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.
Does anyone know what will become of the Sidwell property once the lower school moves into DC? It would be lovely if it could be repurposed into a pocket park. Would Bethesda bid on it for this? The one thing I can see as an outsider that Bethesda needs is more parks.
Anonymous wrote:Does anyone know what will become of the Sidwell property once the lower school moves into DC? It would be lovely if it could be repurposed into a pocket park. Would Bethesda bid on it for this? The one thing I can see as an outsider that Bethesda needs is more parks.
Yes with all the new housing and increased density in the pipeline, more parkland should be a priority. I hope the county buys it.
Anonymous wrote:Does anyone know what will become of the Sidwell property once the lower school moves into DC? It would be lovely if it could be repurposed into a pocket park. Would Bethesda bid on it for this? The one thing I can see as an outsider that Bethesda needs is more parks.
Yes with all the new housing and increased density in the pipeline, more parkland should be a priority. I hope the county buys it.
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.
Do you have anything constructive to add to this conversation or are you just going to be one of those dogmatic density bros that calls everyone a NIMBY. Abolishing zoning altogether is not going to solve all of the worlds problems. There are many competing priorities that local communities need to balance and housing is just one of them. Your comment about expanding roads is also ridiculous, because that can become impossible to do once an area becomes highly developed. Downtown DC literally cannot widen most of their roads anymore because tHere is no room. They would need to demolish all of the buildings to widen roads on K street or anything like that.
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.
Do you have anything constructive to add to this conversation or are you just going to be one of those dogmatic density bros that calls everyone a NIMBY. Abolishing zoning altogether is not going to solve all of the world’s problems. There are many competing priorities that local communities need to balance and housing is just one of them. Your comment about expanding roads is also ridiculous, because that can become impossible to do once an area becomes highly developed. Downtown DC literally cannot widen most of their roads anymore because tHere is no room. They would need to demolish all of the buildings to widen roads on K street or anything like that.
DP. You sound very naive. Let’s look at your Austin example. Basic input costs to a builder that a local government can control are: land, labor, and regulations. Let’s look at these factors and compare one by one to see why developers build more housing in Austin than Montgomery County before we even need to consider demand factors.
Land: Austin has cheaper land than Montgomery County. Greenfield land is cheaper in than infill. Montgomery County infill land costs are further inflated due to artificial scarcity (Ag Reserve). Austin allows basically unlimited greenfield development.
Labor: Austin has marginally lower labor costs. Their minimum wage is $15/hr while Montgomery County minimum wage is $17.15 per hour.
Regulatory: Development fees and taxes are significantly higher in Montgomery County and further, Montgomery County applies higher fees and costs to greenfield development than infill, making it even harder to build the cheapest possible housing - and further artificially inflating infill land costs. I also have no idea how long it takes to obtain permits in Austin, but my guess is that it is significantly shorter than Montgomery County who is notoriously slow to the point of being unprofessional.
So if you want to promote more housing development like in Austin that reduces rental costs, basic things that would be essential are to end the Ag Reserve, reduce taxes on greenfield development, stop raising the minimum wage, make county government workers work, and actually do some real zoning to promote and protect industrial areas and stop allowing them to be converted to residential. You don’t seem willing or able to understand this, but removing roadblocks to cheaper greenfield development will reduce cost factors that inhibit infill development.
Anonymous wrote:Does anyone know what will become of the Sidwell property once the lower school moves into DC? It would be lovely if it could be repurposed into a pocket park. Would Bethesda bid on it for this? The one thing I can see as an outsider that Bethesda needs is more parks.
Yes with all the new housing and increased density in the pipeline, more parkland should be a priority. I hope the county buys it.
Anonymous wrote:Does anyone know what will become of the Sidwell property once the lower school moves into DC? It would be lovely if it could be repurposed into a pocket park. Would Bethesda bid on it for this? The one thing I can see as an outsider that Bethesda needs is more parks.
Yes with all the new housing and increased density in the pipeline, more parkland should be a priority. I hope the county buys it.
Anonymous wrote:Does anyone know what will become of the Sidwell property once the lower school moves into DC? It would be lovely if it could be repurposed into a pocket park. Would Bethesda bid on it for this? The one thing I can see as an outsider that Bethesda needs is more parks.
Yes with all the new housing and increased density in the pipeline, more parkland should be a priority. I hope the county buys it.
Yup! Density leaves more room for parks!
Uh oh, the YIMBY MoCo’s are checking in, I guess.
Most people in MOCO do not want to eliminate the AG reserve.
Anonymous wrote:Does anyone know what will become of the Sidwell property once the lower school moves into DC? It would be lovely if it could be repurposed into a pocket park. Would Bethesda bid on it for this? The one thing I can see as an outsider that Bethesda needs is more parks.
Yes with all the new housing and increased density in the pipeline, more parkland should be a priority. I hope the county buys it.
Yup! Density leaves more room for parks!
Uh oh, the YIMBY MoCo’s are checking in, I guess.
Most people in MOCO do not want to eliminate the AG reserve.
Most don’t, we assume. But in Prince William County, the housing advocates pressured the board there into getting rid of the Rural Crescent. Now the whole county will be marred by untamed sprawl. So much for access to the countryside for the benefit of all. Housing advocates in general are anti urban growth boundaries which is unfortunate. The model should be Europe’s dense cities and lots of healthy open space. But surprisingly many if not most housing advocates here are anti rural and anti parkland, seeing those areas as playgrounds for the wealthy. Over in Portland Oregon, where the urban growth boundary was invented, housing advocates have long favored eliminating it. Locally here in DC, I’ve heard advocates talk about what a waste of space Rock Creek Park is when it could be more housing. People seriously need to be educated on the benefits of open space and tree canopy coverage. It shouldn’t be a hard concept to grasp.
Anonymous wrote:Does anyone know what will become of the Sidwell property once the lower school moves into DC? It would be lovely if it could be repurposed into a pocket park. Would Bethesda bid on it for this? The one thing I can see as an outsider that Bethesda needs is more parks.
Oh, really? Funny how about ten years ago the Planning Commission told us all this new development in downtown Bethesda would result in more parks. Instead we got more crowding without an improvement in parks and green space. Oh and they told the retirees in Chevy Chase that the new development would enable their kids to move back to Bethesda and Chevy Chase. Instead we have luxury housing and low income housing, with the few remaining original homes (generally of high construction value) leveled to make way for more development. If they had just left Bethesda alone, there would have been more rental units (naturally occurring affordable housing) in both old original homes and the old garden apartments.
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