benefit will be a more regular connection from the metro station than the current shuttles. But also, UMD is expanding into the Discovery Disctrict, and there's two stops there. Students, faculty, and staff will have free rides in the 5 stops around UMD, so I expect those to be heavily used (that portion will also be the slowest part of the PL due to all the students crossing the tracks, hopefully they will be safe).
And I didn't even mention the increased ease to go to, or commute from, SS and Bethesday. I fully expect the PL will become a critical part of the regional infrastructure a few short years after opening.
Commuting from Bethesda will take one hour on the Purple Line, station to station. That will not be a favored option by anyone who cares about their time.
Correction, 35 min to the edge of campus on Adelphi Rd, 39 to the middle of campus.
And how much time to get to Bethesda station from home? From a lot of Bethesda you can do that same trip from your house in 30 minutes.
If your point is that someone will live in an apartment in downtown Bethesda, anyone that can afford that rent values their time and no one that values their time would waste it pointlessly on the Purple Line.
The people who livei n apartments in downtown Bethesda are not the primary targeted demographics for the purple line. The purple line will be primarily for people who live in PG County, Takoma Park, Silver Spring, White Oak who have to travel to work over in the Bethesda area. People that can't afford to live in an apartment in downtown Bethesda, but who have to work in Montgomery County. These are people who have spent hours on busses or on the Metro to go down into the city and back out the other way, or people who have to negotiate with a family member for use of a shared car. Going the other way, it is for people who live in Montgomery county, but are going to school at UMD. This will get a ton of cars off of the overly congested Beltway and East-West Highway and get those roads less crowded for those who will still commute by car.
What are these jobs you speak of? Bethesda has attracted one major employer in the past two decades and that employer is having trouble filling its office. More recently, landlords have torn down office buildings to put up housing for people who commute to DC. The number of commuters at UMCP has dropped by about half in the past two decades and a lot of those still come from north of campus, not east or west.
The Purple Line is solving problems from 20 or 30 years ago. How many years will it take to break even under even the most favorable benefit calculations? The money would have been better spent creating a better link with NoVa and getting Walter Reed and NIH commuters off of 355.
What are these jobs? The minimum wage workers at Giant, Safetway and Trader's Joes. The barristas who make your lattes at Starbucks. The janitorial staff for the various businesses and buildings in Bethesda. People who work at the desk or housekeeping at the Hyatt Regency and the Hilton. Those who work at the Dunkin Donuts and the clerks at the gas stations and convenience stores. Nannies for local families. There are thousands of low income staff at many of the businesses in the Bethesda and Chevy Chase area who can't really afford to live in the Bethesda/Chevy Chase area. A significant number live in PG county or eastern Montgomery County and may commute via the green line down and the red line back out. Or take busses. But WMATA has been cutting many bus lines over recent years. My spouse now has full-time telework because my spouse cannot drive to work and the bus that spouse used to take to work was canceled by WMATA.
I have this feeling that you live in Montgomery County and are a NIMBY. I live in PG County and the Purple Line is very popular in PG County as one more way to make jobs in Montgomery County more accessible. I know a number of people who work in lower wage positions in Silver Spring or Bethesda areas who can't wait for the line to open up to solve some of their commuting issues. These people cannot afford to live in Bethesda and right now and looking forward to having a new mode of public transportation that goes around the beltway rather than as a spoke into town.
Do you think those jobs are going to generate 74,000 trips a day? That was the usage assumption when the Purple Line was approved.
And why do you focus on low wage workers? I’ll bet you’re a NIMBY who doesn’t want to live near poor people and you just expect them to commute from other places to make your latte and clean your bathrooms.
Think about all the trips you make that aren't (1) the trip from home to work or (2) the trip from work to home. Even after covid. If you want to know what's outdated, it's the assumption that the only trips that count are the work commute trips.
Errands aren’t going to drive ridership to the projected level. Only the presence of new major employers will do that. Instead of making up unrealistic claims about people doing their errands using the purple line, focus on improving business conditions so that Bethesda and Silver Spring attract more jobs. None of the things that the left YIMBYs want will happen without more jobs and yet at every turn you ignore the problem or support ideas that make it worse.
Exactly. And the Purple Line on its own will not attract new businesses. What will attract new businesses is better access to NOVA. Yet the left YIMBYs are NIMBY when it comes to that issue, which should be a priority for economic development.
There is literally new economic development going on at Chevy Chase lake where there will be a purple line stop. Amazon Fresh, apartments, ice cream, wine, etc...
You seem to have a lot of trouble understanding the scale of development and job growth necessary to justify the Purple Line. The Amazon Fresh doesn’t even employ cashiers and the ice cream store only has 2-3 people working in it at a time.
Are you looking for make work or for economic development? Like very few people work at an apartment building but those are good to develop right on top of a transit stop.
And where will the new jobs for the new residents be on the Purple Line? You seem to envision economic growth without jobs. It doesn’t work that way. You need new jobs. A lot of new jobs that pay high salaries.
Unless the left YIMBYs get behind repealing the energy tax and the local minimum wage (just to start) and some pro-business policies, there will be no jobs and the Purple Line will be a huge loser that underperforms even on the easy things like driving housing supply growth.
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.
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.
It's going to be tough to sell growth to someone that doesn't want the county to grow.
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.
Imagine that. Putting housing where there is a lot of demand for it.
There’s a lot of demand for housing in a lot of places, not only the places you approve of it. We underperform on housing production because developers view MoCo as higher risk and prefer to build in places with job growth. Your approach to growth has created a hot mess and a housing crisis. That’s great for big corporate landlords because they’ve secured enough market power to fix prices but it’s terrible for everyone else.
Please don't limit it to my approval. Upzone it all.
You say that but then you’ll oppose the roads needed to make the new construction viable. You’re no better than a NIMBY.
DP. Upzone it all. Let the market decide whether or not it's viable without new roads.
If you oppose the roads for the housing, you also oppose the housing. You’re a NIMBY. Sorry, pal.
No, opposing roads is not opposing housing. Opposing roads is opposing roads.
Get a grip. You’re a NIMBY. You need to turn in your GGW membership card and join an HOA.
You can’t have what Austin has without greenfield. If you limit the land available for housing whether it’s through zoning or a refusal to build roads, land will be more expensive. Remember that supply and demand thing? It applies to land too.
Anonymous wrote:I was looking at the Google Map someone made of the Purple Line route. It looks like it will really benefit Univ of Md with three stops and the connection to Metro. I think the Purple Line will raise the profile of the school among prospective applicants (especially those from out of state who would marvel at the novelty of the thing). That’s what happened when the Portland Streetcar famously built the line through the plaza of Portland State University 25 years ago.
Funny how UMD initially fought the Purple Line and tried to block it, like Duke University did with their proposed light rail.
UMD is definitely going to be boosted by the PL. The main immediate benefit will be a more regular connection from the metro station than the current shuttles. But also, UMD is expanding into the Discovery Disctrict, and there's two stops there. Students, faculty, and staff will have free rides in the 5 stops around UMD, so I expect those to be heavily used (that portion will also be the slowest part of the PL due to all the students crossing the tracks, hopefully they will be safe).
And I didn't even mention the increased ease to go to, or commute from, SS and Bethesday. I fully expect the PL will become a critical part of the regional infrastructure a few short years after opening.
Commuting from Bethesda will take one hour on the Purple Line, station to station. That will not be a favored option by anyone who cares about their time.
Correction, 35 min to the edge of campus on Adelphi Rd, 39 to the middle of campus.
And how much time to get to Bethesda station from home? From a lot of Bethesda you can do that same trip from your house in 30 minutes.
If your point is that someone will live in an apartment in downtown Bethesda, anyone that can afford that rent values their time and no one that values their time would waste it pointlessly on the Purple Line.
The people who livei n apartments in downtown Bethesda are not the primary targeted demographics for the purple line. The purple line will be primarily for people who live in PG County, Takoma Park, Silver Spring, White Oak who have to travel to work over in the Bethesda area. People that can't afford to live in an apartment in downtown Bethesda, but who have to work in Montgomery County. These are people who have spent hours on busses or on the Metro to go down into the city and back out the other way, or people who have to negotiate with a family member for use of a shared car. Going the other way, it is for people who live in Montgomery county, but are going to school at UMD. This will get a ton of cars off of the overly congested Beltway and East-West Highway and get those roads less crowded for those who will still commute by car.
What are these jobs you speak of? Bethesda has attracted one major employer in the past two decades and that employer is having trouble filling its office. More recently, landlords have torn down office buildings to put up housing for people who commute to DC. The number of commuters at UMCP has dropped by about half in the past two decades and a lot of those still come from north of campus, not east or west.
The Purple Line is solving problems from 20 or 30 years ago. How many years will it take to break even under even the most favorable benefit calculations? The money would have been better spent creating a better link with NoVa and getting Walter Reed and NIH commuters off of 355.
What are these jobs? The minimum wage workers at Giant, Safetway and Trader's Joes. The barristas who make your lattes at Starbucks. The janitorial staff for the various businesses and buildings in Bethesda. People who work at the desk or housekeeping at the Hyatt Regency and the Hilton. Those who work at the Dunkin Donuts and the clerks at the gas stations and convenience stores. Nannies for local families. There are thousands of low income staff at many of the businesses in the Bethesda and Chevy Chase area who can't really afford to live in the Bethesda/Chevy Chase area. A significant number live in PG county or eastern Montgomery County and may commute via the green line down and the red line back out. Or take busses. But WMATA has been cutting many bus lines over recent years. My spouse now has full-time telework because my spouse cannot drive to work and the bus that spouse used to take to work was canceled by WMATA.
I have this feeling that you live in Montgomery County and are a NIMBY. I live in PG County and the Purple Line is very popular in PG County as one more way to make jobs in Montgomery County more accessible. I know a number of people who work in lower wage positions in Silver Spring or Bethesda areas who can't wait for the line to open up to solve some of their commuting issues. These people cannot afford to live in Bethesda and right now and looking forward to having a new mode of public transportation that goes around the beltway rather than as a spoke into town.
Do you think those jobs are going to generate 74,000 trips a day? That was the usage assumption when the Purple Line was approved.
And why do you focus on low wage workers? I’ll bet you’re a NIMBY who doesn’t want to live near poor people and you just expect them to commute from other places to make your latte and clean your bathrooms.
Think about all the trips you make that aren't (1) the trip from home to work or (2) the trip from work to home. Even after covid. If you want to know what's outdated, it's the assumption that the only trips that count are the work commute trips.
Errands aren’t going to drive ridership to the projected level. Only the presence of new major employers will do that. Instead of making up unrealistic claims about people doing their errands using the purple line, focus on improving business conditions so that Bethesda and Silver Spring attract more jobs. None of the things that the left YIMBYs want will happen without more jobs and yet at every turn you ignore the problem or support ideas that make it worse.
Exactly. And the Purple Line on its own will not attract new businesses. What will attract new businesses is better access to NOVA. Yet the left YIMBYs are NIMBY when it comes to that issue, which should be a priority for economic development.
There is literally new economic development going on at Chevy Chase lake where there will be a purple line stop. Amazon Fresh, apartments, ice cream, wine, etc...
You seem to have a lot of trouble understanding the scale of development and job growth necessary to justify the Purple Line. The Amazon Fresh doesn’t even employ cashiers and the ice cream store only has 2-3 people working in it at a time.
Are you looking for make work or for economic development? Like very few people work at an apartment building but those are good to develop right on top of a transit stop.
And where will the new jobs for the new residents be on the Purple Line? You seem to envision economic growth without jobs. It doesn’t work that way. You need new jobs. A lot of new jobs that pay high salaries.
Unless the left YIMBYs get behind repealing the energy tax and the local minimum wage (just to start) and some pro-business policies, there will be no jobs and the Purple Line will be a huge loser that underperforms even on the easy things like driving housing supply growth.
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.
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.
It's going to be tough to sell growth to someone that doesn't want the county to grow.
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.
Imagine that. Putting housing where there is a lot of demand for it.
There’s a lot of demand for housing in a lot of places, not only the places you approve of it. We underperform on housing production because developers view MoCo as higher risk and prefer to build in places with job growth. Your approach to growth has created a hot mess and a housing crisis. That’s great for big corporate landlords because they’ve secured enough market power to fix prices but it’s terrible for everyone else.
Please don't limit it to my approval. Upzone it all.
You say that but then you’ll oppose the roads needed to make the new construction viable. You’re no better than a NIMBY.
DP. Upzone it all. Let the market decide whether or not it's viable without new roads.
If you oppose the roads for the housing, you also oppose the housing. You’re a NIMBY. Sorry, pal.
No, opposing roads is not opposing housing. Opposing roads is opposing roads.
Get a grip. You’re a NIMBY. You need to turn in your GGW membership card and join an HOA.
You can’t have what Austin has without greenfield. If you limit the land available for housing whether it’s through zoning or a refusal to build roads, land will be more expensive. Remember that supply and demand thing? It applies to land too.
I don't want what Austin has except the building housing part.
Anonymous wrote:I was looking at the Google Map someone made of the Purple Line route. It looks like it will really benefit Univ of Md with three stops and the connection to Metro. I think the Purple Line will raise the profile of the school among prospective applicants (especially those from out of state who would marvel at the novelty of the thing). That’s what happened when the Portland Streetcar famously built the line through the plaza of Portland State University 25 years ago.
Funny how UMD initially fought the Purple Line and tried to block it, like Duke University did with their proposed light rail.
UMD is definitely going to be boosted by the PL. The main immediate benefit will be a more regular connection from the metro station than the current shuttles. But also, UMD is expanding into the Discovery Disctrict, and there's two stops there. Students, faculty, and staff will have free rides in the 5 stops around UMD, so I expect those to be heavily used (that portion will also be the slowest part of the PL due to all the students crossing the tracks, hopefully they will be safe).
And I didn't even mention the increased ease to go to, or commute from, SS and Bethesday. I fully expect the PL will become a critical part of the regional infrastructure a few short years after opening.
Commuting from Bethesda will take one hour on the Purple Line, station to station. That will not be a favored option by anyone who cares about their time.
Correction, 35 min to the edge of campus on Adelphi Rd, 39 to the middle of campus.
And how much time to get to Bethesda station from home? From a lot of Bethesda you can do that same trip from your house in 30 minutes.
If your point is that someone will live in an apartment in downtown Bethesda, anyone that can afford that rent values their time and no one that values their time would waste it pointlessly on the Purple Line.
The people who livei n apartments in downtown Bethesda are not the primary targeted demographics for the purple line. The purple line will be primarily for people who live in PG County, Takoma Park, Silver Spring, White Oak who have to travel to work over in the Bethesda area. People that can't afford to live in an apartment in downtown Bethesda, but who have to work in Montgomery County. These are people who have spent hours on busses or on the Metro to go down into the city and back out the other way, or people who have to negotiate with a family member for use of a shared car. Going the other way, it is for people who live in Montgomery county, but are going to school at UMD. This will get a ton of cars off of the overly congested Beltway and East-West Highway and get those roads less crowded for those who will still commute by car.
What are these jobs you speak of? Bethesda has attracted one major employer in the past two decades and that employer is having trouble filling its office. More recently, landlords have torn down office buildings to put up housing for people who commute to DC. The number of commuters at UMCP has dropped by about half in the past two decades and a lot of those still come from north of campus, not east or west.
The Purple Line is solving problems from 20 or 30 years ago. How many years will it take to break even under even the most favorable benefit calculations? The money would have been better spent creating a better link with NoVa and getting Walter Reed and NIH commuters off of 355.
What are these jobs? The minimum wage workers at Giant, Safetway and Trader's Joes. The barristas who make your lattes at Starbucks. The janitorial staff for the various businesses and buildings in Bethesda. People who work at the desk or housekeeping at the Hyatt Regency and the Hilton. Those who work at the Dunkin Donuts and the clerks at the gas stations and convenience stores. Nannies for local families. There are thousands of low income staff at many of the businesses in the Bethesda and Chevy Chase area who can't really afford to live in the Bethesda/Chevy Chase area. A significant number live in PG county or eastern Montgomery County and may commute via the green line down and the red line back out. Or take busses. But WMATA has been cutting many bus lines over recent years. My spouse now has full-time telework because my spouse cannot drive to work and the bus that spouse used to take to work was canceled by WMATA.
I have this feeling that you live in Montgomery County and are a NIMBY. I live in PG County and the Purple Line is very popular in PG County as one more way to make jobs in Montgomery County more accessible. I know a number of people who work in lower wage positions in Silver Spring or Bethesda areas who can't wait for the line to open up to solve some of their commuting issues. These people cannot afford to live in Bethesda and right now and looking forward to having a new mode of public transportation that goes around the beltway rather than as a spoke into town.
Do you think those jobs are going to generate 74,000 trips a day? That was the usage assumption when the Purple Line was approved.
And why do you focus on low wage workers? I’ll bet you’re a NIMBY who doesn’t want to live near poor people and you just expect them to commute from other places to make your latte and clean your bathrooms.
Think about all the trips you make that aren't (1) the trip from home to work or (2) the trip from work to home. Even after covid. If you want to know what's outdated, it's the assumption that the only trips that count are the work commute trips.
Errands aren’t going to drive ridership to the projected level. Only the presence of new major employers will do that. Instead of making up unrealistic claims about people doing their errands using the purple line, focus on improving business conditions so that Bethesda and Silver Spring attract more jobs. None of the things that the left YIMBYs want will happen without more jobs and yet at every turn you ignore the problem or support ideas that make it worse.
Exactly. And the Purple Line on its own will not attract new businesses. What will attract new businesses is better access to NOVA. Yet the left YIMBYs are NIMBY when it comes to that issue, which should be a priority for economic development.
There is literally new economic development going on at Chevy Chase lake where there will be a purple line stop. Amazon Fresh, apartments, ice cream, wine, etc...
You seem to have a lot of trouble understanding the scale of development and job growth necessary to justify the Purple Line. The Amazon Fresh doesn’t even employ cashiers and the ice cream store only has 2-3 people working in it at a time.
Are you looking for make work or for economic development? Like very few people work at an apartment building but those are good to develop right on top of a transit stop.
And where will the new jobs for the new residents be on the Purple Line? You seem to envision economic growth without jobs. It doesn’t work that way. You need new jobs. A lot of new jobs that pay high salaries.
Unless the left YIMBYs get behind repealing the energy tax and the local minimum wage (just to start) and some pro-business policies, there will be no jobs and the Purple Line will be a huge loser that underperforms even on the easy things like driving housing supply growth.
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.
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.
It's going to be tough to sell growth to someone that doesn't want the county to grow.
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.
Imagine that. Putting housing where there is a lot of demand for it.
There’s a lot of demand for housing in a lot of places, not only the places you approve of it. We underperform on housing production because developers view MoCo as higher risk and prefer to build in places with job growth. Your approach to growth has created a hot mess and a housing crisis. That’s great for big corporate landlords because they’ve secured enough market power to fix prices but it’s terrible for everyone else.
Please don't limit it to my approval. Upzone it all.
The county is already doing that. It’ll all be multi-plexes up to 8 units for rent or purchase. Single family homes in the close in DC suburbs are going the way of the dodo. In a couple decades there won’t be many of them left.
And that's ok. (Assuming, for the sake of argument, that your statement is accurate about the county's actions, which it is NOT.)
The market plays a role. Toronto just got rid of single family zoning with lots of support. But the conversions will take decades of course. Nothing is overnight. A housing type that would better support families is low-rise, multistory flats with large, secure courtyard gardens that create safe outdoor places for families with kids. We see that all over Europe in some of the most desirable neighborhoods, but it just doesn’t fit with in U.S. zoning or building codes, so we’re stuck with the multi-plex compromise. The attractive bungalow courts of the west coast are another idea that has been largely rejected here on the east coast.
You just describe the projects, council estates, and little boxes made of ticky tacky. The reality never works out as well as the theory.
Anonymous wrote:I was looking at the Google Map someone made of the Purple Line route. It looks like it will really benefit Univ of Md with three stops and the connection to Metro. I think the Purple Line will raise the profile of the school among prospective applicants (especially those from out of state who would marvel at the novelty of the thing). That’s what happened when the Portland Streetcar famously built the line through the plaza of Portland State University 25 years ago.
Funny how UMD initially fought the Purple Line and tried to block it, like Duke University did with their proposed light rail.
UMD is definitely going to be boosted by the PL. The main immediate benefit will be a more regular connection from the metro station than the current shuttles. But also, UMD is expanding into the Discovery Disctrict, and there's two stops there. Students, faculty, and staff will have free rides in the 5 stops around UMD, so I expect those to be heavily used (that portion will also be the slowest part of the PL due to all the students crossing the tracks, hopefully they will be safe).
And I didn't even mention the increased ease to go to, or commute from, SS and Bethesday. I fully expect the PL will become a critical part of the regional infrastructure a few short years after opening.
Commuting from Bethesda will take one hour on the Purple Line, station to station. That will not be a favored option by anyone who cares about their time.
Correction, 35 min to the edge of campus on Adelphi Rd, 39 to the middle of campus.
And how much time to get to Bethesda station from home? From a lot of Bethesda you can do that same trip from your house in 30 minutes.
If your point is that someone will live in an apartment in downtown Bethesda, anyone that can afford that rent values their time and no one that values their time would waste it pointlessly on the Purple Line.
The people who livei n apartments in downtown Bethesda are not the primary targeted demographics for the purple line. The purple line will be primarily for people who live in PG County, Takoma Park, Silver Spring, White Oak who have to travel to work over in the Bethesda area. People that can't afford to live in an apartment in downtown Bethesda, but who have to work in Montgomery County. These are people who have spent hours on busses or on the Metro to go down into the city and back out the other way, or people who have to negotiate with a family member for use of a shared car. Going the other way, it is for people who live in Montgomery county, but are going to school at UMD. This will get a ton of cars off of the overly congested Beltway and East-West Highway and get those roads less crowded for those who will still commute by car.
What are these jobs you speak of? Bethesda has attracted one major employer in the past two decades and that employer is having trouble filling its office. More recently, landlords have torn down office buildings to put up housing for people who commute to DC. The number of commuters at UMCP has dropped by about half in the past two decades and a lot of those still come from north of campus, not east or west.
The Purple Line is solving problems from 20 or 30 years ago. How many years will it take to break even under even the most favorable benefit calculations? The money would have been better spent creating a better link with NoVa and getting Walter Reed and NIH commuters off of 355.
What are these jobs? The minimum wage workers at Giant, Safetway and Trader's Joes. The barristas who make your lattes at Starbucks. The janitorial staff for the various businesses and buildings in Bethesda. People who work at the desk or housekeeping at the Hyatt Regency and the Hilton. Those who work at the Dunkin Donuts and the clerks at the gas stations and convenience stores. Nannies for local families. There are thousands of low income staff at many of the businesses in the Bethesda and Chevy Chase area who can't really afford to live in the Bethesda/Chevy Chase area. A significant number live in PG county or eastern Montgomery County and may commute via the green line down and the red line back out. Or take busses. But WMATA has been cutting many bus lines over recent years. My spouse now has full-time telework because my spouse cannot drive to work and the bus that spouse used to take to work was canceled by WMATA.
I have this feeling that you live in Montgomery County and are a NIMBY. I live in PG County and the Purple Line is very popular in PG County as one more way to make jobs in Montgomery County more accessible. I know a number of people who work in lower wage positions in Silver Spring or Bethesda areas who can't wait for the line to open up to solve some of their commuting issues. These people cannot afford to live in Bethesda and right now and looking forward to having a new mode of public transportation that goes around the beltway rather than as a spoke into town.
Do you think those jobs are going to generate 74,000 trips a day? That was the usage assumption when the Purple Line was approved.
And why do you focus on low wage workers? I’ll bet you’re a NIMBY who doesn’t want to live near poor people and you just expect them to commute from other places to make your latte and clean your bathrooms.
Think about all the trips you make that aren't (1) the trip from home to work or (2) the trip from work to home. Even after covid. If you want to know what's outdated, it's the assumption that the only trips that count are the work commute trips.
Errands aren’t going to drive ridership to the projected level. Only the presence of new major employers will do that. Instead of making up unrealistic claims about people doing their errands using the purple line, focus on improving business conditions so that Bethesda and Silver Spring attract more jobs. None of the things that the left YIMBYs want will happen without more jobs and yet at every turn you ignore the problem or support ideas that make it worse.
Exactly. And the Purple Line on its own will not attract new businesses. What will attract new businesses is better access to NOVA. Yet the left YIMBYs are NIMBY when it comes to that issue, which should be a priority for economic development.
There is literally new economic development going on at Chevy Chase lake where there will be a purple line stop. Amazon Fresh, apartments, ice cream, wine, etc...
You seem to have a lot of trouble understanding the scale of development and job growth necessary to justify the Purple Line. The Amazon Fresh doesn’t even employ cashiers and the ice cream store only has 2-3 people working in it at a time.
Are you looking for make work or for economic development? Like very few people work at an apartment building but those are good to develop right on top of a transit stop.
And where will the new jobs for the new residents be on the Purple Line? You seem to envision economic growth without jobs. It doesn’t work that way. You need new jobs. A lot of new jobs that pay high salaries.
Unless the left YIMBYs get behind repealing the energy tax and the local minimum wage (just to start) and some pro-business policies, there will be no jobs and the Purple Line will be a huge loser that underperforms even on the easy things like driving housing supply growth.
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.
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.
It's going to be tough to sell growth to someone that doesn't want the county to grow.
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.
Imagine that. Putting housing where there is a lot of demand for it.
There’s a lot of demand for housing in a lot of places, not only the places you approve of it. We underperform on housing production because developers view MoCo as higher risk and prefer to build in places with job growth. Your approach to growth has created a hot mess and a housing crisis. That’s great for big corporate landlords because they’ve secured enough market power to fix prices but it’s terrible for everyone else.
Please don't limit it to my approval. Upzone it all.
You say that but then you’ll oppose the roads needed to make the new construction viable. You’re no better than a NIMBY.
DP. Upzone it all. Let the market decide whether or not it's viable without new roads.
If you oppose the roads for the housing, you also oppose the housing. You’re a NIMBY. Sorry, pal.
No, opposing roads is not opposing housing. Opposing roads is opposing roads.
Get a grip. You’re a NIMBY. You need to turn in your GGW membership card and join an HOA.
You can’t have what Austin has without greenfield. If you limit the land available for housing whether it’s through zoning or a refusal to build roads, land will be more expensive. Remember that supply and demand thing? It applies to land too.
I don't want what Austin has except the building housing part.
What Austin has is the housing part, which it got because it keeps adding jobs and greenfield housing development. If you don’t want the jobs or the greenfield housing, you don’t want the housing part. You’re a NIMBY.
Anonymous wrote:I was looking at the Google Map someone made of the Purple Line route. It looks like it will really benefit Univ of Md with three stops and the connection to Metro. I think the Purple Line will raise the profile of the school among prospective applicants (especially those from out of state who would marvel at the novelty of the thing). That’s what happened when the Portland Streetcar famously built the line through the plaza of Portland State University 25 years ago.
Funny how UMD initially fought the Purple Line and tried to block it, like Duke University did with their proposed light rail.
UMD is definitely going to be boosted by the PL. The main immediate benefit will be a more regular connection from the metro station than the current shuttles. But also, UMD is expanding into the Discovery Disctrict, and there's two stops there. Students, faculty, and staff will have free rides in the 5 stops around UMD, so I expect those to be heavily used (that portion will also be the slowest part of the PL due to all the students crossing the tracks, hopefully they will be safe).
And I didn't even mention the increased ease to go to, or commute from, SS and Bethesday. I fully expect the PL will become a critical part of the regional infrastructure a few short years after opening.
Commuting from Bethesda will take one hour on the Purple Line, station to station. That will not be a favored option by anyone who cares about their time.
Correction, 35 min to the edge of campus on Adelphi Rd, 39 to the middle of campus.
And how much time to get to Bethesda station from home? From a lot of Bethesda you can do that same trip from your house in 30 minutes.
If your point is that someone will live in an apartment in downtown Bethesda, anyone that can afford that rent values their time and no one that values their time would waste it pointlessly on the Purple Line.
The people who livei n apartments in downtown Bethesda are not the primary targeted demographics for the purple line. The purple line will be primarily for people who live in PG County, Takoma Park, Silver Spring, White Oak who have to travel to work over in the Bethesda area. People that can't afford to live in an apartment in downtown Bethesda, but who have to work in Montgomery County. These are people who have spent hours on busses or on the Metro to go down into the city and back out the other way, or people who have to negotiate with a family member for use of a shared car. Going the other way, it is for people who live in Montgomery county, but are going to school at UMD. This will get a ton of cars off of the overly congested Beltway and East-West Highway and get those roads less crowded for those who will still commute by car.
What are these jobs you speak of? Bethesda has attracted one major employer in the past two decades and that employer is having trouble filling its office. More recently, landlords have torn down office buildings to put up housing for people who commute to DC. The number of commuters at UMCP has dropped by about half in the past two decades and a lot of those still come from north of campus, not east or west.
The Purple Line is solving problems from 20 or 30 years ago. How many years will it take to break even under even the most favorable benefit calculations? The money would have been better spent creating a better link with NoVa and getting Walter Reed and NIH commuters off of 355.
What are these jobs? The minimum wage workers at Giant, Safetway and Trader's Joes. The barristas who make your lattes at Starbucks. The janitorial staff for the various businesses and buildings in Bethesda. People who work at the desk or housekeeping at the Hyatt Regency and the Hilton. Those who work at the Dunkin Donuts and the clerks at the gas stations and convenience stores. Nannies for local families. There are thousands of low income staff at many of the businesses in the Bethesda and Chevy Chase area who can't really afford to live in the Bethesda/Chevy Chase area. A significant number live in PG county or eastern Montgomery County and may commute via the green line down and the red line back out. Or take busses. But WMATA has been cutting many bus lines over recent years. My spouse now has full-time telework because my spouse cannot drive to work and the bus that spouse used to take to work was canceled by WMATA.
I have this feeling that you live in Montgomery County and are a NIMBY. I live in PG County and the Purple Line is very popular in PG County as one more way to make jobs in Montgomery County more accessible. I know a number of people who work in lower wage positions in Silver Spring or Bethesda areas who can't wait for the line to open up to solve some of their commuting issues. These people cannot afford to live in Bethesda and right now and looking forward to having a new mode of public transportation that goes around the beltway rather than as a spoke into town.
Do you think those jobs are going to generate 74,000 trips a day? That was the usage assumption when the Purple Line was approved.
And why do you focus on low wage workers? I’ll bet you’re a NIMBY who doesn’t want to live near poor people and you just expect them to commute from other places to make your latte and clean your bathrooms.
Think about all the trips you make that aren't (1) the trip from home to work or (2) the trip from work to home. Even after covid. If you want to know what's outdated, it's the assumption that the only trips that count are the work commute trips.
Errands aren’t going to drive ridership to the projected level. Only the presence of new major employers will do that. Instead of making up unrealistic claims about people doing their errands using the purple line, focus on improving business conditions so that Bethesda and Silver Spring attract more jobs. None of the things that the left YIMBYs want will happen without more jobs and yet at every turn you ignore the problem or support ideas that make it worse.
Exactly. And the Purple Line on its own will not attract new businesses. What will attract new businesses is better access to NOVA. Yet the left YIMBYs are NIMBY when it comes to that issue, which should be a priority for economic development.
There is literally new economic development going on at Chevy Chase lake where there will be a purple line stop. Amazon Fresh, apartments, ice cream, wine, etc...
You seem to have a lot of trouble understanding the scale of development and job growth necessary to justify the Purple Line. The Amazon Fresh doesn’t even employ cashiers and the ice cream store only has 2-3 people working in it at a time.
Are you looking for make work or for economic development? Like very few people work at an apartment building but those are good to develop right on top of a transit stop.
And where will the new jobs for the new residents be on the Purple Line? You seem to envision economic growth without jobs. It doesn’t work that way. You need new jobs. A lot of new jobs that pay high salaries.
Unless the left YIMBYs get behind repealing the energy tax and the local minimum wage (just to start) and some pro-business policies, there will be no jobs and the Purple Line will be a huge loser that underperforms even on the easy things like driving housing supply growth.
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.
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.
It's going to be tough to sell growth to someone that doesn't want the county to grow.
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.
Imagine that. Putting housing where there is a lot of demand for it.
There’s a lot of demand for housing in a lot of places, not only the places you approve of it. We underperform on housing production because developers view MoCo as higher risk and prefer to build in places with job growth. Your approach to growth has created a hot mess and a housing crisis. That’s great for big corporate landlords because they’ve secured enough market power to fix prices but it’s terrible for everyone else.
Please don't limit it to my approval. Upzone it all.
You say that but then you’ll oppose the roads needed to make the new construction viable. You’re no better than a NIMBY.
DP. Upzone it all. Let the market decide whether or not it's viable without new roads.
If you oppose the roads for the housing, you also oppose the housing. You’re a NIMBY. Sorry, pal.
No, opposing roads is not opposing housing. Opposing roads is opposing roads.
Get a grip. You’re a NIMBY. You need to turn in your GGW membership card and join an HOA.
You can’t have what Austin has without greenfield. If you limit the land available for housing whether it’s through zoning or a refusal to build roads, land will be more expensive. Remember that supply and demand thing? It applies to land too.
I don't want what Austin has except the building housing part.
What Austin has is the housing part, which it got because it keeps adding jobs and greenfield housing development. If you don’t want the jobs or the greenfield housing, you don’t want the housing part. You’re a NIMBY.
No. The point of Austin is that building more housing can, in fact, reduce housing costs. The point of Austin is not that everybody who doesn't want to do everything exactly the way Austin did is a NIMBY.
Anonymous wrote:I was looking at the Google Map someone made of the Purple Line route. It looks like it will really benefit Univ of Md with three stops and the connection to Metro. I think the Purple Line will raise the profile of the school among prospective applicants (especially those from out of state who would marvel at the novelty of the thing). That’s what happened when the Portland Streetcar famously built the line through the plaza of Portland State University 25 years ago.
Funny how UMD initially fought the Purple Line and tried to block it, like Duke University did with their proposed light rail.
UMD is definitely going to be boosted by the PL. The main immediate benefit will be a more regular connection from the metro station than the current shuttles. But also, UMD is expanding into the Discovery Disctrict, and there's two stops there. Students, faculty, and staff will have free rides in the 5 stops around UMD, so I expect those to be heavily used (that portion will also be the slowest part of the PL due to all the students crossing the tracks, hopefully they will be safe).
And I didn't even mention the increased ease to go to, or commute from, SS and Bethesday. I fully expect the PL will become a critical part of the regional infrastructure a few short years after opening.
Commuting from Bethesda will take one hour on the Purple Line, station to station. That will not be a favored option by anyone who cares about their time.
Correction, 35 min to the edge of campus on Adelphi Rd, 39 to the middle of campus.
And how much time to get to Bethesda station from home? From a lot of Bethesda you can do that same trip from your house in 30 minutes.
If your point is that someone will live in an apartment in downtown Bethesda, anyone that can afford that rent values their time and no one that values their time would waste it pointlessly on the Purple Line.
The people who livei n apartments in downtown Bethesda are not the primary targeted demographics for the purple line. The purple line will be primarily for people who live in PG County, Takoma Park, Silver Spring, White Oak who have to travel to work over in the Bethesda area. People that can't afford to live in an apartment in downtown Bethesda, but who have to work in Montgomery County. These are people who have spent hours on busses or on the Metro to go down into the city and back out the other way, or people who have to negotiate with a family member for use of a shared car. Going the other way, it is for people who live in Montgomery county, but are going to school at UMD. This will get a ton of cars off of the overly congested Beltway and East-West Highway and get those roads less crowded for those who will still commute by car.
What are these jobs you speak of? Bethesda has attracted one major employer in the past two decades and that employer is having trouble filling its office. More recently, landlords have torn down office buildings to put up housing for people who commute to DC. The number of commuters at UMCP has dropped by about half in the past two decades and a lot of those still come from north of campus, not east or west.
The Purple Line is solving problems from 20 or 30 years ago. How many years will it take to break even under even the most favorable benefit calculations? The money would have been better spent creating a better link with NoVa and getting Walter Reed and NIH commuters off of 355.
What are these jobs? The minimum wage workers at Giant, Safetway and Trader's Joes. The barristas who make your lattes at Starbucks. The janitorial staff for the various businesses and buildings in Bethesda. People who work at the desk or housekeeping at the Hyatt Regency and the Hilton. Those who work at the Dunkin Donuts and the clerks at the gas stations and convenience stores. Nannies for local families. There are thousands of low income staff at many of the businesses in the Bethesda and Chevy Chase area who can't really afford to live in the Bethesda/Chevy Chase area. A significant number live in PG county or eastern Montgomery County and may commute via the green line down and the red line back out. Or take busses. But WMATA has been cutting many bus lines over recent years. My spouse now has full-time telework because my spouse cannot drive to work and the bus that spouse used to take to work was canceled by WMATA.
I have this feeling that you live in Montgomery County and are a NIMBY. I live in PG County and the Purple Line is very popular in PG County as one more way to make jobs in Montgomery County more accessible. I know a number of people who work in lower wage positions in Silver Spring or Bethesda areas who can't wait for the line to open up to solve some of their commuting issues. These people cannot afford to live in Bethesda and right now and looking forward to having a new mode of public transportation that goes around the beltway rather than as a spoke into town.
Do you think those jobs are going to generate 74,000 trips a day? That was the usage assumption when the Purple Line was approved.
And why do you focus on low wage workers? I’ll bet you’re a NIMBY who doesn’t want to live near poor people and you just expect them to commute from other places to make your latte and clean your bathrooms.
Think about all the trips you make that aren't (1) the trip from home to work or (2) the trip from work to home. Even after covid. If you want to know what's outdated, it's the assumption that the only trips that count are the work commute trips.
Errands aren’t going to drive ridership to the projected level. Only the presence of new major employers will do that. Instead of making up unrealistic claims about people doing their errands using the purple line, focus on improving business conditions so that Bethesda and Silver Spring attract more jobs. None of the things that the left YIMBYs want will happen without more jobs and yet at every turn you ignore the problem or support ideas that make it worse.
Exactly. And the Purple Line on its own will not attract new businesses. What will attract new businesses is better access to NOVA. Yet the left YIMBYs are NIMBY when it comes to that issue, which should be a priority for economic development.
There is literally new economic development going on at Chevy Chase lake where there will be a purple line stop. Amazon Fresh, apartments, ice cream, wine, etc...
You seem to have a lot of trouble understanding the scale of development and job growth necessary to justify the Purple Line. The Amazon Fresh doesn’t even employ cashiers and the ice cream store only has 2-3 people working in it at a time.
Are you looking for make work or for economic development? Like very few people work at an apartment building but those are good to develop right on top of a transit stop.
And where will the new jobs for the new residents be on the Purple Line? You seem to envision economic growth without jobs. It doesn’t work that way. You need new jobs. A lot of new jobs that pay high salaries.
Unless the left YIMBYs get behind repealing the energy tax and the local minimum wage (just to start) and some pro-business policies, there will be no jobs and the Purple Line will be a huge loser that underperforms even on the easy things like driving housing supply growth.
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.
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.
It's going to be tough to sell growth to someone that doesn't want the county to grow.
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.
Imagine that. Putting housing where there is a lot of demand for it.
There’s a lot of demand for housing in a lot of places, not only the places you approve of it. We underperform on housing production because developers view MoCo as higher risk and prefer to build in places with job growth. Your approach to growth has created a hot mess and a housing crisis. That’s great for big corporate landlords because they’ve secured enough market power to fix prices but it’s terrible for everyone else.
Please don't limit it to my approval. Upzone it all.
You say that but then you’ll oppose the roads needed to make the new construction viable. You’re no better than a NIMBY.
DP. Upzone it all. Let the market decide whether or not it's viable without new roads.
If you oppose the roads for the housing, you also oppose the housing. You’re a NIMBY. Sorry, pal.
No, opposing roads is not opposing housing. Opposing roads is opposing roads.
Get a grip. You’re a NIMBY. You need to turn in your GGW membership card and join an HOA.
You can’t have what Austin has without greenfield. If you limit the land available for housing whether it’s through zoning or a refusal to build roads, land will be more expensive. Remember that supply and demand thing? It applies to land too.
I don't want what Austin has except the building housing part.
What Austin has is the housing part, which it got because it keeps adding jobs and greenfield housing development. If you don’t want the jobs or the greenfield housing, you don’t want the housing part. You’re a NIMBY.
No. The point of Austin is that building more housing can, in fact, reduce housing costs. The point of Austin is not that everybody who doesn't want to do everything exactly the way Austin did is a NIMBY.
You’re delusional if you think you can achieve Austin’s housing production without job growth or the price effect without greenfield. You’re a NIMBY because the only housing production you support is based on imaginary economics.
Anonymous wrote:I was looking at the Google Map someone made of the Purple Line route. It looks like it will really benefit Univ of Md with three stops and the connection to Metro. I think the Purple Line will raise the profile of the school among prospective applicants (especially those from out of state who would marvel at the novelty of the thing). That’s what happened when the Portland Streetcar famously built the line through the plaza of Portland State University 25 years ago.
Funny how UMD initially fought the Purple Line and tried to block it, like Duke University did with their proposed light rail.
UMD is definitely going to be boosted by the PL. The main immediate benefit will be a more regular connection from the metro station than the current shuttles. But also, UMD is expanding into the Discovery Disctrict, and there's two stops there. Students, faculty, and staff will have free rides in the 5 stops around UMD, so I expect those to be heavily used (that portion will also be the slowest part of the PL due to all the students crossing the tracks, hopefully they will be safe).
And I didn't even mention the increased ease to go to, or commute from, SS and Bethesday. I fully expect the PL will become a critical part of the regional infrastructure a few short years after opening.
Commuting from Bethesda will take one hour on the Purple Line, station to station. That will not be a favored option by anyone who cares about their time.
Correction, 35 min to the edge of campus on Adelphi Rd, 39 to the middle of campus.
And how much time to get to Bethesda station from home? From a lot of Bethesda you can do that same trip from your house in 30 minutes.
If your point is that someone will live in an apartment in downtown Bethesda, anyone that can afford that rent values their time and no one that values their time would waste it pointlessly on the Purple Line.
The people who livei n apartments in downtown Bethesda are not the primary targeted demographics for the purple line. The purple line will be primarily for people who live in PG County, Takoma Park, Silver Spring, White Oak who have to travel to work over in the Bethesda area. People that can't afford to live in an apartment in downtown Bethesda, but who have to work in Montgomery County. These are people who have spent hours on busses or on the Metro to go down into the city and back out the other way, or people who have to negotiate with a family member for use of a shared car. Going the other way, it is for people who live in Montgomery county, but are going to school at UMD. This will get a ton of cars off of the overly congested Beltway and East-West Highway and get those roads less crowded for those who will still commute by car.
What are these jobs you speak of? Bethesda has attracted one major employer in the past two decades and that employer is having trouble filling its office. More recently, landlords have torn down office buildings to put up housing for people who commute to DC. The number of commuters at UMCP has dropped by about half in the past two decades and a lot of those still come from north of campus, not east or west.
The Purple Line is solving problems from 20 or 30 years ago. How many years will it take to break even under even the most favorable benefit calculations? The money would have been better spent creating a better link with NoVa and getting Walter Reed and NIH commuters off of 355.
What are these jobs? The minimum wage workers at Giant, Safetway and Trader's Joes. The barristas who make your lattes at Starbucks. The janitorial staff for the various businesses and buildings in Bethesda. People who work at the desk or housekeeping at the Hyatt Regency and the Hilton. Those who work at the Dunkin Donuts and the clerks at the gas stations and convenience stores. Nannies for local families. There are thousands of low income staff at many of the businesses in the Bethesda and Chevy Chase area who can't really afford to live in the Bethesda/Chevy Chase area. A significant number live in PG county or eastern Montgomery County and may commute via the green line down and the red line back out. Or take busses. But WMATA has been cutting many bus lines over recent years. My spouse now has full-time telework because my spouse cannot drive to work and the bus that spouse used to take to work was canceled by WMATA.
I have this feeling that you live in Montgomery County and are a NIMBY. I live in PG County and the Purple Line is very popular in PG County as one more way to make jobs in Montgomery County more accessible. I know a number of people who work in lower wage positions in Silver Spring or Bethesda areas who can't wait for the line to open up to solve some of their commuting issues. These people cannot afford to live in Bethesda and right now and looking forward to having a new mode of public transportation that goes around the beltway rather than as a spoke into town.
Do you think those jobs are going to generate 74,000 trips a day? That was the usage assumption when the Purple Line was approved.
And why do you focus on low wage workers? I’ll bet you’re a NIMBY who doesn’t want to live near poor people and you just expect them to commute from other places to make your latte and clean your bathrooms.
Think about all the trips you make that aren't (1) the trip from home to work or (2) the trip from work to home. Even after covid. If you want to know what's outdated, it's the assumption that the only trips that count are the work commute trips.
Errands aren’t going to drive ridership to the projected level. Only the presence of new major employers will do that. Instead of making up unrealistic claims about people doing their errands using the purple line, focus on improving business conditions so that Bethesda and Silver Spring attract more jobs. None of the things that the left YIMBYs want will happen without more jobs and yet at every turn you ignore the problem or support ideas that make it worse.
Exactly. And the Purple Line on its own will not attract new businesses. What will attract new businesses is better access to NOVA. Yet the left YIMBYs are NIMBY when it comes to that issue, which should be a priority for economic development.
There is literally new economic development going on at Chevy Chase lake where there will be a purple line stop. Amazon Fresh, apartments, ice cream, wine, etc...
You seem to have a lot of trouble understanding the scale of development and job growth necessary to justify the Purple Line. The Amazon Fresh doesn’t even employ cashiers and the ice cream store only has 2-3 people working in it at a time.
Are you looking for make work or for economic development? Like very few people work at an apartment building but those are good to develop right on top of a transit stop.
And where will the new jobs for the new residents be on the Purple Line? You seem to envision economic growth without jobs. It doesn’t work that way. You need new jobs. A lot of new jobs that pay high salaries.
Unless the left YIMBYs get behind repealing the energy tax and the local minimum wage (just to start) and some pro-business policies, there will be no jobs and the Purple Line will be a huge loser that underperforms even on the easy things like driving housing supply growth.
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.
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.
It's going to be tough to sell growth to someone that doesn't want the county to grow.
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.
Imagine that. Putting housing where there is a lot of demand for it.
There’s a lot of demand for housing in a lot of places, not only the places you approve of it. We underperform on housing production because developers view MoCo as higher risk and prefer to build in places with job growth. Your approach to growth has created a hot mess and a housing crisis. That’s great for big corporate landlords because they’ve secured enough market power to fix prices but it’s terrible for everyone else.
Please don't limit it to my approval. Upzone it all.
You say that but then you’ll oppose the roads needed to make the new construction viable. You’re no better than a NIMBY.
DP. Upzone it all. Let the market decide whether or not it's viable without new roads.
If you oppose the roads for the housing, you also oppose the housing. You’re a NIMBY. Sorry, pal.
No, opposing roads is not opposing housing. Opposing roads is opposing roads.
Get a grip. You’re a NIMBY. You need to turn in your GGW membership card and join an HOA.
You can’t have what Austin has without greenfield. If you limit the land available for housing whether it’s through zoning or a refusal to build roads, land will be more expensive. Remember that supply and demand thing? It applies to land too.
I don't want what Austin has except the building housing part.
What Austin has is the housing part, which it got because it keeps adding jobs and greenfield housing development. If you don’t want the jobs or the greenfield housing, you don’t want the housing part. You’re a NIMBY.
No. The point of Austin is that building more housing can, in fact, reduce housing costs. The point of Austin is not that everybody who doesn't want to do everything exactly the way Austin did is a NIMBY.
You’re delusional if you think you can achieve Austin’s housing production without job growth or the price effect without greenfield. You’re a NIMBY because the only housing production you support is based on imaginary economics.
It's like you learned that "NIMBY" is an insult without learning what NIMBY means.
Anonymous wrote:I was looking at the Google Map someone made of the Purple Line route. It looks like it will really benefit Univ of Md with three stops and the connection to Metro. I think the Purple Line will raise the profile of the school among prospective applicants (especially those from out of state who would marvel at the novelty of the thing). That’s what happened when the Portland Streetcar famously built the line through the plaza of Portland State University 25 years ago.
Funny how UMD initially fought the Purple Line and tried to block it, like Duke University did with their proposed light rail.
UMD is definitely going to be boosted by the PL. The main immediate benefit will be a more regular connection from the metro station than the current shuttles. But also, UMD is expanding into the Discovery Disctrict, and there's two stops there. Students, faculty, and staff will have free rides in the 5 stops around UMD, so I expect those to be heavily used (that portion will also be the slowest part of the PL due to all the students crossing the tracks, hopefully they will be safe).
And I didn't even mention the increased ease to go to, or commute from, SS and Bethesday. I fully expect the PL will become a critical part of the regional infrastructure a few short years after opening.
Commuting from Bethesda will take one hour on the Purple Line, station to station. That will not be a favored option by anyone who cares about their time.
Correction, 35 min to the edge of campus on Adelphi Rd, 39 to the middle of campus.
And how much time to get to Bethesda station from home? From a lot of Bethesda you can do that same trip from your house in 30 minutes.
If your point is that someone will live in an apartment in downtown Bethesda, anyone that can afford that rent values their time and no one that values their time would waste it pointlessly on the Purple Line.
The people who livei n apartments in downtown Bethesda are not the primary targeted demographics for the purple line. The purple line will be primarily for people who live in PG County, Takoma Park, Silver Spring, White Oak who have to travel to work over in the Bethesda area. People that can't afford to live in an apartment in downtown Bethesda, but who have to work in Montgomery County. These are people who have spent hours on busses or on the Metro to go down into the city and back out the other way, or people who have to negotiate with a family member for use of a shared car. Going the other way, it is for people who live in Montgomery county, but are going to school at UMD. This will get a ton of cars off of the overly congested Beltway and East-West Highway and get those roads less crowded for those who will still commute by car.
What are these jobs you speak of? Bethesda has attracted one major employer in the past two decades and that employer is having trouble filling its office. More recently, landlords have torn down office buildings to put up housing for people who commute to DC. The number of commuters at UMCP has dropped by about half in the past two decades and a lot of those still come from north of campus, not east or west.
The Purple Line is solving problems from 20 or 30 years ago. How many years will it take to break even under even the most favorable benefit calculations? The money would have been better spent creating a better link with NoVa and getting Walter Reed and NIH commuters off of 355.
What are these jobs? The minimum wage workers at Giant, Safetway and Trader's Joes. The barristas who make your lattes at Starbucks. The janitorial staff for the various businesses and buildings in Bethesda. People who work at the desk or housekeeping at the Hyatt Regency and the Hilton. Those who work at the Dunkin Donuts and the clerks at the gas stations and convenience stores. Nannies for local families. There are thousands of low income staff at many of the businesses in the Bethesda and Chevy Chase area who can't really afford to live in the Bethesda/Chevy Chase area. A significant number live in PG county or eastern Montgomery County and may commute via the green line down and the red line back out. Or take busses. But WMATA has been cutting many bus lines over recent years. My spouse now has full-time telework because my spouse cannot drive to work and the bus that spouse used to take to work was canceled by WMATA.
I have this feeling that you live in Montgomery County and are a NIMBY. I live in PG County and the Purple Line is very popular in PG County as one more way to make jobs in Montgomery County more accessible. I know a number of people who work in lower wage positions in Silver Spring or Bethesda areas who can't wait for the line to open up to solve some of their commuting issues. These people cannot afford to live in Bethesda and right now and looking forward to having a new mode of public transportation that goes around the beltway rather than as a spoke into town.
Do you think those jobs are going to generate 74,000 trips a day? That was the usage assumption when the Purple Line was approved.
And why do you focus on low wage workers? I’ll bet you’re a NIMBY who doesn’t want to live near poor people and you just expect them to commute from other places to make your latte and clean your bathrooms.
Think about all the trips you make that aren't (1) the trip from home to work or (2) the trip from work to home. Even after covid. If you want to know what's outdated, it's the assumption that the only trips that count are the work commute trips.
Errands aren’t going to drive ridership to the projected level. Only the presence of new major employers will do that. Instead of making up unrealistic claims about people doing their errands using the purple line, focus on improving business conditions so that Bethesda and Silver Spring attract more jobs. None of the things that the left YIMBYs want will happen without more jobs and yet at every turn you ignore the problem or support ideas that make it worse.
Exactly. And the Purple Line on its own will not attract new businesses. What will attract new businesses is better access to NOVA. Yet the left YIMBYs are NIMBY when it comes to that issue, which should be a priority for economic development.
There is literally new economic development going on at Chevy Chase lake where there will be a purple line stop. Amazon Fresh, apartments, ice cream, wine, etc...
You seem to have a lot of trouble understanding the scale of development and job growth necessary to justify the Purple Line. The Amazon Fresh doesn’t even employ cashiers and the ice cream store only has 2-3 people working in it at a time.
Are you looking for make work or for economic development? Like very few people work at an apartment building but those are good to develop right on top of a transit stop.
And where will the new jobs for the new residents be on the Purple Line? You seem to envision economic growth without jobs. It doesn’t work that way. You need new jobs. A lot of new jobs that pay high salaries.
Unless the left YIMBYs get behind repealing the energy tax and the local minimum wage (just to start) and some pro-business policies, there will be no jobs and the Purple Line will be a huge loser that underperforms even on the easy things like driving housing supply growth.
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.
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.
It's going to be tough to sell growth to someone that doesn't want the county to grow.
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.
Imagine that. Putting housing where there is a lot of demand for it.
There’s a lot of demand for housing in a lot of places, not only the places you approve of it. We underperform on housing production because developers view MoCo as higher risk and prefer to build in places with job growth. Your approach to growth has created a hot mess and a housing crisis. That’s great for big corporate landlords because they’ve secured enough market power to fix prices but it’s terrible for everyone else.
Please don't limit it to my approval. Upzone it all.
You say that but then you’ll oppose the roads needed to make the new construction viable. You’re no better than a NIMBY.
DP. Upzone it all. Let the market decide whether or not it's viable without new roads.
If you oppose the roads for the housing, you also oppose the housing. You’re a NIMBY. Sorry, pal.
No, opposing roads is not opposing housing. Opposing roads is opposing roads.
Get a grip. You’re a NIMBY. You need to turn in your GGW membership card and join an HOA.
You can’t have what Austin has without greenfield. If you limit the land available for housing whether it’s through zoning or a refusal to build roads, land will be more expensive. Remember that supply and demand thing? It applies to land too.
I don't want what Austin has except the building housing part.
What Austin has is the housing part, which it got because it keeps adding jobs and greenfield housing development. If you don’t want the jobs or the greenfield housing, you don’t want the housing part. You’re a NIMBY.
No. The point of Austin is that building more housing can, in fact, reduce housing costs. The point of Austin is not that everybody who doesn't want to do everything exactly the way Austin did is a NIMBY.
You’re delusional if you think you can achieve Austin’s housing production without job growth or the price effect without greenfield. You’re a NIMBY because the only housing production you support is based on imaginary economics.
It's like you learned that "NIMBY" is an insult without learning what NIMBY means.
I know what it means. You’re a NIMBY just like the people who say they support housing but only if it includes a deal-killing amount of affordable housing are NIMBYs. You get to say you support housing but you only support housing under conditions under which only a little housing will be produced. If that’s not what you mean to do then support different ideas.
It's like you learned that "NIMBY" is an insult without learning what NIMBY means.
I know what it means. You’re a NIMBY just like the people who say they support housing but only if it includes a deal-killing amount of affordable housing are NIMBYs. You get to say you support housing but you only support housing under conditions under which only a little housing will be produced. If that’s not what you mean to do then support different ideas.
No, you don't know what NIMBY means.
Yes, it is possible to build lots of housing without contributing to more roads, more driving, and more sprawl.
It's like you learned that "NIMBY" is an insult without learning what NIMBY means.
I know what it means. You’re a NIMBY just like the people who say they support housing but only if it includes a deal-killing amount of affordable housing are NIMBYs. You get to say you support housing but you only support housing under conditions under which only a little housing will be produced. If that’s not what you mean to do then support different ideas.
No, you don't know what NIMBY means.
Yes, it is possible to build lots of housing without contributing to more roads, more driving, and more sprawl.
It just won’t be cheap because break-even rents will be equal to 110-120 percent AMI, so regardless of zoning or transit or anything else, construction will stop once that income segment is housed because costs will exceed price for lower income segments. That’s basically the market Montgomery County has now, and it doesn’t produce enough housing. If the only housing policies you support have NIMBY outcomes, then you’re a NIMBY. You’re a NIMBY.
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