MoCo Planning Board Meeting - Upzoning

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:Condos mean more people in a given area. Which means more bars and restaurants. Which means more people want to live there. Which drives up the prices of those condos. Which drives up the prices of houses developers need to buy and tear down in order to build more condos. Which means even more people in a given area. Which means more bars and restaurants, which means more people want to live there, which drives up the prices even further.

People understood intuitively before we changed the term “gentrification” to “upzoning.”

There isn’t a coherent explanation of how changing zoning laws reduce housing prices. Typically the opposite happens — prices go up, by a lot.

There is, and it's based on supply and demand. Just like "gentrification" and "upzoning" are different things, so "there is no explanation" and "I don't like the explanation" are different things, too.

So what’s the explanation?

https://googlethatforyou.com?q=housing%20zoning%20supply%20demand

‘If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.’ —Albert Einstein

Very weird that no one can explain how upzoning reduces housing prices

Either you've testified at public hearings about housing policy, in which case you've heard plenty of pro-housing people explain this plenty of times, or you're a person who has a lot of time to post on DCUM, in which case a person might wonder how come you don't have the time to testify at public hearings.

Either you sincerely want to know, in which case you can go educate yourself, or you don't sincerely want to know, in which case feel free to waste your own time.

DP. I've heard a lot of people offer theories of how upzoning causes prices to fall, but it doesn't matter if no one builds. In the case of Montgomery County, there is a lot of approved density that isn't getting built because it doesn't pencil. Upzoning residential areas isn't going to change that and is more likely to suppress very high density construction because those projects will face more competition from lower density projects that are cheaper to build but can get the same price as a very high-density project.

I don't think anyone has said that re-zoning, by itself, will make housing more affordable for more people. Obviously there also has to be building following on the re-zoning.

I will note that there is no "approved density" that isn't getting built. Builders don't build "density". Builders build housing. Now, would zoning changes lead builders to make different decisions about where to build housing? Yes, that's the whole point.

OK. There’s a lot of approved housing that isn’t getting built. You have to make silly semantic arguments because the facts are really bad for your position. The problem isn’t zoning. The problem is developers aren’t building because they think the market in Montgomery County is poor. Anything built here is at a disadvantage to things built in DC and especially NOVA because those places have more jobs, so it’s higher risk.

"Approved housing" isn't fungible. As a matter of fact, your argument supports re-zoning. Builders aren't building approved housing, under the current zoning, because it doesn't pencil out. Assuming we want builders to be building housing (which I do, though you may not), that's a reason to change the zoning, to give builders more options for projects that do pencil out.

Nothing is going to pencil out at scale without more jobs. You think you’re going to get 50 quads to replace the 200-unit high-rise that’s not getting built? YIMBYs in this county have done it a great disservice by promoting jobless urbanism while also supporting policies that are hostile to business.

The builders who can do 200 units are few and far between. Many of them have big investments in CRE or multi-family that are getting crushed, losing many millions of equity in current structures.

However, there are a lot more crappy little builders in this area who can do 2-4 unit flips. That's who give donations of a couple thousand to each Council member to get up-zoning. These guys can't handle a big project like 200 units, but they can toss together a crew and local bank + hard money financing to pump out 4 unit garden apartments.

So yeah, that's the game.

You don’t get market changing housing deliveries without the developers who can deliver 200 units.

The issue with 200+ units is that all the kids there need to go to one school. At least with garden apartment you are spreading the numbers across a bunch of schools/infrastructure.

The County needs to be careful with up-zoning; these ticky-tack flippers will want to pile garden apartments into the same 3-4 neighborhoods inside the Beltway and put even further strain on the same 2 high school pyramids. The County should parcel it out evenly across MoCo, perhaps even by putting limits on a single HS pyramid (e.g., once BCC catchment gets 75 units approved, no more will be approved until every MoCo HS pyramid hits the 75 threshold).

There's a real risk of concentration on infrastructure if the County doesn't do this carefully. Flippers are going to aim for the land with highest return and quickest chance of sale - they move in a herd.

Back to central planning...

The "ticky tacky flippers" are flipping currently, and it's fully allowed currently. In which case, I think they should be allowed to build a building with 2-3-4 units instead of one gargantuan McMansion. It also wouldn't be "garden apartments", it would just be a basic duplex, triplex, or fourplex building.

At least the McMansion doesn’t utterly overwhelm the existing schools. MoCo has a school supply problem at all levels.

Montgomery County also has a housing supply problem, and I think that housing is even more important than schools.

DP. I disagree, in a way.

Housing is more important than schools in the same way that food is more important than housing. Kind of a hierarchy of needs thing.

However, just as the need for housing might eclipse the preference for a particular cuisine or brand of food where other food is available, the need for adequate public facilities such as schools might be more important than the preference for additional housing of a particular type where other housing (hi-rise instead of triplex, townhouse a modest distance away, rental instead of a purchase, etc.) is available.

There's a calculus to it, to be sure, depending on where on the spectrum of need and preference these might fall. There is enough housing stock available and enough properties on which such housing could be built with current zoning that the school overcrowding factor is the more pressing element in many localities, especially closer in, where the policy change is aimed. It also is far less flexible than housing inventory, taking greater lead times to address, and it is directly negatively impacted by the even greater housing inventory envisioned in the upzoning under consideration. The same may well be the case for other essential public services.

Montgomery Planning and the County Council should be taking a more holistic and community/resident-inclusive approach.

People can't live in housing that could be built. The housing has to actually be built in order for people to live in it.

That DP to whom you responded (07:42 was someone else). This is missing the point and/or is a response that cherry-picks housing to be built.

There is both housing that is now available and housing that could be built under current zoning (a very large amount under-built close to Metro). People can live in the currently available housing. They may want alternatives to that in the same areas, and I don't begrudge them that interest, but I would say that the need for public services, like schools, trumps that interest in localities where current capacities are not adequate.

While one could say that the same people who would move into newly zoned/built multiplex properties would then just fill that existing capacity, resilulting in the same level of overcrowding, this would ignore the market dynamic based on that desire for those alternatives -- without the zoning change, many families will choose to live slightly farther out in areas that aren't currently overcrowded. This would result in marginally longer commutes and the various ills that might come from that, but I would say that those ills are of less consequence, in both the short and long terms, than the ills of inadequate public facility capacity.

MoCo should address the situation in a way such that we are sure that capacities of public facilities like schools are made adequate by the time that the additional housing of interest comes online. That has been ignored/under-addressed, now, for far too long, and we shouldn't be trusting, then, that the various agencies will change to make it work without a more directly coordinated approach.

Increasing supply and lowering housing prices creates induced demand for housing too. To some extent if you build new low income housing people will appear to fill these housing units. There is also induced demand by people using more space per person when affordability increases. I’m not saying that we should not pursue more affordable housing. However, MOCO will end having a disproportionate share of tax negative residents if it is not careful. Growth in low income residents needs to be matched with new high income residents or the county will not have enough money to maintain the current level of services.

The likelihood that a triplex with 3 families each with 1-2 students will not cost the County money is NIL. Net tax loss.

And the family that used to own that former SFH likely benefited the County. Net tax gain.

Not if they have kids in school, they're not. I've owned the SFH we live in for 20 years now and have had kids in MCPS for 15 years. For every one of those years, my household has been a net tax loss - even when it was just one kid in MCPS, but especially for the years when it was 2.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous RT wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Condos mean more people in a given area. Which means more bars and restaurants. Which means more people want to live there. Which drives up the prices of those condos. Which drives up the prices of houses developers need to buy and tear down in order to build more condos. Which means even more people in a given area. Which means more bars and restaurants, which means more people want to live there, which drives up the prices even further.

People understood intuitively before we changed the term “gentrification” to “upzoning.”

There isn’t a coherent explanation of how changing zoning laws reduce housing prices. Typically the opposite happens — prices go up, by a lot.

There is, and it's based on supply and demand. Just like "gentrification" and "upzoning" are different things, so "there is no explanation" and "I don't like the explanation" are different things, too.

So what’s the explanation?

https://googlethatforyou.com?q=housing%20zoning%20supply%20demand

‘If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.’ —Albert Einstein

Very weird that no one can explain how upzoning reduces housing prices

Either you've testified at public hearings about housing policy, in which case you've heard plenty of pro-housing people explain this plenty of times, or you're a person who has a lot of time to post on DCUM, in which case a person might wonder how come you don't have the time to testify at public hearings.

Either you sincerely want to know, in which case you can go educate yourself, or you don't sincerely want to know, in which case feel free to waste your own time.

DP. I've heard a lot of people offer theories of how upzoning causes prices to fall, but it doesn't matter if no one builds. In the case of Montgomery County, there is a lot of approved density that isn't getting built because it doesn't pencil. Upzoning residential areas isn't going to change that and is more likely to suppress very high density construction because those projects will face more competition from lower density projects that are cheaper to build but can get the same price as a very high-density project.

I don't think anyone has said that re-zoning, by itself, will make housing more affordable for more people. Obviously there also has to be building following on the re-zoning.

I will note that there is no "approved density" that isn't getting built. Builders don't build "density". Builders build housing. Now, would zoning changes lead builders to make different decisions about where to build housing? Yes, that's the whole point.

OK. There’s a lot of approved housing that isn’t getting built. You have to make silly semantic arguments because the facts are really bad for your position. The problem isn’t zoning. The problem is developers aren’t building because they think the market in Montgomery County is poor. Anything built here is at a disadvantage to things built in DC and especially NOVA because those places have more jobs, so it’s higher risk.

"Approved housing" isn't fungible. As a matter of fact, your argument supports re-zoning. Builders aren't building approved housing, under the current zoning, because it doesn't pencil out. Assuming we want builders to be building housing (which I do, though you may not), that's a reason to change the zoning, to give builders more options for projects that do pencil out.

Nothing is going to pencil out at scale without more jobs. You think you’re going to get 50 quads to replace the 200-unit high-rise that’s not getting built? YIMBYs in this county have done it a great disservice by promoting jobless urbanism while also supporting policies that are hostile to business.

The builders who can do 200 units are few and far between. Many of them have big investments in CRE or multi-family that are getting crushed, losing many millions of equity in current structures.

However, there are a lot more crappy little builders in this area who can do 2-4 unit flips. That's who give donations of a couple thousand to each Council member to get up-zoning. These guys can't handle a big project like 200 units, but they can toss together a crew and local bank + hard money financing to pump out 4 unit garden apartments.

So yeah, that's the game.

You don’t get market changing housing deliveries without the developers who can deliver 200 units.

The issue with 200+ units is that all the kids there need to go to one school. At least with garden apartment you are spreading the numbers across a bunch of schools/infrastructure.

The County needs to be careful with up-zoning; these ticky-tack flippers will want to pile garden apartments into the same 3-4 neighborhoods inside the Beltway and put even further strain on the same 2 high school pyramids. The County should parcel it out evenly across MoCo, perhaps even by putting limits on a single HS pyramid (e.g., once BCC catchment gets 75 units approved, no more will be approved until every MoCo HS pyramid hits the 75 threshold).

There's a real risk of concentration on infrastructure if the County doesn't do this carefully. Flippers are going to aim for the land with highest return and quickest chance of sale - they move in a herd.

Back to central planning...

The "ticky tacky flippers" are flipping currently, and it's fully allowed currently. In which case, I think they should be allowed to build a building with 2-3-4 units instead of one gargantuan McMansion. It also wouldn't be "garden apartments", it would just be a basic duplex, triplex, or fourplex building.

At least the McMansion doesn’t utterly overwhelm the existing schools. MoCo has a school supply problem at all levels.

Montgomery County also has a housing supply problem, and I think that housing is even more important than schools.

DP. I disagree, in a way.

Housing is more important than schools in the same way that food is more important than housing. Kind of a hierarchy of needs thing.

However, just as the need for housing might eclipse the preference for a particular cuisine or brand of food where other food is available, the need for adequate public facilities such as schools might be more important than the preference for additional housing of a particular type where other housing (hi-rise instead of triplex, townhouse a modest distance away, rental instead of a purchase, etc.) is available.

There's a calculus to it, to be sure, depending on where on the spectrum of need and preference these might fall. There is enough housing stock available and enough properties on which such housing could be built with current zoning that the school overcrowding factor is the more pressing element in many localities, especially closer in, where the policy change is aimed. It also is far less flexible than housing inventory, taking greater lead times to address, and it is directly negatively impacted by the even greater housing inventory envisioned in the upzoning under consideration. The same may well be the case for other essential public services.

Montgomery Planning and the County Council should be taking a more holistic and community/resident-inclusive approach.

People can't live in housing that could be built. The housing has to actually be built in order for people to live in it.

That DP to whom you responded (07:42 was someone else). This is missing the point and/or is a response that cherry-picks housing to be built.

There is both housing that is now available and housing that could be built under current zoning (a very large amount under-built close to Metro). People can live in the currently available housing. They may want alternatives to that in the same areas, and I don't begrudge them that interest, but I would say that the need for public services, like schools, trumps that interest in localities where current capacities are not adequate.

While one could say that the same people who would move into newly zoned/built multiplex properties would then just fill that existing capacity, resilulting in the same level of overcrowding, this would ignore the market dynamic based on that desire for those alternatives -- without the zoning change, many families will choose to live slightly farther out in areas that aren't currently overcrowded. This would result in marginally longer commutes and the various ills that might come from that, but I would say that those ills are of less consequence, in both the short and long terms, than the ills of inadequate public facility capacity.

MoCo should address the situation in a way such that we are sure that capacities of public facilities like schools are made adequate by the time that the additional housing of interest comes online. That has been ignored/under-addressed, now, for far too long, and we shouldn't be trusting, then, that the various agencies will change to make it work without a more directly coordinated approach.

Increasing supply and lowering housing prices creates induced demand for housing too. To some extent if you build new low income housing people will appear to fill these housing units. There is also induced demand by people using more space per person when affordability increases. I’m not saying that we should not pursue more affordable housing. However, MOCO will end having a disproportionate share of tax negative residents if it is not careful. Growth in low income residents needs to be matched with new high income residents or the county will not have enough money to maintain the current level of services.

Induced demand? How many houses do people need? I can see how building roads induces demand: people will drive more. But will people want more than one house?

There is absolutely induced demand from building more houses. Building more houses will decrease the rate out migration and create a stronger incentive for people to relocate to the county. In moderation this is good, but the fiscal implications can be disastrous if growth is too rapid. Induced demand encouraging relocation be the strongest for low income household because they are the most responsive to housing prices and have limited budgets.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous RT wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Condos mean more people in a given area. Which means more bars and restaurants. Which means more people want to live there. Which drives up the prices of those condos. Which drives up the prices of houses developers need to buy and tear down in order to build more condos. Which means even more people in a given area. Which means more bars and restaurants, which means more people want to live there, which drives up the prices even further.

People understood intuitively before we changed the term “gentrification” to “upzoning.”

There isn’t a coherent explanation of how changing zoning laws reduce housing prices. Typically the opposite happens — prices go up, by a lot.

There is, and it's based on supply and demand. Just like "gentrification" and "upzoning" are different things, so "there is no explanation" and "I don't like the explanation" are different things, too.

So what’s the explanation?

https://googlethatforyou.com?q=housing%20zoning%20supply%20demand

‘If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.’ —Albert Einstein

Very weird that no one can explain how upzoning reduces housing prices

Either you've testified at public hearings about housing policy, in which case you've heard plenty of pro-housing people explain this plenty of times, or you're a person who has a lot of time to post on DCUM, in which case a person might wonder how come you don't have the time to testify at public hearings.

Either you sincerely want to know, in which case you can go educate yourself, or you don't sincerely want to know, in which case feel free to waste your own time.

DP. I've heard a lot of people offer theories of how upzoning causes prices to fall, but it doesn't matter if no one builds. In the case of Montgomery County, there is a lot of approved density that isn't getting built because it doesn't pencil. Upzoning residential areas isn't going to change that and is more likely to suppress very high density construction because those projects will face more competition from lower density projects that are cheaper to build but can get the same price as a very high-density project.

I don't think anyone has said that re-zoning, by itself, will make housing more affordable for more people. Obviously there also has to be building following on the re-zoning.

I will note that there is no "approved density" that isn't getting built. Builders don't build "density". Builders build housing. Now, would zoning changes lead builders to make different decisions about where to build housing? Yes, that's the whole point.

OK. There’s a lot of approved housing that isn’t getting built. You have to make silly semantic arguments because the facts are really bad for your position. The problem isn’t zoning. The problem is developers aren’t building because they think the market in Montgomery County is poor. Anything built here is at a disadvantage to things built in DC and especially NOVA because those places have more jobs, so it’s higher risk.

"Approved housing" isn't fungible. As a matter of fact, your argument supports re-zoning. Builders aren't building approved housing, under the current zoning, because it doesn't pencil out. Assuming we want builders to be building housing (which I do, though you may not), that's a reason to change the zoning, to give builders more options for projects that do pencil out.

Nothing is going to pencil out at scale without more jobs. You think you’re going to get 50 quads to replace the 200-unit high-rise that’s not getting built? YIMBYs in this county have done it a great disservice by promoting jobless urbanism while also supporting policies that are hostile to business.

The builders who can do 200 units are few and far between. Many of them have big investments in CRE or multi-family that are getting crushed, losing many millions of equity in current structures.

However, there are a lot more crappy little builders in this area who can do 2-4 unit flips. That's who give donations of a couple thousand to each Council member to get up-zoning. These guys can't handle a big project like 200 units, but they can toss together a crew and local bank + hard money financing to pump out 4 unit garden apartments.

So yeah, that's the game.

You don’t get market changing housing deliveries without the developers who can deliver 200 units.

The issue with 200+ units is that all the kids there need to go to one school. At least with garden apartment you are spreading the numbers across a bunch of schools/infrastructure.

The County needs to be careful with up-zoning; these ticky-tack flippers will want to pile garden apartments into the same 3-4 neighborhoods inside the Beltway and put even further strain on the same 2 high school pyramids. The County should parcel it out evenly across MoCo, perhaps even by putting limits on a single HS pyramid (e.g., once BCC catchment gets 75 units approved, no more will be approved until every MoCo HS pyramid hits the 75 threshold).

There's a real risk of concentration on infrastructure if the County doesn't do this carefully. Flippers are going to aim for the land with highest return and quickest chance of sale - they move in a herd.

Back to central planning...

The "ticky tacky flippers" are flipping currently, and it's fully allowed currently. In which case, I think they should be allowed to build a building with 2-3-4 units instead of one gargantuan McMansion. It also wouldn't be "garden apartments", it would just be a basic duplex, triplex, or fourplex building.

At least the McMansion doesn’t utterly overwhelm the existing schools. MoCo has a school supply problem at all levels.

Montgomery County also has a housing supply problem, and I think that housing is even more important than schools.

DP. I disagree, in a way.

Housing is more important than schools in the same way that food is more important than housing. Kind of a hierarchy of needs thing.

However, just as the need for housing might eclipse the preference for a particular cuisine or brand of food where other food is available, the need for adequate public facilities such as schools might be more important than the preference for additional housing of a particular type where other housing (hi-rise instead of triplex, townhouse a modest distance away, rental instead of a purchase, etc.) is available.

There's a calculus to it, to be sure, depending on where on the spectrum of need and preference these might fall. There is enough housing stock available and enough properties on which such housing could be built with current zoning that the school overcrowding factor is the more pressing element in many localities, especially closer in, where the policy change is aimed. It also is far less flexible than housing inventory, taking greater lead times to address, and it is directly negatively impacted by the even greater housing inventory envisioned in the upzoning under consideration. The same may well be the case for other essential public services.

Montgomery Planning and the County Council should be taking a more holistic and community/resident-inclusive approach.

People can't live in housing that could be built. The housing has to actually be built in order for people to live in it.

That DP to whom you responded (07:42 was someone else). This is missing the point and/or is a response that cherry-picks housing to be built.

There is both housing that is now available and housing that could be built under current zoning (a very large amount under-built close to Metro). People can live in the currently available housing. They may want alternatives to that in the same areas, and I don't begrudge them that interest, but I would say that the need for public services, like schools, trumps that interest in localities where current capacities are not adequate.

While one could say that the same people who would move into newly zoned/built multiplex properties would then just fill that existing capacity, resilulting in the same level of overcrowding, this would ignore the market dynamic based on that desire for those alternatives -- without the zoning change, many families will choose to live slightly farther out in areas that aren't currently overcrowded. This would result in marginally longer commutes and the various ills that might come from that, but I would say that those ills are of less consequence, in both the short and long terms, than the ills of inadequate public facility capacity.

MoCo should address the situation in a way such that we are sure that capacities of public facilities like schools are made adequate by the time that the additional housing of interest comes online. That has been ignored/under-addressed, now, for far too long, and we shouldn't be trusting, then, that the various agencies will change to make it work without a more directly coordinated approach.

Increasing supply and lowering housing prices creates induced demand for housing too. To some extent if you build new low income housing people will appear to fill these housing units. There is also induced demand by people using more space per person when affordability increases. I’m not saying that we should not pursue more affordable housing. However, MOCO will end having a disproportionate share of tax negative residents if it is not careful. Growth in low income residents needs to be matched with new high income residents or the county will not have enough money to maintain the current level of services.

Induced demand? How many houses do people need? I can see how building roads induces demand: people will drive more. But will people want more than one house?

There is absolutely induced demand from building more houses. Building more houses will decrease the rate out migration and create a stronger incentive for people to relocate to the county. In moderation this is good, but the fiscal implications can be disastrous if growth is too rapid. Induced demand encouraging relocation be the strongest for low income household because they are the most responsive to housing prices and have limited budgets.

That just sounds like housing units will be filled. Sounds good. That's the point. More county.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous RT wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Condos mean more people in a given area. Which means more bars and restaurants. Which means more people want to live there. Which drives up the prices of those condos. Which drives up the prices of houses developers need to buy and tear down in order to build more condos. Which means even more people in a given area. Which means more bars and restaurants, which means more people want to live there, which drives up the prices even further.

People understood intuitively before we changed the term “gentrification” to “upzoning.”

There isn’t a coherent explanation of how changing zoning laws reduce housing prices. Typically the opposite happens — prices go up, by a lot.

There is, and it's based on supply and demand. Just like "gentrification" and "upzoning" are different things, so "there is no explanation" and "I don't like the explanation" are different things, too.

So what’s the explanation?

https://googlethatforyou.com?q=housing%20zoning%20supply%20demand

‘If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.’ —Albert Einstein

Very weird that no one can explain how upzoning reduces housing prices

Either you've testified at public hearings about housing policy, in which case you've heard plenty of pro-housing people explain this plenty of times, or you're a person who has a lot of time to post on DCUM, in which case a person might wonder how come you don't have the time to testify at public hearings.

Either you sincerely want to know, in which case you can go educate yourself, or you don't sincerely want to know, in which case feel free to waste your own time.

DP. I've heard a lot of people offer theories of how upzoning causes prices to fall, but it doesn't matter if no one builds. In the case of Montgomery County, there is a lot of approved density that isn't getting built because it doesn't pencil. Upzoning residential areas isn't going to change that and is more likely to suppress very high density construction because those projects will face more competition from lower density projects that are cheaper to build but can get the same price as a very high-density project.

I don't think anyone has said that re-zoning, by itself, will make housing more affordable for more people. Obviously there also has to be building following on the re-zoning.

I will note that there is no "approved density" that isn't getting built. Builders don't build "density". Builders build housing. Now, would zoning changes lead builders to make different decisions about where to build housing? Yes, that's the whole point.

OK. There’s a lot of approved housing that isn’t getting built. You have to make silly semantic arguments because the facts are really bad for your position. The problem isn’t zoning. The problem is developers aren’t building because they think the market in Montgomery County is poor. Anything built here is at a disadvantage to things built in DC and especially NOVA because those places have more jobs, so it’s higher risk.

"Approved housing" isn't fungible. As a matter of fact, your argument supports re-zoning. Builders aren't building approved housing, under the current zoning, because it doesn't pencil out. Assuming we want builders to be building housing (which I do, though you may not), that's a reason to change the zoning, to give builders more options for projects that do pencil out.

Nothing is going to pencil out at scale without more jobs. You think you’re going to get 50 quads to replace the 200-unit high-rise that’s not getting built? YIMBYs in this county have done it a great disservice by promoting jobless urbanism while also supporting policies that are hostile to business.

The builders who can do 200 units are few and far between. Many of them have big investments in CRE or multi-family that are getting crushed, losing many millions of equity in current structures.

However, there are a lot more crappy little builders in this area who can do 2-4 unit flips. That's who give donations of a couple thousand to each Council member to get up-zoning. These guys can't handle a big project like 200 units, but they can toss together a crew and local bank + hard money financing to pump out 4 unit garden apartments.

So yeah, that's the game.

You don’t get market changing housing deliveries without the developers who can deliver 200 units.

The issue with 200+ units is that all the kids there need to go to one school. At least with garden apartment you are spreading the numbers across a bunch of schools/infrastructure.

The County needs to be careful with up-zoning; these ticky-tack flippers will want to pile garden apartments into the same 3-4 neighborhoods inside the Beltway and put even further strain on the same 2 high school pyramids. The County should parcel it out evenly across MoCo, perhaps even by putting limits on a single HS pyramid (e.g., once BCC catchment gets 75 units approved, no more will be approved until every MoCo HS pyramid hits the 75 threshold).

There's a real risk of concentration on infrastructure if the County doesn't do this carefully. Flippers are going to aim for the land with highest return and quickest chance of sale - they move in a herd.

Back to central planning...

The "ticky tacky flippers" are flipping currently, and it's fully allowed currently. In which case, I think they should be allowed to build a building with 2-3-4 units instead of one gargantuan McMansion. It also wouldn't be "garden apartments", it would just be a basic duplex, triplex, or fourplex building.

At least the McMansion doesn’t utterly overwhelm the existing schools. MoCo has a school supply problem at all levels.

Montgomery County also has a housing supply problem, and I think that housing is even more important than schools.

DP. I disagree, in a way.

Housing is more important than schools in the same way that food is more important than housing. Kind of a hierarchy of needs thing.

However, just as the need for housing might eclipse the preference for a particular cuisine or brand of food where other food is available, the need for adequate public facilities such as schools might be more important than the preference for additional housing of a particular type where other housing (hi-rise instead of triplex, townhouse a modest distance away, rental instead of a purchase, etc.) is available.

There's a calculus to it, to be sure, depending on where on the spectrum of need and preference these might fall. There is enough housing stock available and enough properties on which such housing could be built with current zoning that the school overcrowding factor is the more pressing element in many localities, especially closer in, where the policy change is aimed. It also is far less flexible than housing inventory, taking greater lead times to address, and it is directly negatively impacted by the even greater housing inventory envisioned in the upzoning under consideration. The same may well be the case for other essential public services.

Montgomery Planning and the County Council should be taking a more holistic and community/resident-inclusive approach.

People can't live in housing that could be built. The housing has to actually be built in order for people to live in it.

That DP to whom you responded (07:42 was someone else). This is missing the point and/or is a response that cherry-picks housing to be built.

There is both housing that is now available and housing that could be built under current zoning (a very large amount under-built close to Metro). People can live in the currently available housing. They may want alternatives to that in the same areas, and I don't begrudge them that interest, but I would say that the need for public services, like schools, trumps that interest in localities where current capacities are not adequate.

While one could say that the same people who would move into newly zoned/built multiplex properties would then just fill that existing capacity, resilulting in the same level of overcrowding, this would ignore the market dynamic based on that desire for those alternatives -- without the zoning change, many families will choose to live slightly farther out in areas that aren't currently overcrowded. This would result in marginally longer commutes and the various ills that might come from that, but I would say that those ills are of less consequence, in both the short and long terms, than the ills of inadequate public facility capacity.

MoCo should address the situation in a way such that we are sure that capacities of public facilities like schools are made adequate by the time that the additional housing of interest comes online. That has been ignored/under-addressed, now, for far too long, and we shouldn't be trusting, then, that the various agencies will change to make it work without a more directly coordinated approach.

Increasing supply and lowering housing prices creates induced demand for housing too. To some extent if you build new low income housing people will appear to fill these housing units. There is also induced demand by people using more space per person when affordability increases. I’m not saying that we should not pursue more affordable housing. However, MOCO will end having a disproportionate share of tax negative residents if it is not careful. Growth in low income residents needs to be matched with new high income residents or the county will not have enough money to maintain the current level of services.

The likelihood that a triplex with 3 families each with 1-2 students will not cost the County money is NIL. Net tax loss.

And the family that used to own that former SFH likely benefited the County. Net tax gain.

Not if they have kids in school, they're not. I've owned the SFH we live in for 20 years now and have had kids in MCPS for 15 years. For every one of those years, my household has been a net tax loss - even when it was just one kid in MCPS, but especially for the years when it was 2.

The average student generation factor is .562 for new SFH and .462 for new townhomes. Assuming the average assessed value for a new townhouse is 500k and average assessed value for new SFH is 1.2M Here’s how the numbers look. A single Quadplex unit will contribute $6,000 in property taxes, but cost the county $14,952. This means a single quad unit results in an annual net loss of $8,592 before accounting for sales and income taxes. A new SFH cost the county $16,195 a year, but contributes 12,240 in property taxes. So a new SFH creates an annual net loss of 3,955 before accounting for income and sales taxes. This new SFH household will cover most (if not all of the remaining 3,955) through sales and income taxes. The quadplex unit household will not come close to covering their remaining share of county expenses. Conclusion multifamily units are very tax negative and the county loses $1,000’s each year for every new unit. New SFH are slightly tax negative or even slightly tax positive.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:Condos mean more people in a given area. Which means more bars and restaurants. Which means more people want to live there. Which drives up the prices of those condos. Which drives up the prices of houses developers need to buy and tear down in order to build more condos. Which means even more people in a given area. Which means more bars and restaurants, which means more people want to live there, which drives up the prices even further.

People understood intuitively before we changed the term “gentrification” to “upzoning.”

There isn’t a coherent explanation of how changing zoning laws reduce housing prices. Typically the opposite happens — prices go up, by a lot.

There is, and it's based on supply and demand. Just like "gentrification" and "upzoning" are different things, so "there is no explanation" and "I don't like the explanation" are different things, too.

So what’s the explanation?

https://googlethatforyou.com?q=housing%20zoning%20supply%20demand

‘If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.’ —Albert Einstein

Very weird that no one can explain how upzoning reduces housing prices

Either you've testified at public hearings about housing policy, in which case you've heard plenty of pro-housing people explain this plenty of times, or you're a person who has a lot of time to post on DCUM, in which case a person might wonder how come you don't have the time to testify at public hearings.

Either you sincerely want to know, in which case you can go educate yourself, or you don't sincerely want to know, in which case feel free to waste your own time.

DP. I've heard a lot of people offer theories of how upzoning causes prices to fall, but it doesn't matter if no one builds. In the case of Montgomery County, there is a lot of approved density that isn't getting built because it doesn't pencil. Upzoning residential areas isn't going to change that and is more likely to suppress very high density construction because those projects will face more competition from lower density projects that are cheaper to build but can get the same price as a very high-density project.

I don't think anyone has said that re-zoning, by itself, will make housing more affordable for more people. Obviously there also has to be building following on the re-zoning.

I will note that there is no "approved density" that isn't getting built. Builders don't build "density". Builders build housing. Now, would zoning changes lead builders to make different decisions about where to build housing? Yes, that's the whole point.

OK. There’s a lot of approved housing that isn’t getting built. You have to make silly semantic arguments because the facts are really bad for your position. The problem isn’t zoning. The problem is developers aren’t building because they think the market in Montgomery County is poor. Anything built here is at a disadvantage to things built in DC and especially NOVA because those places have more jobs, so it’s higher risk.

"Approved housing" isn't fungible. As a matter of fact, your argument supports re-zoning. Builders aren't building approved housing, under the current zoning, because it doesn't pencil out. Assuming we want builders to be building housing (which I do, though you may not), that's a reason to change the zoning, to give builders more options for projects that do pencil out.

Nothing is going to pencil out at scale without more jobs. You think you’re going to get 50 quads to replace the 200-unit high-rise that’s not getting built? YIMBYs in this county have done it a great disservice by promoting jobless urbanism while also supporting policies that are hostile to business.

The builders who can do 200 units are few and far between. Many of them have big investments in CRE or multi-family that are getting crushed, losing many millions of equity in current structures.

However, there are a lot more crappy little builders in this area who can do 2-4 unit flips. That's who give donations of a couple thousand to each Council member to get up-zoning. These guys can't handle a big project like 200 units, but they can toss together a crew and local bank + hard money financing to pump out 4 unit garden apartments.

So yeah, that's the game.

You don’t get market changing housing deliveries without the developers who can deliver 200 units.

The issue with 200+ units is that all the kids there need to go to one school. At least with garden apartment you are spreading the numbers across a bunch of schools/infrastructure.

The County needs to be careful with up-zoning; these ticky-tack flippers will want to pile garden apartments into the same 3-4 neighborhoods inside the Beltway and put even further strain on the same 2 high school pyramids. The County should parcel it out evenly across MoCo, perhaps even by putting limits on a single HS pyramid (e.g., once BCC catchment gets 75 units approved, no more will be approved until every MoCo HS pyramid hits the 75 threshold).

There's a real risk of concentration on infrastructure if the County doesn't do this carefully. Flippers are going to aim for the land with highest return and quickest chance of sale - they move in a herd.

Back to central planning...

The "ticky tacky flippers" are flipping currently, and it's fully allowed currently. In which case, I think they should be allowed to build a building with 2-3-4 units instead of one gargantuan McMansion. It also wouldn't be "garden apartments", it would just be a basic duplex, triplex, or fourplex building.

At least the McMansion doesn’t utterly overwhelm the existing schools. MoCo has a school supply problem at all levels.

Montgomery County also has a housing supply problem, and I think that housing is even more important than schools.

DP. I disagree, in a way.

Housing is more important than schools in the same way that food is more important than housing. Kind of a hierarchy of needs thing.

However, just as the need for housing might eclipse the preference for a particular cuisine or brand of food where other food is available, the need for adequate public facilities such as schools might be more important than the preference for additional housing of a particular type where other housing (hi-rise instead of triplex, townhouse a modest distance away, rental instead of a purchase, etc.) is available.

There's a calculus to it, to be sure, depending on where on the spectrum of need and preference these might fall. There is enough housing stock available and enough properties on which such housing could be built with current zoning that the school overcrowding factor is the more pressing element in many localities, especially closer in, where the policy change is aimed. It also is far less flexible than housing inventory, taking greater lead times to address, and it is directly negatively impacted by the even greater housing inventory envisioned in the upzoning under consideration. The same may well be the case for other essential public services.

Montgomery Planning and the County Council should be taking a more holistic and community/resident-inclusive approach.

People can't live in housing that could be built. The housing has to actually be built in order for people to live in it.

That DP to whom you responded (07:42 was someone else). This is missing the point and/or is a response that cherry-picks housing to be built.

There is both housing that is now available and housing that could be built under current zoning (a very large amount under-built close to Metro). People can live in the currently available housing. They may want alternatives to that in the same areas, and I don't begrudge them that interest, but I would say that the need for public services, like schools, trumps that interest in localities where current capacities are not adequate.

While one could say that the same people who would move into newly zoned/built multiplex properties would then just fill that existing capacity, resilulting in the same level of overcrowding, this would ignore the market dynamic based on that desire for those alternatives -- without the zoning change, many families will choose to live slightly farther out in areas that aren't currently overcrowded. This would result in marginally longer commutes and the various ills that might come from that, but I would say that those ills are of less consequence, in both the short and long terms, than the ills of inadequate public facility capacity.

MoCo should address the situation in a way such that we are sure that capacities of public facilities like schools are made adequate by the time that the additional housing of interest comes online. That has been ignored/under-addressed, now, for far too long, and we shouldn't be trusting, then, that the various agencies will change to make it work without a more directly coordinated approach.

Increasing supply and lowering housing prices creates induced demand for housing too. To some extent if you build new low income housing people will appear to fill these housing units. There is also induced demand by people using more space per person when affordability increases. I’m not saying that we should not pursue more affordable housing. However, MOCO will end having a disproportionate share of tax negative residents if it is not careful. Growth in low income residents needs to be matched with new high income residents or the county will not have enough money to maintain the current level of services.

Induced demand? How many houses do people need? I can see how building roads induces demand: people will drive more. But will people want more than one house?

There is absolutely induced demand from building more houses. Building more houses will decrease the rate out migration and create a stronger incentive for people to relocate to the county. In moderation this is good, but the fiscal implications can be disastrous if growth is too rapid. Induced demand encouraging relocation be the strongest for low income household because they are the most responsive to housing prices and have limited budgets.

That just sounds like housing units will be filled. Sounds good. That's the point. More county.

Of course they'll be bought. There's 6.5 million people in the DMW. Do you think people like commuting from West Virginia?

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:Condos mean more people in a given area. Which means more bars and restaurants. Which means more people want to live there. Which drives up the prices of those condos. Which drives up the prices of houses developers need to buy and tear down in order to build more condos. Which means even more people in a given area. Which means more bars and restaurants, which means more people want to live there, which drives up the prices even further.

People understood intuitively before we changed the term “gentrification” to “upzoning.”

There isn’t a coherent explanation of how changing zoning laws reduce housing prices. Typically the opposite happens — prices go up, by a lot.

There is, and it's based on supply and demand. Just like "gentrification" and "upzoning" are different things, so "there is no explanation" and "I don't like the explanation" are different things, too.

So what’s the explanation?

https://googlethatforyou.com?q=housing%20zoning%20supply%20demand

‘If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.’ —Albert Einstein

Very weird that no one can explain how upzoning reduces housing prices

Either you've testified at public hearings about housing policy, in which case you've heard plenty of pro-housing people explain this plenty of times, or you're a person who has a lot of time to post on DCUM, in which case a person might wonder how come you don't have the time to testify at public hearings.

Either you sincerely want to know, in which case you can go educate yourself, or you don't sincerely want to know, in which case feel free to waste your own time.

DP. I've heard a lot of people offer theories of how upzoning causes prices to fall, but it doesn't matter if no one builds. In the case of Montgomery County, there is a lot of approved density that isn't getting built because it doesn't pencil. Upzoning residential areas isn't going to change that and is more likely to suppress very high density construction because those projects will face more competition from lower density projects that are cheaper to build but can get the same price as a very high-density project.

I don't think anyone has said that re-zoning, by itself, will make housing more affordable for more people. Obviously there also has to be building following on the re-zoning.

I will note that there is no "approved density" that isn't getting built. Builders don't build "density". Builders build housing. Now, would zoning changes lead builders to make different decisions about where to build housing? Yes, that's the whole point.

OK. There’s a lot of approved housing that isn’t getting built. You have to make silly semantic arguments because the facts are really bad for your position. The problem isn’t zoning. The problem is developers aren’t building because they think the market in Montgomery County is poor. Anything built here is at a disadvantage to things built in DC and especially NOVA because those places have more jobs, so it’s higher risk.

"Approved housing" isn't fungible. As a matter of fact, your argument supports re-zoning. Builders aren't building approved housing, under the current zoning, because it doesn't pencil out. Assuming we want builders to be building housing (which I do, though you may not), that's a reason to change the zoning, to give builders more options for projects that do pencil out.

Nothing is going to pencil out at scale without more jobs. You think you’re going to get 50 quads to replace the 200-unit high-rise that’s not getting built? YIMBYs in this county have done it a great disservice by promoting jobless urbanism while also supporting policies that are hostile to business.

The builders who can do 200 units are few and far between. Many of them have big investments in CRE or multi-family that are getting crushed, losing many millions of equity in current structures.

However, there are a lot more crappy little builders in this area who can do 2-4 unit flips. That's who give donations of a couple thousand to each Council member to get up-zoning. These guys can't handle a big project like 200 units, but they can toss together a crew and local bank + hard money financing to pump out 4 unit garden apartments.

So yeah, that's the game.

You don’t get market changing housing deliveries without the developers who can deliver 200 units.

The issue with 200+ units is that all the kids there need to go to one school. At least with garden apartment you are spreading the numbers across a bunch of schools/infrastructure.

The County needs to be careful with up-zoning; these ticky-tack flippers will want to pile garden apartments into the same 3-4 neighborhoods inside the Beltway and put even further strain on the same 2 high school pyramids. The County should parcel it out evenly across MoCo, perhaps even by putting limits on a single HS pyramid (e.g., once BCC catchment gets 75 units approved, no more will be approved until every MoCo HS pyramid hits the 75 threshold).

There's a real risk of concentration on infrastructure if the County doesn't do this carefully. Flippers are going to aim for the land with highest return and quickest chance of sale - they move in a herd.

Back to central planning...

The "ticky tacky flippers" are flipping currently, and it's fully allowed currently. In which case, I think they should be allowed to build a building with 2-3-4 units instead of one gargantuan McMansion. It also wouldn't be "garden apartments", it would just be a basic duplex, triplex, or fourplex building.

At least the McMansion doesn’t utterly overwhelm the existing schools. MoCo has a school supply problem at all levels.

Montgomery County also has a housing supply problem, and I think that housing is even more important than schools.

DP. I disagree, in a way.

Housing is more important than schools in the same way that food is more important than housing. Kind of a hierarchy of needs thing.

However, just as the need for housing might eclipse the preference for a particular cuisine or brand of food where other food is available, the need for adequate public facilities such as schools might be more important than the preference for additional housing of a particular type where other housing (hi-rise instead of triplex, townhouse a modest distance away, rental instead of a purchase, etc.) is available.

There's a calculus to it, to be sure, depending on where on the spectrum of need and preference these might fall. There is enough housing stock available and enough properties on which such housing could be built with current zoning that the school overcrowding factor is the more pressing element in many localities, especially closer in, where the policy change is aimed. It also is far less flexible than housing inventory, taking greater lead times to address, and it is directly negatively impacted by the even greater housing inventory envisioned in the upzoning under consideration. The same may well be the case for other essential public services.

Montgomery Planning and the County Council should be taking a more holistic and community/resident-inclusive approach.

People can't live in housing that could be built. The housing has to actually be built in order for people to live in it.

That DP to whom you responded (07:42 was someone else). This is missing the point and/or is a response that cherry-picks housing to be built.

There is both housing that is now available and housing that could be built under current zoning (a very large amount under-built close to Metro). People can live in the currently available housing. They may want alternatives to that in the same areas, and I don't begrudge them that interest, but I would say that the need for public services, like schools, trumps that interest in localities where current capacities are not adequate.

While one could say that the same people who would move into newly zoned/built multiplex properties would then just fill that existing capacity, resilulting in the same level of overcrowding, this would ignore the market dynamic based on that desire for those alternatives -- without the zoning change, many families will choose to live slightly farther out in areas that aren't currently overcrowded. This would result in marginally longer commutes and the various ills that might come from that, but I would say that those ills are of less consequence, in both the short and long terms, than the ills of inadequate public facility capacity.

MoCo should address the situation in a way such that we are sure that capacities of public facilities like schools are made adequate by the time that the additional housing of interest comes online. That has been ignored/under-addressed, now, for far too long, and we shouldn't be trusting, then, that the various agencies will change to make it work without a more directly coordinated approach.

Increasing supply and lowering housing prices creates induced demand for housing too. To some extent if you build new low income housing people will appear to fill these housing units. There is also induced demand by people using more space per person when affordability increases. I’m not saying that we should not pursue more affordable housing. However, MOCO will end having a disproportionate share of tax negative residents if it is not careful. Growth in low income residents needs to be matched with new high income residents or the county will not have enough money to maintain the current level of services.

The likelihood that a triplex with 3 families each with 1-2 students will not cost the County money is NIL. Net tax loss.

And the family that used to own that former SFH likely benefited the County. Net tax gain.

Not if they have kids in school, they're not. I've owned the SFH we live in for 20 years now and have had kids in MCPS for 15 years. For every one of those years, my household has been a net tax loss - even when it was just one kid in MCPS, but especially for the years when it was 2.

The average student generation factor is .562 for new SFH and .462 for new townhomes. Assuming the average assessed value for a new townhouse is 500k and average assessed value for new SFH is 1.2M Here’s how the numbers look. A single Quadplex unit will contribute $6,000 in property taxes, but cost the county $14,952. This means a single quad unit results in an annual net loss of $8,592 before accounting for sales and income taxes. A new SFH cost the county $16,195 a year, but contributes 12,240 in property taxes. So a new SFH creates an annual net loss of 3,955 before accounting for income and sales taxes. This new SFH household will cover most (if not all of the remaining 3,955) through sales and income taxes. The quadplex unit household will not come close to covering their remaining share of county expenses. Conclusion multifamily units are very tax negative and the county loses $1,000’s each year for every new unit. New SFH are slightly tax negative or even slightly tax positive.

The above numbers prove the point. Residents living in a quad unit will need to pay at least $8592 in income taxes to avoid being a loss. Residents in a SFH will need to pay only $3955 in income taxes. The latter is almost guaranteed. One, it is a smaller loss that needs to be recouped thru income taxes. Two, residents living in those SFHs are generally in higher income brackets paying even more in income taxes. Third, above analysis does not take into account that many SFHs in MC are assessed at much higher than 1.2M, resulting in even higher property taxes, meaning that property taxes themselves come close to paying the MC costs of residents of higher end SFHs. [Of course, MC is focused on chasing away those residents, a poor financial move if there is one.]

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous RT wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Condos mean more people in a given area. Which means more bars and restaurants. Which means more people want to live there. Which drives up the prices of those condos. Which drives up the prices of houses developers need to buy and tear down in order to build more condos. Which means even more people in a given area. Which means more bars and restaurants, which means more people want to live there, which drives up the prices even further.

People understood intuitively before we changed the term “gentrification” to “upzoning.”

There isn’t a coherent explanation of how changing zoning laws reduce housing prices. Typically the opposite happens — prices go up, by a lot.

There is, and it's based on supply and demand. Just like "gentrification" and "upzoning" are different things, so "there is no explanation" and "I don't like the explanation" are different things, too.

So what’s the explanation?

https://googlethatforyou.com?q=housing%20zoning%20supply%20demand

‘If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.’ —Albert Einstein

Very weird that no one can explain how upzoning reduces housing prices

Either you've testified at public hearings about housing policy, in which case you've heard plenty of pro-housing people explain this plenty of times, or you're a person who has a lot of time to post on DCUM, in which case a person might wonder how come you don't have the time to testify at public hearings.

Either you sincerely want to know, in which case you can go educate yourself, or you don't sincerely want to know, in which case feel free to waste your own time.

DP. I've heard a lot of people offer theories of how upzoning causes prices to fall, but it doesn't matter if no one builds. In the case of Montgomery County, there is a lot of approved density that isn't getting built because it doesn't pencil. Upzoning residential areas isn't going to change that and is more likely to suppress very high density construction because those projects will face more competition from lower density projects that are cheaper to build but can get the same price as a very high-density project.

I don't think anyone has said that re-zoning, by itself, will make housing more affordable for more people. Obviously there also has to be building following on the re-zoning.

I will note that there is no "approved density" that isn't getting built. Builders don't build "density". Builders build housing. Now, would zoning changes lead builders to make different decisions about where to build housing? Yes, that's the whole point.

OK. There’s a lot of approved housing that isn’t getting built. You have to make silly semantic arguments because the facts are really bad for your position. The problem isn’t zoning. The problem is developers aren’t building because they think the market in Montgomery County is poor. Anything built here is at a disadvantage to things built in DC and especially NOVA because those places have more jobs, so it’s higher risk.

"Approved housing" isn't fungible. As a matter of fact, your argument supports re-zoning. Builders aren't building approved housing, under the current zoning, because it doesn't pencil out. Assuming we want builders to be building housing (which I do, though you may not), that's a reason to change the zoning, to give builders more options for projects that do pencil out.

Nothing is going to pencil out at scale without more jobs. You think you’re going to get 50 quads to replace the 200-unit high-rise that’s not getting built? YIMBYs in this county have done it a great disservice by promoting jobless urbanism while also supporting policies that are hostile to business.

The builders who can do 200 units are few and far between. Many of them have big investments in CRE or multi-family that are getting crushed, losing many millions of equity in current structures.

However, there are a lot more crappy little builders in this area who can do 2-4 unit flips. That's who give donations of a couple thousand to each Council member to get up-zoning. These guys can't handle a big project like 200 units, but they can toss together a crew and local bank + hard money financing to pump out 4 unit garden apartments.

So yeah, that's the game.

You don’t get market changing housing deliveries without the developers who can deliver 200 units.

The issue with 200+ units is that all the kids there need to go to one school. At least with garden apartment you are spreading the numbers across a bunch of schools/infrastructure.

The County needs to be careful with up-zoning; these ticky-tack flippers will want to pile garden apartments into the same 3-4 neighborhoods inside the Beltway and put even further strain on the same 2 high school pyramids. The County should parcel it out evenly across MoCo, perhaps even by putting limits on a single HS pyramid (e.g., once BCC catchment gets 75 units approved, no more will be approved until every MoCo HS pyramid hits the 75 threshold).

There's a real risk of concentration on infrastructure if the County doesn't do this carefully. Flippers are going to aim for the land with highest return and quickest chance of sale - they move in a herd.

Back to central planning...

The "ticky tacky flippers" are flipping currently, and it's fully allowed currently. In which case, I think they should be allowed to build a building with 2-3-4 units instead of one gargantuan McMansion. It also wouldn't be "garden apartments", it would just be a basic duplex, triplex, or fourplex building.

At least the McMansion doesn’t utterly overwhelm the existing schools. MoCo has a school supply problem at all levels.

Montgomery County also has a housing supply problem, and I think that housing is even more important than schools.

DP. I disagree, in a way.

Housing is more important than schools in the same way that food is more important than housing. Kind of a hierarchy of needs thing.

However, just as the need for housing might eclipse the preference for a particular cuisine or brand of food where other food is available, the need for adequate public facilities such as schools might be more important than the preference for additional housing of a particular type where other housing (hi-rise instead of triplex, townhouse a modest distance away, rental instead of a purchase, etc.) is available.

There's a calculus to it, to be sure, depending on where on the spectrum of need and preference these might fall. There is enough housing stock available and enough properties on which such housing could be built with current zoning that the school overcrowding factor is the more pressing element in many localities, especially closer in, where the policy change is aimed. It also is far less flexible than housing inventory, taking greater lead times to address, and it is directly negatively impacted by the even greater housing inventory envisioned in the upzoning under consideration. The same may well be the case for other essential public services.

Montgomery Planning and the County Council should be taking a more holistic and community/resident-inclusive approach.

People can't live in housing that could be built. The housing has to actually be built in order for people to live in it.

That DP to whom you responded (07:42 was someone else). This is missing the point and/or is a response that cherry-picks housing to be built.

There is both housing that is now available and housing that could be built under current zoning (a very large amount under-built close to Metro). People can live in the currently available housing. They may want alternatives to that in the same areas, and I don't begrudge them that interest, but I would say that the need for public services, like schools, trumps that interest in localities where current capacities are not adequate.

While one could say that the same people who would move into newly zoned/built multiplex properties would then just fill that existing capacity, resilulting in the same level of overcrowding, this would ignore the market dynamic based on that desire for those alternatives -- without the zoning change, many families will choose to live slightly farther out in areas that aren't currently overcrowded. This would result in marginally longer commutes and the various ills that might come from that, but I would say that those ills are of less consequence, in both the short and long terms, than the ills of inadequate public facility capacity.

MoCo should address the situation in a way such that we are sure that capacities of public facilities like schools are made adequate by the time that the additional housing of interest comes online. That has been ignored/under-addressed, now, for far too long, and we shouldn't be trusting, then, that the various agencies will change to make it work without a more directly coordinated approach.

Increasing supply and lowering housing prices creates induced demand for housing too. To some extent if you build new low income housing people will appear to fill these housing units. There is also induced demand by people using more space per person when affordability increases. I’m not saying that we should not pursue more affordable housing. However, MOCO will end having a disproportionate share of tax negative residents if it is not careful. Growth in low income residents needs to be matched with new high income residents or the county will not have enough money to maintain the current level of services.

Induced demand? How many houses do people need? I can see how building roads induces demand: people will drive more. But will people want more than one house?

There is absolutely induced demand from building more houses. Building more houses will decrease the rate out migration and create a stronger incentive for people to relocate to the county. In moderation this is good, but the fiscal implications can be disastrous if growth is too rapid. Induced demand encouraging relocation be the strongest for low income household because they are the most responsive to housing prices and have limited budgets.

"I don't think MCPS should build housing that poor people might move live in, it would just encourage them."

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:Condos mean more people in a given area. Which means more bars and restaurants. Which means more people want to live there. Which drives up the prices of those condos. Which drives up the prices of houses developers need to buy and tear down in order to build more condos. Which means even more people in a given area. Which means more bars and restaurants, which means more people want to live there, which drives up the prices even further.

People understood intuitively before we changed the term “gentrification” to “upzoning.”

There isn’t a coherent explanation of how changing zoning laws reduce housing prices. Typically the opposite happens — prices go up, by a lot.

There is, and it's based on supply and demand. Just like "gentrification" and "upzoning" are different things, so "there is no explanation" and "I don't like the explanation" are different things, too.

So what’s the explanation?

https://googlethatforyou.com?q=housing%20zoning%20supply%20demand

‘If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.’ —Albert Einstein

Very weird that no one can explain how upzoning reduces housing prices

Either you've testified at public hearings about housing policy, in which case you've heard plenty of pro-housing people explain this plenty of times, or you're a person who has a lot of time to post on DCUM, in which case a person might wonder how come you don't have the time to testify at public hearings.

Either you sincerely want to know, in which case you can go educate yourself, or you don't sincerely want to know, in which case feel free to waste your own time.

DP. I've heard a lot of people offer theories of how upzoning causes prices to fall, but it doesn't matter if no one builds. In the case of Montgomery County, there is a lot of approved density that isn't getting built because it doesn't pencil. Upzoning residential areas isn't going to change that and is more likely to suppress very high density construction because those projects will face more competition from lower density projects that are cheaper to build but can get the same price as a very high-density project.

I don't think anyone has said that re-zoning, by itself, will make housing more affordable for more people. Obviously there also has to be building following on the re-zoning.

I will note that there is no "approved density" that isn't getting built. Builders don't build "density". Builders build housing. Now, would zoning changes lead builders to make different decisions about where to build housing? Yes, that's the whole point.

OK. There’s a lot of approved housing that isn’t getting built. You have to make silly semantic arguments because the facts are really bad for your position. The problem isn’t zoning. The problem is developers aren’t building because they think the market in Montgomery County is poor. Anything built here is at a disadvantage to things built in DC and especially NOVA because those places have more jobs, so it’s higher risk.

"Approved housing" isn't fungible. As a matter of fact, your argument supports re-zoning. Builders aren't building approved housing, under the current zoning, because it doesn't pencil out. Assuming we want builders to be building housing (which I do, though you may not), that's a reason to change the zoning, to give builders more options for projects that do pencil out.

Nothing is going to pencil out at scale without more jobs. You think you’re going to get 50 quads to replace the 200-unit high-rise that’s not getting built? YIMBYs in this county have done it a great disservice by promoting jobless urbanism while also supporting policies that are hostile to business.

The builders who can do 200 units are few and far between. Many of them have big investments in CRE or multi-family that are getting crushed, losing many millions of equity in current structures.

However, there are a lot more crappy little builders in this area who can do 2-4 unit flips. That's who give donations of a couple thousand to each Council member to get up-zoning. These guys can't handle a big project like 200 units, but they can toss together a crew and local bank + hard money financing to pump out 4 unit garden apartments.

So yeah, that's the game.

You don’t get market changing housing deliveries without the developers who can deliver 200 units.

The issue with 200+ units is that all the kids there need to go to one school. At least with garden apartment you are spreading the numbers across a bunch of schools/infrastructure.

The County needs to be careful with up-zoning; these ticky-tack flippers will want to pile garden apartments into the same 3-4 neighborhoods inside the Beltway and put even further strain on the same 2 high school pyramids. The County should parcel it out evenly across MoCo, perhaps even by putting limits on a single HS pyramid (e.g., once BCC catchment gets 75 units approved, no more will be approved until every MoCo HS pyramid hits the 75 threshold).

There's a real risk of concentration on infrastructure if the County doesn't do this carefully. Flippers are going to aim for the land with highest return and quickest chance of sale - they move in a herd.

Back to central planning...

The "ticky tacky flippers" are flipping currently, and it's fully allowed currently. In which case, I think they should be allowed to build a building with 2-3-4 units instead of one gargantuan McMansion. It also wouldn't be "garden apartments", it would just be a basic duplex, triplex, or fourplex building.

At least the McMansion doesn’t utterly overwhelm the existing schools. MoCo has a school supply problem at all levels.

Montgomery County also has a housing supply problem, and I think that housing is even more important than schools.

DP. I disagree, in a way.

Housing is more important than schools in the same way that food is more important than housing. Kind of a hierarchy of needs thing.

However, just as the need for housing might eclipse the preference for a particular cuisine or brand of food where other food is available, the need for adequate public facilities such as schools might be more important than the preference for additional housing of a particular type where other housing (hi-rise instead of triplex, townhouse a modest distance away, rental instead of a purchase, etc.) is available.

There's a calculus to it, to be sure, depending on where on the spectrum of need and preference these might fall. There is enough housing stock available and enough properties on which such housing could be built with current zoning that the school overcrowding factor is the more pressing element in many localities, especially closer in, where the policy change is aimed. It also is far less flexible than housing inventory, taking greater lead times to address, and it is directly negatively impacted by the even greater housing inventory envisioned in the upzoning under consideration. The same may well be the case for other essential public services.

Montgomery Planning and the County Council should be taking a more holistic and community/resident-inclusive approach.

People can't live in housing that could be built. The housing has to actually be built in order for people to live in it.

That DP to whom you responded (07:42 was someone else). This is missing the point and/or is a response that cherry-picks housing to be built.

There is both housing that is now available and housing that could be built under current zoning (a very large amount under-built close to Metro). People can live in the currently available housing. They may want alternatives to that in the same areas, and I don't begrudge them that interest, but I would say that the need for public services, like schools, trumps that interest in localities where current capacities are not adequate.

While one could say that the same people who would move into newly zoned/built multiplex properties would then just fill that existing capacity, resilulting in the same level of overcrowding, this would ignore the market dynamic based on that desire for those alternatives -- without the zoning change, many families will choose to live slightly farther out in areas that aren't currently overcrowded. This would result in marginally longer commutes and the various ills that might come from that, but I would say that those ills are of less consequence, in both the short and long terms, than the ills of inadequate public facility capacity.

MoCo should address the situation in a way such that we are sure that capacities of public facilities like schools are made adequate by the time that the additional housing of interest comes online. That has been ignored/under-addressed, now, for far too long, and we shouldn't be trusting, then, that the various agencies will change to make it work without a more directly coordinated approach.

Increasing supply and lowering housing prices creates induced demand for housing too. To some extent if you build new low income housing people will appear to fill these housing units. There is also induced demand by people using more space per person when affordability increases. I’m not saying that we should not pursue more affordable housing. However, MOCO will end having a disproportionate share of tax negative residents if it is not careful. Growth in low income residents needs to be matched with new high income residents or the county will not have enough money to maintain the current level of services.

Induced demand? How many houses do people need? I can see how building roads induces demand: people will drive more. But will people want more than one house?

There is absolutely induced demand from building more houses. Building more houses will decrease the rate out migration and create a stronger incentive for people to relocate to the county. In moderation this is good, but the fiscal implications can be disastrous if growth is too rapid. Induced demand encouraging relocation be the strongest for low income household because they are the most responsive to housing prices and have limited budgets.

"I don't think MCPS should build housing that poor people might move live in, it would just encourage them."

+1

Basically the gist of those anti purple line posts as well.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous RT wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Condos mean more people in a given area. Which means more bars and restaurants. Which means more people want to live there. Which drives up the prices of those condos. Which drives up the prices of houses developers need to buy and tear down in order to build more condos. Which means even more people in a given area. Which means more bars and restaurants, which means more people want to live there, which drives up the prices even further.

People understood intuitively before we changed the term “gentrification” to “upzoning.”

There isn’t a coherent explanation of how changing zoning laws reduce housing prices. Typically the opposite happens — prices go up, by a lot.

There is, and it's based on supply and demand. Just like "gentrification" and "upzoning" are different things, so "there is no explanation" and "I don't like the explanation" are different things, too.

So what’s the explanation?

https://googlethatforyou.com?q=housing%20zoning%20supply%20demand

‘If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.’ —Albert Einstein

Very weird that no one can explain how upzoning reduces housing prices

Either you've testified at public hearings about housing policy, in which case you've heard plenty of pro-housing people explain this plenty of times, or you're a person who has a lot of time to post on DCUM, in which case a person might wonder how come you don't have the time to testify at public hearings.

Either you sincerely want to know, in which case you can go educate yourself, or you don't sincerely want to know, in which case feel free to waste your own time.

DP. I've heard a lot of people offer theories of how upzoning causes prices to fall, but it doesn't matter if no one builds. In the case of Montgomery County, there is a lot of approved density that isn't getting built because it doesn't pencil. Upzoning residential areas isn't going to change that and is more likely to suppress very high density construction because those projects will face more competition from lower density projects that are cheaper to build but can get the same price as a very high-density project.

I don't think anyone has said that re-zoning, by itself, will make housing more affordable for more people. Obviously there also has to be building following on the re-zoning.

I will note that there is no "approved density" that isn't getting built. Builders don't build "density". Builders build housing. Now, would zoning changes lead builders to make different decisions about where to build housing? Yes, that's the whole point.

OK. There’s a lot of approved housing that isn’t getting built. You have to make silly semantic arguments because the facts are really bad for your position. The problem isn’t zoning. The problem is developers aren’t building because they think the market in Montgomery County is poor. Anything built here is at a disadvantage to things built in DC and especially NOVA because those places have more jobs, so it’s higher risk.

"Approved housing" isn't fungible. As a matter of fact, your argument supports re-zoning. Builders aren't building approved housing, under the current zoning, because it doesn't pencil out. Assuming we want builders to be building housing (which I do, though you may not), that's a reason to change the zoning, to give builders more options for projects that do pencil out.

Nothing is going to pencil out at scale without more jobs. You think you’re going to get 50 quads to replace the 200-unit high-rise that’s not getting built? YIMBYs in this county have done it a great disservice by promoting jobless urbanism while also supporting policies that are hostile to business.

The builders who can do 200 units are few and far between. Many of them have big investments in CRE or multi-family that are getting crushed, losing many millions of equity in current structures.

However, there are a lot more crappy little builders in this area who can do 2-4 unit flips. That's who give donations of a couple thousand to each Council member to get up-zoning. These guys can't handle a big project like 200 units, but they can toss together a crew and local bank + hard money financing to pump out 4 unit garden apartments.

So yeah, that's the game.

You don’t get market changing housing deliveries without the developers who can deliver 200 units.

The issue with 200+ units is that all the kids there need to go to one school. At least with garden apartment you are spreading the numbers across a bunch of schools/infrastructure.

The County needs to be careful with up-zoning; these ticky-tack flippers will want to pile garden apartments into the same 3-4 neighborhoods inside the Beltway and put even further strain on the same 2 high school pyramids. The County should parcel it out evenly across MoCo, perhaps even by putting limits on a single HS pyramid (e.g., once BCC catchment gets 75 units approved, no more will be approved until every MoCo HS pyramid hits the 75 threshold).

There's a real risk of concentration on infrastructure if the County doesn't do this carefully. Flippers are going to aim for the land with highest return and quickest chance of sale - they move in a herd.

Back to central planning...

The "ticky tacky flippers" are flipping currently, and it's fully allowed currently. In which case, I think they should be allowed to build a building with 2-3-4 units instead of one gargantuan McMansion. It also wouldn't be "garden apartments", it would just be a basic duplex, triplex, or fourplex building.

At least the McMansion doesn’t utterly overwhelm the existing schools. MoCo has a school supply problem at all levels.

Montgomery County also has a housing supply problem, and I think that housing is even more important than schools.

DP. I disagree, in a way.

Housing is more important than schools in the same way that food is more important than housing. Kind of a hierarchy of needs thing.

However, just as the need for housing might eclipse the preference for a particular cuisine or brand of food where other food is available, the need for adequate public facilities such as schools might be more important than the preference for additional housing of a particular type where other housing (hi-rise instead of triplex, townhouse a modest distance away, rental instead of a purchase, etc.) is available.

There's a calculus to it, to be sure, depending on where on the spectrum of need and preference these might fall. There is enough housing stock available and enough properties on which such housing could be built with current zoning that the school overcrowding factor is the more pressing element in many localities, especially closer in, where the policy change is aimed. It also is far less flexible than housing inventory, taking greater lead times to address, and it is directly negatively impacted by the even greater housing inventory envisioned in the upzoning under consideration. The same may well be the case for other essential public services.

Montgomery Planning and the County Council should be taking a more holistic and community/resident-inclusive approach.

People can't live in housing that could be built. The housing has to actually be built in order for people to live in it.

That DP to whom you responded (07:42 was someone else). This is missing the point and/or is a response that cherry-picks housing to be built.

There is both housing that is now available and housing that could be built under current zoning (a very large amount under-built close to Metro). People can live in the currently available housing. They may want alternatives to that in the same areas, and I don't begrudge them that interest, but I would say that the need for public services, like schools, trumps that interest in localities where current capacities are not adequate.

While one could say that the same people who would move into newly zoned/built multiplex properties would then just fill that existing capacity, resilulting in the same level of overcrowding, this would ignore the market dynamic based on that desire for those alternatives -- without the zoning change, many families will choose to live slightly farther out in areas that aren't currently overcrowded. This would result in marginally longer commutes and the various ills that might come from that, but I would say that those ills are of less consequence, in both the short and long terms, than the ills of inadequate public facility capacity.

MoCo should address the situation in a way such that we are sure that capacities of public facilities like schools are made adequate by the time that the additional housing of interest comes online. That has been ignored/under-addressed, now, for far too long, and we shouldn't be trusting, then, that the various agencies will change to make it work without a more directly coordinated approach.

Increasing supply and lowering housing prices creates induced demand for housing too. To some extent if you build new low income housing people will appear to fill these housing units. There is also induced demand by people using more space per person when affordability increases. I’m not saying that we should not pursue more affordable housing. However, MOCO will end having a disproportionate share of tax negative residents if it is not careful. Growth in low income residents needs to be matched with new high income residents or the county will not have enough money to maintain the current level of services.

Induced demand? How many houses do people need? I can see how building roads induces demand: people will drive more. But will people want more than one house?

There is absolutely induced demand from building more houses. Building more houses will decrease the rate out migration and create a stronger incentive for people to relocate to the county. In moderation this is good, but the fiscal implications can be disastrous if growth is too rapid. Induced demand encouraging relocation be the strongest for low income household because they are the most responsive to housing prices and have limited budgets.

"I don't think MCPS should build housing that poor people might move live in, it would just encourage them."

+1

Basically the gist of those anti purple line posts as well.

If the county decides to do this and voters support this development that’s great, but this does not resolve the funding question. How do you suggest that gets additional revenue to cover this shortfall? MOCO Local income taxes are already at the statutory cap. This funding shortfall from tax negative development will need to be covered by raising property taxes. What is the upper limit for property tax rates that you think is reasonable for MOCO to charge. 1.0%, 1.5%, 2.0%, etc. There is no right answer to this question, I’m just curious what you believe the max reasonable real estate property tax rate is?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous RT wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Condos mean more people in a given area. Which means more bars and restaurants. Which means more people want to live there. Which drives up the prices of those condos. Which drives up the prices of houses developers need to buy and tear down in order to build more condos. Which means even more people in a given area. Which means more bars and restaurants, which means more people want to live there, which drives up the prices even further.

People understood intuitively before we changed the term “gentrification” to “upzoning.”

There isn’t a coherent explanation of how changing zoning laws reduce housing prices. Typically the opposite happens — prices go up, by a lot.

There is, and it's based on supply and demand. Just like "gentrification" and "upzoning" are different things, so "there is no explanation" and "I don't like the explanation" are different things, too.

So what’s the explanation?

https://googlethatforyou.com?q=housing%20zoning%20supply%20demand

‘If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.’ —Albert Einstein

Very weird that no one can explain how upzoning reduces housing prices

Either you've testified at public hearings about housing policy, in which case you've heard plenty of pro-housing people explain this plenty of times, or you're a person who has a lot of time to post on DCUM, in which case a person might wonder how come you don't have the time to testify at public hearings.

Either you sincerely want to know, in which case you can go educate yourself, or you don't sincerely want to know, in which case feel free to waste your own time.

DP. I've heard a lot of people offer theories of how upzoning causes prices to fall, but it doesn't matter if no one builds. In the case of Montgomery County, there is a lot of approved density that isn't getting built because it doesn't pencil. Upzoning residential areas isn't going to change that and is more likely to suppress very high density construction because those projects will face more competition from lower density projects that are cheaper to build but can get the same price as a very high-density project.

I don't think anyone has said that re-zoning, by itself, will make housing more affordable for more people. Obviously there also has to be building following on the re-zoning.

I will note that there is no "approved density" that isn't getting built. Builders don't build "density". Builders build housing. Now, would zoning changes lead builders to make different decisions about where to build housing? Yes, that's the whole point.

OK. There’s a lot of approved housing that isn’t getting built. You have to make silly semantic arguments because the facts are really bad for your position. The problem isn’t zoning. The problem is developers aren’t building because they think the market in Montgomery County is poor. Anything built here is at a disadvantage to things built in DC and especially NOVA because those places have more jobs, so it’s higher risk.

"Approved housing" isn't fungible. As a matter of fact, your argument supports re-zoning. Builders aren't building approved housing, under the current zoning, because it doesn't pencil out. Assuming we want builders to be building housing (which I do, though you may not), that's a reason to change the zoning, to give builders more options for projects that do pencil out.

Nothing is going to pencil out at scale without more jobs. You think you’re going to get 50 quads to replace the 200-unit high-rise that’s not getting built? YIMBYs in this county have done it a great disservice by promoting jobless urbanism while also supporting policies that are hostile to business.

The builders who can do 200 units are few and far between. Many of them have big investments in CRE or multi-family that are getting crushed, losing many millions of equity in current structures.

However, there are a lot more crappy little builders in this area who can do 2-4 unit flips. That's who give donations of a couple thousand to each Council member to get up-zoning. These guys can't handle a big project like 200 units, but they can toss together a crew and local bank + hard money financing to pump out 4 unit garden apartments.

So yeah, that's the game.

You don’t get market changing housing deliveries without the developers who can deliver 200 units.

The issue with 200+ units is that all the kids there need to go to one school. At least with garden apartment you are spreading the numbers across a bunch of schools/infrastructure.

The County needs to be careful with up-zoning; these ticky-tack flippers will want to pile garden apartments into the same 3-4 neighborhoods inside the Beltway and put even further strain on the same 2 high school pyramids. The County should parcel it out evenly across MoCo, perhaps even by putting limits on a single HS pyramid (e.g., once BCC catchment gets 75 units approved, no more will be approved until every MoCo HS pyramid hits the 75 threshold).

There's a real risk of concentration on infrastructure if the County doesn't do this carefully. Flippers are going to aim for the land with highest return and quickest chance of sale - they move in a herd.

Back to central planning...

The "ticky tacky flippers" are flipping currently, and it's fully allowed currently. In which case, I think they should be allowed to build a building with 2-3-4 units instead of one gargantuan McMansion. It also wouldn't be "garden apartments", it would just be a basic duplex, triplex, or fourplex building.

At least the McMansion doesn’t utterly overwhelm the existing schools. MoCo has a school supply problem at all levels.

Montgomery County also has a housing supply problem, and I think that housing is even more important than schools.

DP. I disagree, in a way.

Housing is more important than schools in the same way that food is more important than housing. Kind of a hierarchy of needs thing.

However, just as the need for housing might eclipse the preference for a particular cuisine or brand of food where other food is available, the need for adequate public facilities such as schools might be more important than the preference for additional housing of a particular type where other housing (hi-rise instead of triplex, townhouse a modest distance away, rental instead of a purchase, etc.) is available.

There's a calculus to it, to be sure, depending on where on the spectrum of need and preference these might fall. There is enough housing stock available and enough properties on which such housing could be built with current zoning that the school overcrowding factor is the more pressing element in many localities, especially closer in, where the policy change is aimed. It also is far less flexible than housing inventory, taking greater lead times to address, and it is directly negatively impacted by the even greater housing inventory envisioned in the upzoning under consideration. The same may well be the case for other essential public services.

Montgomery Planning and the County Council should be taking a more holistic and community/resident-inclusive approach.

People can't live in housing that could be built. The housing has to actually be built in order for people to live in it.

That DP to whom you responded (07:42 was someone else). This is missing the point and/or is a response that cherry-picks housing to be built.

There is both housing that is now available and housing that could be built under current zoning (a very large amount under-built close to Metro). People can live in the currently available housing. They may want alternatives to that in the same areas, and I don't begrudge them that interest, but I would say that the need for public services, like schools, trumps that interest in localities where current capacities are not adequate.

While one could say that the same people who would move into newly zoned/built multiplex properties would then just fill that existing capacity, resilulting in the same level of overcrowding, this would ignore the market dynamic based on that desire for those alternatives -- without the zoning change, many families will choose to live slightly farther out in areas that aren't currently overcrowded. This would result in marginally longer commutes and the various ills that might come from that, but I would say that those ills are of less consequence, in both the short and long terms, than the ills of inadequate public facility capacity.

MoCo should address the situation in a way such that we are sure that capacities of public facilities like schools are made adequate by the time that the additional housing of interest comes online. That has been ignored/under-addressed, now, for far too long, and we shouldn't be trusting, then, that the various agencies will change to make it work without a more directly coordinated approach.

Increasing supply and lowering housing prices creates induced demand for housing too. To some extent if you build new low income housing people will appear to fill these housing units. There is also induced demand by people using more space per person when affordability increases. I’m not saying that we should not pursue more affordable housing. However, MOCO will end having a disproportionate share of tax negative residents if it is not careful. Growth in low income residents needs to be matched with new high income residents or the county will not have enough money to maintain the current level of services.

Induced demand? How many houses do people need? I can see how building roads induces demand: people will drive more. But will people want more than one house?

There is absolutely induced demand from building more houses. Building more houses will decrease the rate out migration and create a stronger incentive for people to relocate to the county. In moderation this is good, but the fiscal implications can be disastrous if growth is too rapid. Induced demand encouraging relocation be the strongest for low income household because they are the most responsive to housing prices and have limited budgets.

"I don't think MCPS should build housing that poor people might move live in, it would just encourage them."

+1

Basically the gist of those anti purple line posts as well.

If the county decides to do this and voters support this development that’s great, but this does not resolve the funding question. How do you suggest that gets additional revenue to cover this shortfall? MOCO Local income taxes are already at the statutory cap. This funding shortfall from tax negative development will need to be covered by raising property taxes. What is the upper limit for property tax rates that you think is reasonable for MOCO to charge. 1.0%, 1.5%, 2.0%, etc. There is no right answer to this question, I’m just curious what you believe the max reasonable real estate property tax rate is?

Thank you for bringing some numbers to this discussion - very informative.

The County could tackle this a number of ways:
1. increase the property tax rate on the quadplexes relative to existing SFHs given the realities of the fiscal shortfall
2. higher (punitive?) property taxes on SFHs/townhouses/individual apartment units that are not “primary residences” of the owner, whether that be a natural person or an LLC (though don’t assess a penalty tax rate on multifamily properties…this is actually desired investment)
3. Punitive taxes on STR income/properties

In short, the County should strive to have every home filled with tax-paying occupants as their “primary residence.” Unoccupied 2nd homes and investment homes reduce affordability, though also probably put less stress on the overall fiscal picture. It’s a tough balancing act for policymakers and the County CFO.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:Condos mean more people in a given area. Which means more bars and restaurants. Which means more people want to live there. Which drives up the prices of those condos. Which drives up the prices of houses developers need to buy and tear down in order to build more condos. Which means even more people in a given area. Which means more bars and restaurants, which means more people want to live there, which drives up the prices even further.

People understood intuitively before we changed the term “gentrification” to “upzoning.”

There isn’t a coherent explanation of how changing zoning laws reduce housing prices. Typically the opposite happens — prices go up, by a lot.

There is, and it's based on supply and demand. Just like "gentrification" and "upzoning" are different things, so "there is no explanation" and "I don't like the explanation" are different things, too.

So what’s the explanation?

https://googlethatforyou.com?q=housing%20zoning%20supply%20demand

‘If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.’ —Albert Einstein

Very weird that no one can explain how upzoning reduces housing prices

Either you've testified at public hearings about housing policy, in which case you've heard plenty of pro-housing people explain this plenty of times, or you're a person who has a lot of time to post on DCUM, in which case a person might wonder how come you don't have the time to testify at public hearings.

Either you sincerely want to know, in which case you can go educate yourself, or you don't sincerely want to know, in which case feel free to waste your own time.

DP. I've heard a lot of people offer theories of how upzoning causes prices to fall, but it doesn't matter if no one builds. In the case of Montgomery County, there is a lot of approved density that isn't getting built because it doesn't pencil. Upzoning residential areas isn't going to change that and is more likely to suppress very high density construction because those projects will face more competition from lower density projects that are cheaper to build but can get the same price as a very high-density project.

I don't think anyone has said that re-zoning, by itself, will make housing more affordable for more people. Obviously there also has to be building following on the re-zoning.

I will note that there is no "approved density" that isn't getting built. Builders don't build "density". Builders build housing. Now, would zoning changes lead builders to make different decisions about where to build housing? Yes, that's the whole point.

OK. There’s a lot of approved housing that isn’t getting built. You have to make silly semantic arguments because the facts are really bad for your position. The problem isn’t zoning. The problem is developers aren’t building because they think the market in Montgomery County is poor. Anything built here is at a disadvantage to things built in DC and especially NOVA because those places have more jobs, so it’s higher risk.

"Approved housing" isn't fungible. As a matter of fact, your argument supports re-zoning. Builders aren't building approved housing, under the current zoning, because it doesn't pencil out. Assuming we want builders to be building housing (which I do, though you may not), that's a reason to change the zoning, to give builders more options for projects that do pencil out.

Nothing is going to pencil out at scale without more jobs. You think you’re going to get 50 quads to replace the 200-unit high-rise that’s not getting built? YIMBYs in this county have done it a great disservice by promoting jobless urbanism while also supporting policies that are hostile to business.

The builders who can do 200 units are few and far between. Many of them have big investments in CRE or multi-family that are getting crushed, losing many millions of equity in current structures.

However, there are a lot more crappy little builders in this area who can do 2-4 unit flips. That's who give donations of a couple thousand to each Council member to get up-zoning. These guys can't handle a big project like 200 units, but they can toss together a crew and local bank + hard money financing to pump out 4 unit garden apartments.

So yeah, that's the game.

You don’t get market changing housing deliveries without the developers who can deliver 200 units.

The issue with 200+ units is that all the kids there need to go to one school. At least with garden apartment you are spreading the numbers across a bunch of schools/infrastructure.

The County needs to be careful with up-zoning; these ticky-tack flippers will want to pile garden apartments into the same 3-4 neighborhoods inside the Beltway and put even further strain on the same 2 high school pyramids. The County should parcel it out evenly across MoCo, perhaps even by putting limits on a single HS pyramid (e.g., once BCC catchment gets 75 units approved, no more will be approved until every MoCo HS pyramid hits the 75 threshold).

There's a real risk of concentration on infrastructure if the County doesn't do this carefully. Flippers are going to aim for the land with highest return and quickest chance of sale - they move in a herd.

Back to central planning...

The "ticky tacky flippers" are flipping currently, and it's fully allowed currently. In which case, I think they should be allowed to build a building with 2-3-4 units instead of one gargantuan McMansion. It also wouldn't be "garden apartments", it would just be a basic duplex, triplex, or fourplex building.

At least the McMansion doesn’t utterly overwhelm the existing schools. MoCo has a school supply problem at all levels.

Montgomery County also has a housing supply problem, and I think that housing is even more important than schools.

DP. I disagree, in a way.

Housing is more important than schools in the same way that food is more important than housing. Kind of a hierarchy of needs thing.

However, just as the need for housing might eclipse the preference for a particular cuisine or brand of food where other food is available, the need for adequate public facilities such as schools might be more important than the preference for additional housing of a particular type where other housing (hi-rise instead of triplex, townhouse a modest distance away, rental instead of a purchase, etc.) is available.

There's a calculus to it, to be sure, depending on where on the spectrum of need and preference these might fall. There is enough housing stock available and enough properties on which such housing could be built with current zoning that the school overcrowding factor is the more pressing element in many localities, especially closer in, where the policy change is aimed. It also is far less flexible than housing inventory, taking greater lead times to address, and it is directly negatively impacted by the even greater housing inventory envisioned in the upzoning under consideration. The same may well be the case for other essential public services.

Montgomery Planning and the County Council should be taking a more holistic and community/resident-inclusive approach.

People can't live in housing that could be built. The housing has to actually be built in order for people to live in it.

That DP to whom you responded (07:42 was someone else). This is missing the point and/or is a response that cherry-picks housing to be built.

There is both housing that is now available and housing that could be built under current zoning (a very large amount under-built close to Metro). People can live in the currently available housing. They may want alternatives to that in the same areas, and I don't begrudge them that interest, but I would say that the need for public services, like schools, trumps that interest in localities where current capacities are not adequate.

While one could say that the same people who would move into newly zoned/built multiplex properties would then just fill that existing capacity, resilulting in the same level of overcrowding, this would ignore the market dynamic based on that desire for those alternatives -- without the zoning change, many families will choose to live slightly farther out in areas that aren't currently overcrowded. This would result in marginally longer commutes and the various ills that might come from that, but I would say that those ills are of less consequence, in both the short and long terms, than the ills of inadequate public facility capacity.

MoCo should address the situation in a way such that we are sure that capacities of public facilities like schools are made adequate by the time that the additional housing of interest comes online. That has been ignored/under-addressed, now, for far too long, and we shouldn't be trusting, then, that the various agencies will change to make it work without a more directly coordinated approach.

Increasing supply and lowering housing prices creates induced demand for housing too. To some extent if you build new low income housing people will appear to fill these housing units. There is also induced demand by people using more space per person when affordability increases. I’m not saying that we should not pursue more affordable housing. However, MOCO will end having a disproportionate share of tax negative residents if it is not careful. Growth in low income residents needs to be matched with new high income residents or the county will not have enough money to maintain the current level of services.

Induced demand? How many houses do people need? I can see how building roads induces demand: people will drive more. But will people want more than one house?

There is absolutely induced demand from building more houses. Building more houses will decrease the rate out migration and create a stronger incentive for people to relocate to the county. In moderation this is good, but the fiscal implications can be disastrous if growth is too rapid. Induced demand encouraging relocation be the strongest for low income household because they are the most responsive to housing prices and have limited budgets.

"I don't think MCPS should build housing that poor people might move live in, it would just encourage them."

+1

Basically the gist of those anti purple line posts as well.

If the county decides to do this and voters support this development that’s great, but this does not resolve the funding question. How do you suggest that gets additional revenue to cover this shortfall? MOCO Local income taxes are already at the statutory cap. This funding shortfall from tax negative development will need to be covered by raising property taxes. What is the upper limit for property tax rates that you think is reasonable for MOCO to charge. 1.0%, 1.5%, 2.0%, etc. There is no right answer to this question, I’m just curious what you believe the max reasonable real estate property tax rate is?

You're making whole bunch of bonkers assumptions to come up with your ideas about future tax revenue and then saying we should base housing policy based on your future tax revenue ideas based on your bonkers assumptions.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:Condos mean more people in a given area. Which means more bars and restaurants. Which means more people want to live there. Which drives up the prices of those condos. Which drives up the prices of houses developers need to buy and tear down in order to build more condos. Which means even more people in a given area. Which means more bars and restaurants, which means more people want to live there, which drives up the prices even further.

People understood intuitively before we changed the term “gentrification” to “upzoning.”

There isn’t a coherent explanation of how changing zoning laws reduce housing prices. Typically the opposite happens — prices go up, by a lot.

There is, and it's based on supply and demand. Just like "gentrification" and "upzoning" are different things, so "there is no explanation" and "I don't like the explanation" are different things, too.

So what’s the explanation?

https://googlethatforyou.com?q=housing%20zoning%20supply%20demand

‘If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.’ —Albert Einstein

Very weird that no one can explain how upzoning reduces housing prices

Either you've testified at public hearings about housing policy, in which case you've heard plenty of pro-housing people explain this plenty of times, or you're a person who has a lot of time to post on DCUM, in which case a person might wonder how come you don't have the time to testify at public hearings.

Either you sincerely want to know, in which case you can go educate yourself, or you don't sincerely want to know, in which case feel free to waste your own time.

DP. I've heard a lot of people offer theories of how upzoning causes prices to fall, but it doesn't matter if no one builds. In the case of Montgomery County, there is a lot of approved density that isn't getting built because it doesn't pencil. Upzoning residential areas isn't going to change that and is more likely to suppress very high density construction because those projects will face more competition from lower density projects that are cheaper to build but can get the same price as a very high-density project.

I don't think anyone has said that re-zoning, by itself, will make housing more affordable for more people. Obviously there also has to be building following on the re-zoning.

I will note that there is no "approved density" that isn't getting built. Builders don't build "density". Builders build housing. Now, would zoning changes lead builders to make different decisions about where to build housing? Yes, that's the whole point.

OK. There’s a lot of approved housing that isn’t getting built. You have to make silly semantic arguments because the facts are really bad for your position. The problem isn’t zoning. The problem is developers aren’t building because they think the market in Montgomery County is poor. Anything built here is at a disadvantage to things built in DC and especially NOVA because those places have more jobs, so it’s higher risk.

"Approved housing" isn't fungible. As a matter of fact, your argument supports re-zoning. Builders aren't building approved housing, under the current zoning, because it doesn't pencil out. Assuming we want builders to be building housing (which I do, though you may not), that's a reason to change the zoning, to give builders more options for projects that do pencil out.

Nothing is going to pencil out at scale without more jobs. You think you’re going to get 50 quads to replace the 200-unit high-rise that’s not getting built? YIMBYs in this county have done it a great disservice by promoting jobless urbanism while also supporting policies that are hostile to business.

The builders who can do 200 units are few and far between. Many of them have big investments in CRE or multi-family that are getting crushed, losing many millions of equity in current structures.

However, there are a lot more crappy little builders in this area who can do 2-4 unit flips. That's who give donations of a couple thousand to each Council member to get up-zoning. These guys can't handle a big project like 200 units, but they can toss together a crew and local bank + hard money financing to pump out 4 unit garden apartments.

So yeah, that's the game.

You don’t get market changing housing deliveries without the developers who can deliver 200 units.

The issue with 200+ units is that all the kids there need to go to one school. At least with garden apartment you are spreading the numbers across a bunch of schools/infrastructure.

The County needs to be careful with up-zoning; these ticky-tack flippers will want to pile garden apartments into the same 3-4 neighborhoods inside the Beltway and put even further strain on the same 2 high school pyramids. The County should parcel it out evenly across MoCo, perhaps even by putting limits on a single HS pyramid (e.g., once BCC catchment gets 75 units approved, no more will be approved until every MoCo HS pyramid hits the 75 threshold).

There's a real risk of concentration on infrastructure if the County doesn't do this carefully. Flippers are going to aim for the land with highest return and quickest chance of sale - they move in a herd.

Back to central planning...

The "ticky tacky flippers" are flipping currently, and it's fully allowed currently. In which case, I think they should be allowed to build a building with 2-3-4 units instead of one gargantuan McMansion. It also wouldn't be "garden apartments", it would just be a basic duplex, triplex, or fourplex building.

At least the McMansion doesn’t utterly overwhelm the existing schools. MoCo has a school supply problem at all levels.

Montgomery County also has a housing supply problem, and I think that housing is even more important than schools.

DP. I disagree, in a way.

Housing is more important than schools in the same way that food is more important than housing. Kind of a hierarchy of needs thing.

However, just as the need for housing might eclipse the preference for a particular cuisine or brand of food where other food is available, the need for adequate public facilities such as schools might be more important than the preference for additional housing of a particular type where other housing (hi-rise instead of triplex, townhouse a modest distance away, rental instead of a purchase, etc.) is available.

There's a calculus to it, to be sure, depending on where on the spectrum of need and preference these might fall. There is enough housing stock available and enough properties on which such housing could be built with current zoning that the school overcrowding factor is the more pressing element in many localities, especially closer in, where the policy change is aimed. It also is far less flexible than housing inventory, taking greater lead times to address, and it is directly negatively impacted by the even greater housing inventory envisioned in the upzoning under consideration. The same may well be the case for other essential public services.

Montgomery Planning and the County Council should be taking a more holistic and community/resident-inclusive approach.

People can't live in housing that could be built. The housing has to actually be built in order for people to live in it.

That DP to whom you responded (07:42 was someone else). This is missing the point and/or is a response that cherry-picks housing to be built.

There is both housing that is now available and housing that could be built under current zoning (a very large amount under-built close to Metro). People can live in the currently available housing. They may want alternatives to that in the same areas, and I don't begrudge them that interest, but I would say that the need for public services, like schools, trumps that interest in localities where current capacities are not adequate.

While one could say that the same people who would move into newly zoned/built multiplex properties would then just fill that existing capacity, resilulting in the same level of overcrowding, this would ignore the market dynamic based on that desire for those alternatives -- without the zoning change, many families will choose to live slightly farther out in areas that aren't currently overcrowded. This would result in marginally longer commutes and the various ills that might come from that, but I would say that those ills are of less consequence, in both the short and long terms, than the ills of inadequate public facility capacity.

MoCo should address the situation in a way such that we are sure that capacities of public facilities like schools are made adequate by the time that the additional housing of interest comes online. That has been ignored/under-addressed, now, for far too long, and we shouldn't be trusting, then, that the various agencies will change to make it work without a more directly coordinated approach.

Oh, we're back to the "there is no housing shortage, it's just people who want to live in areas/housing they can't afford" ideas.

Nice hyperbole/strawman you use, there...

There is a shortage of the kind of housing that is desired. There are enough currently unoccupied units to meet current need, but it may not be of the type desired in the locations most desired (either for home by individuals or for growth by county policy makers). Some of those locations might absorb additional housing with current levels of public facilities/school capacities, but many would not. We ahould not he encouraging population growth in areas where these are lacking.

Instead, let's address getting that housing going in all of those areas by ensuring adequate levels of public facilities/school capacities, only triggering the allowance when that has been accomplished/is easily foreseen in the immediate future.

It's kind of meaningless to say that there is currently enough unoccupied housing to meet current need (aside from the fact that people don't want to and/or can't afford to live in that housing).

Again, a strawman, there.

The post I'd started with in this exchange ("DP. I disagree, in a way...") was pointing out that while housing as a need is more important than education (just as food is more important than housing), a preferred type/location (within a region) of housing, given a budget, is not more important than the need for adequate public facilities, including schools that are not overcrowded.

When evaluating relative priorities, you might have a different opinion (or say that adequate public facilities, themselves, represent a preference instead of a need), but then we simply disagree (and while the need for housing trumps the need for schools, housing preference may not trump the preference for adequate facilities; again, it's a calculus). I'd say that characterizing preference for a type of housing as need in this particular evaluation, however, is incorrect.

Eh. If you're going to recategorize housing needs as housing preferences, you should also recategorize school needs as school preferences. "Adequate" housing is just as much as matter of opinion as "adequate" facilities.

Same DP. Not sure why you bothered to write that, unless just to get a word in to leave a misimpression of my thoughts, as I had already said as much in the post to which you replied:

"When evaluating relative priorities, you might have a different opinion (or say that adequate public facilities, themselves, represent a preference instead of a need), but then we simply disagree (and while the need for housing trumps the need for schools, housing preference may not trump the preference for adequate facilities; again, it's a calculus)."

From my view, that which is being advocated in relation to upzoning is closer to addressing a preference, given the current alternatives available, when compared to that which should be addressed from a schools/public facilities standpoint where those schools/facilities are at capacity or, in many cases, overbooked. That upzoning, in such cases, just sets up for an underserved (or further underserved) community.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Condos mean more people in a given area. Which means more bars and restaurants. Which means more people want to live there. Which drives up the prices of those condos. Which drives up the prices of houses developers need to buy and tear down in order to build more condos. Which means even more people in a given area. Which means more bars and restaurants, which means more people want to live there, which drives up the prices even further.

People understood intuitively before we changed the term “gentrification” to “upzoning.”

There isn’t a coherent explanation of how changing zoning laws reduce housing prices. Typically the opposite happens — prices go up, by a lot.

There is, and it's based on supply and demand. Just like "gentrification" and "upzoning" are different things, so "there is no explanation" and "I don't like the explanation" are different things, too.

So what’s the explanation?

https://googlethatforyou.com?q=housing%20zoning%20supply%20demand

‘If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.’ —Albert Einstein

Very weird that no one can explain how upzoning reduces housing prices

Either you've testified at public hearings about housing policy, in which case you've heard plenty of pro-housing people explain this plenty of times, or you're a person who has a lot of time to post on DCUM, in which case a person might wonder how come you don't have the time to testify at public hearings.

Either you sincerely want to know, in which case you can go educate yourself, or you don't sincerely want to know, in which case feel free to waste your own time.

DP. I've heard a lot of people offer theories of how upzoning causes prices to fall, but it doesn't matter if no one builds. In the case of Montgomery County, there is a lot of approved density that isn't getting built because it doesn't pencil. Upzoning residential areas isn't going to change that and is more likely to suppress very high density construction because those projects will face more competition from lower density projects that are cheaper to build but can get the same price as a very high-density project.

I don't think anyone has said that re-zoning, by itself, will make housing more affordable for more people. Obviously there also has to be building following on the re-zoning.

I will note that there is no "approved density" that isn't getting built. Builders don't build "density". Builders build housing. Now, would zoning changes lead builders to make different decisions about where to build housing? Yes, that's the whole point.

OK. There’s a lot of approved housing that isn’t getting built. You have to make silly semantic arguments because the facts are really bad for your position. The problem isn’t zoning. The problem is developers aren’t building because they think the market in Montgomery County is poor. Anything built here is at a disadvantage to things built in DC and especially NOVA because those places have more jobs, so it’s higher risk.

"Approved housing" isn't fungible. As a matter of fact, your argument supports re-zoning. Builders aren't building approved housing, under the current zoning, because it doesn't pencil out. Assuming we want builders to be building housing (which I do, though you may not), that's a reason to change the zoning, to give builders more options for projects that do pencil out.

Nothing is going to pencil out at scale without more jobs. You think you’re going to get 50 quads to replace the 200-unit high-rise that’s not getting built? YIMBYs in this county have done it a great disservice by promoting jobless urbanism while also supporting policies that are hostile to business.

The builders who can do 200 units are few and far between. Many of them have big investments in CRE or multi-family that are getting crushed, losing many millions of equity in current structures.

However, there are a lot more crappy little builders in this area who can do 2-4 unit flips. That's who give donations of a couple thousand to each Council member to get up-zoning. These guys can't handle a big project like 200 units, but they can toss together a crew and local bank + hard money financing to pump out 4 unit garden apartments.

So yeah, that's the game.

You don’t get market changing housing deliveries without the developers who can deliver 200 units.

The issue with 200+ units is that all the kids there need to go to one school. At least with garden apartment you are spreading the numbers across a bunch of schools/infrastructure.

The County needs to be careful with up-zoning; these ticky-tack flippers will want to pile garden apartments into the same 3-4 neighborhoods inside the Beltway and put even further strain on the same 2 high school pyramids. The County should parcel it out evenly across MoCo, perhaps even by putting limits on a single HS pyramid (e.g., once BCC catchment gets 75 units approved, no more will be approved until every MoCo HS pyramid hits the 75 threshold).

There's a real risk of concentration on infrastructure if the County doesn't do this carefully. Flippers are going to aim for the land with highest return and quickest chance of sale - they move in a herd.

Back to central planning...

The "ticky tacky flippers" are flipping currently, and it's fully allowed currently. In which case, I think they should be allowed to build a building with 2-3-4 units instead of one gargantuan McMansion. It also wouldn't be "garden apartments", it would just be a basic duplex, triplex, or fourplex building.

At least the McMansion doesn’t utterly overwhelm the existing schools. MoCo has a school supply problem at all levels.

Montgomery County also has a housing supply problem, and I think that housing is even more important than schools.

DP. I disagree, in a way.

Housing is more important than schools in the same way that food is more important than housing. Kind of a hierarchy of needs thing.

However, just as the need for housing might eclipse the preference for a particular cuisine or brand of food where other food is available, the need for adequate public facilities such as schools might be more important than the preference for additional housing of a particular type where other housing (hi-rise instead of triplex, townhouse a modest distance away, rental instead of a purchase, etc.) is available.

There's a calculus to it, to be sure, depending on where on the spectrum of need and preference these might fall. There is enough housing stock available and enough properties on which such housing could be built with current zoning that the school overcrowding factor is the more pressing element in many localities, especially closer in, where the policy change is aimed. It also is far less flexible than housing inventory, taking greater lead times to address, and it is directly negatively impacted by the even greater housing inventory envisioned in the upzoning under consideration. The same may well be the case for other essential public services.

Montgomery Planning and the County Council should be taking a more holistic and community/resident-inclusive approach.

People can't live in housing that could be built. The housing has to actually be built in order for people to live in it.

That DP to whom you responded (07:42 was someone else). This is missing the point and/or is a response that cherry-picks housing to be built.

There is both housing that is now available and housing that could be built under current zoning (a very large amount under-built close to Metro). People can live in the currently available housing. They may want alternatives to that in the same areas, and I don't begrudge them that interest, but I would say that the need for public services, like schools, trumps that interest in localities where current capacities are not adequate.

While one could say that the same people who would move into newly zoned/built multiplex properties would then just fill that existing capacity, resilulting in the same level of overcrowding, this would ignore the market dynamic based on that desire for those alternatives -- without the zoning change, many families will choose to live slightly farther out in areas that aren't currently overcrowded. This would result in marginally longer commutes and the various ills that might come from that, but I would say that those ills are of less consequence, in both the short and long terms, than the ills of inadequate public facility capacity.

MoCo should address the situation in a way such that we are sure that capacities of public facilities like schools are made adequate by the time that the additional housing of interest comes online. That has been ignored/under-addressed, now, for far too long, and we shouldn't be trusting, then, that the various agencies will change to make it work without a more directly coordinated approach.

Increasing supply and lowering housing prices creates induced demand for housing too. To some extent if you build new low income housing people will appear to fill these housing units. There is also induced demand by people using more space per person when affordability increases. I’m not saying that we should not pursue more affordable housing. However, MOCO will end having a disproportionate share of tax negative residents if it is not careful. Growth in low income residents needs to be matched with new high income residents or the county will not have enough money to maintain the current level of services.

Induced demand? How many houses do people need? I can see how building roads induces demand: people will drive more. But will people want more than one house?

There is absolutely induced demand from building more houses. Building more houses will decrease the rate out migration and create a stronger incentive for people to relocate to the county. In moderation this is good, but the fiscal implications can be disastrous if growth is too rapid. Induced demand encouraging relocation be the strongest for low income household because they are the most responsive to housing prices and have limited budgets.

"I don't think MCPS should build housing that poor people might move live in, it would just encourage them."

+1

Basically the gist of those anti purple line posts as well.

If the county decides to do this and voters support this development that’s great, but this does not resolve the funding question. How do you suggest that gets additional revenue to cover this shortfall? MOCO Local income taxes are already at the statutory cap. This funding shortfall from tax negative development will need to be covered by raising property taxes. What is the upper limit for property tax rates that you think is reasonable for MOCO to charge. 1.0%, 1.5%, 2.0%, etc. There is no right answer to this question, I’m just curious what you believe the max reasonable real estate property tax rate is?

Thank you for bringing some numbers to this discussion - very informative.

The County could tackle this a number of ways:
1. increase the property tax rate on the quadplexes relative to existing SFHs given the realities of the fiscal shortfall
2. higher (punitive?) property taxes on SFHs/townhouses/individual apartment units that are not “primary residences” of the owner, whether that be a natural person or an LLC (though don’t assess a penalty tax rate on multifamily properties…this is actually desired investment)
3. Punitive taxes on STR income/properties

In short, the County should strive to have every home filled with tax-paying occupants as their “primary residence.” Unoccupied 2nd homes and investment homes reduce affordability, though also probably put less stress on the overall fiscal picture. It’s a tough balancing act for policymakers and the County CFO.

There also exists the idea of a progressive upzoning tax.

https://www.newgeography.com/content/006452-forced-upzoning-bad-policy-but-heres-how-we-can-mitigate-its-impacts?destination=node%2F6452

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Anonymous wrote:Condos mean more people in a given area. Which means more bars and restaurants. Which means more people want to live there. Which drives up the prices of those condos. Which drives up the prices of houses developers need to buy and tear down in order to build more condos. Which means even more people in a given area. Which means more bars and restaurants, which means more people want to live there, which drives up the prices even further.

People understood intuitively before we changed the term “gentrification” to “upzoning.”

There isn’t a coherent explanation of how changing zoning laws reduce housing prices. Typically the opposite happens — prices go up, by a lot.

There is, and it's based on supply and demand. Just like "gentrification" and "upzoning" are different things, so "there is no explanation" and "I don't like the explanation" are different things, too.

So what’s the explanation?

https://googlethatforyou.com?q=housing%20zoning%20supply%20demand

‘If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.’ —Albert Einstein

Very weird that no one can explain how upzoning reduces housing prices

Either you've testified at public hearings about housing policy, in which case you've heard plenty of pro-housing people explain this plenty of times, or you're a person who has a lot of time to post on DCUM, in which case a person might wonder how come you don't have the time to testify at public hearings.

Either you sincerely want to know, in which case you can go educate yourself, or you don't sincerely want to know, in which case feel free to waste your own time.

DP. I've heard a lot of people offer theories of how upzoning causes prices to fall, but it doesn't matter if no one builds. In the case of Montgomery County, there is a lot of approved density that isn't getting built because it doesn't pencil. Upzoning residential areas isn't going to change that and is more likely to suppress very high density construction because those projects will face more competition from lower density projects that are cheaper to build but can get the same price as a very high-density project.

I don't think anyone has said that re-zoning, by itself, will make housing more affordable for more people. Obviously there also has to be building following on the re-zoning.

I will note that there is no "approved density" that isn't getting built. Builders don't build "density". Builders build housing. Now, would zoning changes lead builders to make different decisions about where to build housing? Yes, that's the whole point.

OK. There’s a lot of approved housing that isn’t getting built. You have to make silly semantic arguments because the facts are really bad for your position. The problem isn’t zoning. The problem is developers aren’t building because they think the market in Montgomery County is poor. Anything built here is at a disadvantage to things built in DC and especially NOVA because those places have more jobs, so it’s higher risk.

"Approved housing" isn't fungible. As a matter of fact, your argument supports re-zoning. Builders aren't building approved housing, under the current zoning, because it doesn't pencil out. Assuming we want builders to be building housing (which I do, though you may not), that's a reason to change the zoning, to give builders more options for projects that do pencil out.

Nothing is going to pencil out at scale without more jobs. You think you’re going to get 50 quads to replace the 200-unit high-rise that’s not getting built? YIMBYs in this county have done it a great disservice by promoting jobless urbanism while also supporting policies that are hostile to business.

The builders who can do 200 units are few and far between. Many of them have big investments in CRE or multi-family that are getting crushed, losing many millions of equity in current structures.

However, there are a lot more crappy little builders in this area who can do 2-4 unit flips. That's who give donations of a couple thousand to each Council member to get up-zoning. These guys can't handle a big project like 200 units, but they can toss together a crew and local bank + hard money financing to pump out 4 unit garden apartments.

So yeah, that's the game.

You don’t get market changing housing deliveries without the developers who can deliver 200 units.

The issue with 200+ units is that all the kids there need to go to one school. At least with garden apartment you are spreading the numbers across a bunch of schools/infrastructure.

The County needs to be careful with up-zoning; these ticky-tack flippers will want to pile garden apartments into the same 3-4 neighborhoods inside the Beltway and put even further strain on the same 2 high school pyramids. The County should parcel it out evenly across MoCo, perhaps even by putting limits on a single HS pyramid (e.g., once BCC catchment gets 75 units approved, no more will be approved until every MoCo HS pyramid hits the 75 threshold).

There's a real risk of concentration on infrastructure if the County doesn't do this carefully. Flippers are going to aim for the land with highest return and quickest chance of sale - they move in a herd.

Back to central planning...

The "ticky tacky flippers" are flipping currently, and it's fully allowed currently. In which case, I think they should be allowed to build a building with 2-3-4 units instead of one gargantuan McMansion. It also wouldn't be "garden apartments", it would just be a basic duplex, triplex, or fourplex building.

At least the McMansion doesn’t utterly overwhelm the existing schools. MoCo has a school supply problem at all levels.

Montgomery County also has a housing supply problem, and I think that housing is even more important than schools.

DP. I disagree, in a way.

Housing is more important than schools in the same way that food is more important than housing. Kind of a hierarchy of needs thing.

However, just as the need for housing might eclipse the preference for a particular cuisine or brand of food where other food is available, the need for adequate public facilities such as schools might be more important than the preference for additional housing of a particular type where other housing (hi-rise instead of triplex, townhouse a modest distance away, rental instead of a purchase, etc.) is available.

There's a calculus to it, to be sure, depending on where on the spectrum of need and preference these might fall. There is enough housing stock available and enough properties on which such housing could be built with current zoning that the school overcrowding factor is the more pressing element in many localities, especially closer in, where the policy change is aimed. It also is far less flexible than housing inventory, taking greater lead times to address, and it is directly negatively impacted by the even greater housing inventory envisioned in the upzoning under consideration. The same may well be the case for other essential public services.

Montgomery Planning and the County Council should be taking a more holistic and community/resident-inclusive approach.

People can't live in housing that could be built. The housing has to actually be built in order for people to live in it.

That DP to whom you responded (07:42 was someone else). This is missing the point and/or is a response that cherry-picks housing to be built.

There is both housing that is now available and housing that could be built under current zoning (a very large amount under-built close to Metro). People can live in the currently available housing. They may want alternatives to that in the same areas, and I don't begrudge them that interest, but I would say that the need for public services, like schools, trumps that interest in localities where current capacities are not adequate.

While one could say that the same people who would move into newly zoned/built multiplex properties would then just fill that existing capacity, resilulting in the same level of overcrowding, this would ignore the market dynamic based on that desire for those alternatives -- without the zoning change, many families will choose to live slightly farther out in areas that aren't currently overcrowded. This would result in marginally longer commutes and the various ills that might come from that, but I would say that those ills are of less consequence, in both the short and long terms, than the ills of inadequate public facility capacity.

MoCo should address the situation in a way such that we are sure that capacities of public facilities like schools are made adequate by the time that the additional housing of interest comes online. That has been ignored/under-addressed, now, for far too long, and we shouldn't be trusting, then, that the various agencies will change to make it work without a more directly coordinated approach.

Increasing supply and lowering housing prices creates induced demand for housing too. To some extent if you build new low income housing people will appear to fill these housing units. There is also induced demand by people using more space per person when affordability increases. I’m not saying that we should not pursue more affordable housing. However, MOCO will end having a disproportionate share of tax negative residents if it is not careful. Growth in low income residents needs to be matched with new high income residents or the county will not have enough money to maintain the current level of services.

Induced demand? How many houses do people need? I can see how building roads induces demand: people will drive more. But will people want more than one house?

There is absolutely induced demand from building more houses. Building more houses will decrease the rate out migration and create a stronger incentive for people to relocate to the county. In moderation this is good, but the fiscal implications can be disastrous if growth is too rapid. Induced demand encouraging relocation be the strongest for low income household because they are the most responsive to housing prices and have limited budgets.

"I don't think MCPS should build housing that poor people might move live in, it would just encourage them."

+1

Basically the gist of those anti purple line posts as well.

If the county decides to do this and voters support this development that’s great, but this does not resolve the funding question. How do you suggest that gets additional revenue to cover this shortfall? MOCO Local income taxes are already at the statutory cap. This funding shortfall from tax negative development will need to be covered by raising property taxes. What is the upper limit for property tax rates that you think is reasonable for MOCO to charge. 1.0%, 1.5%, 2.0%, etc. There is no right answer to this question, I’m just curious what you believe the max reasonable real estate property tax rate is?

You're making whole bunch of bonkers assumptions to come up with your ideas about future tax revenue and then saying we should base housing policy based on your future tax revenue ideas based on your bonkers assumptions.

That DP from just before. I'm not saying their assumptions are true, but you are saying they aren't without backing that up with your own assumptions/analysis.

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Condos mean more people in a given area. Which means more bars and restaurants. Which means more people want to live there. Which drives up the prices of those condos. Which drives up the prices of houses developers need to buy and tear down in order to build more condos. Which means even more people in a given area. Which means more bars and restaurants, which means more people want to live there, which drives up the prices even further.

People understood intuitively before we changed the term “gentrification” to “upzoning.”

There isn’t a coherent explanation of how changing zoning laws reduce housing prices. Typically the opposite happens — prices go up, by a lot.

There is, and it's based on supply and demand. Just like "gentrification" and "upzoning" are different things, so "there is no explanation" and "I don't like the explanation" are different things, too.

So what’s the explanation?

https://googlethatforyou.com?q=housing%20zoning%20supply%20demand

‘If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.’ —Albert Einstein

Very weird that no one can explain how upzoning reduces housing prices

Either you've testified at public hearings about housing policy, in which case you've heard plenty of pro-housing people explain this plenty of times, or you're a person who has a lot of time to post on DCUM, in which case a person might wonder how come you don't have the time to testify at public hearings.

Either you sincerely want to know, in which case you can go educate yourself, or you don't sincerely want to know, in which case feel free to waste your own time.

DP. I've heard a lot of people offer theories of how upzoning causes prices to fall, but it doesn't matter if no one builds. In the case of Montgomery County, there is a lot of approved density that isn't getting built because it doesn't pencil. Upzoning residential areas isn't going to change that and is more likely to suppress very high density construction because those projects will face more competition from lower density projects that are cheaper to build but can get the same price as a very high-density project.

I don't think anyone has said that re-zoning, by itself, will make housing more affordable for more people. Obviously there also has to be building following on the re-zoning.

I will note that there is no "approved density" that isn't getting built. Builders don't build "density". Builders build housing. Now, would zoning changes lead builders to make different decisions about where to build housing? Yes, that's the whole point.

OK. There’s a lot of approved housing that isn’t getting built. You have to make silly semantic arguments because the facts are really bad for your position. The problem isn’t zoning. The problem is developers aren’t building because they think the market in Montgomery County is poor. Anything built here is at a disadvantage to things built in DC and especially NOVA because those places have more jobs, so it’s higher risk.

"Approved housing" isn't fungible. As a matter of fact, your argument supports re-zoning. Builders aren't building approved housing, under the current zoning, because it doesn't pencil out. Assuming we want builders to be building housing (which I do, though you may not), that's a reason to change the zoning, to give builders more options for projects that do pencil out.

Nothing is going to pencil out at scale without more jobs. You think you’re going to get 50 quads to replace the 200-unit high-rise that’s not getting built? YIMBYs in this county have done it a great disservice by promoting jobless urbanism while also supporting policies that are hostile to business.

The builders who can do 200 units are few and far between. Many of them have big investments in CRE or multi-family that are getting crushed, losing many millions of equity in current structures.

However, there are a lot more crappy little builders in this area who can do 2-4 unit flips. That's who give donations of a couple thousand to each Council member to get up-zoning. These guys can't handle a big project like 200 units, but they can toss together a crew and local bank + hard money financing to pump out 4 unit garden apartments.

So yeah, that's the game.

You don’t get market changing housing deliveries without the developers who can deliver 200 units.

The issue with 200+ units is that all the kids there need to go to one school. At least with garden apartment you are spreading the numbers across a bunch of schools/infrastructure.

The County needs to be careful with up-zoning; these ticky-tack flippers will want to pile garden apartments into the same 3-4 neighborhoods inside the Beltway and put even further strain on the same 2 high school pyramids. The County should parcel it out evenly across MoCo, perhaps even by putting limits on a single HS pyramid (e.g., once BCC catchment gets 75 units approved, no more will be approved until every MoCo HS pyramid hits the 75 threshold).

There's a real risk of concentration on infrastructure if the County doesn't do this carefully. Flippers are going to aim for the land with highest return and quickest chance of sale - they move in a herd.

Back to central planning...

The "ticky tacky flippers" are flipping currently, and it's fully allowed currently. In which case, I think they should be allowed to build a building with 2-3-4 units instead of one gargantuan McMansion. It also wouldn't be "garden apartments", it would just be a basic duplex, triplex, or fourplex building.

At least the McMansion doesn’t utterly overwhelm the existing schools. MoCo has a school supply problem at all levels.

Montgomery County also has a housing supply problem, and I think that housing is even more important than schools.

DP. I disagree, in a way.

Housing is more important than schools in the same way that food is more important than housing. Kind of a hierarchy of needs thing.

However, just as the need for housing might eclipse the preference for a particular cuisine or brand of food where other food is available, the need for adequate public facilities such as schools might be more important than the preference for additional housing of a particular type where other housing (hi-rise instead of triplex, townhouse a modest distance away, rental instead of a purchase, etc.) is available.

There's a calculus to it, to be sure, depending on where on the spectrum of need and preference these might fall. There is enough housing stock available and enough properties on which such housing could be built with current zoning that the school overcrowding factor is the more pressing element in many localities, especially closer in, where the policy change is aimed. It also is far less flexible than housing inventory, taking greater lead times to address, and it is directly negatively impacted by the even greater housing inventory envisioned in the upzoning under consideration. The same may well be the case for other essential public services.

Montgomery Planning and the County Council should be taking a more holistic and community/resident-inclusive approach.

People can't live in housing that could be built. The housing has to actually be built in order for people to live in it.

That DP to whom you responded (07:42 was someone else). This is missing the point and/or is a response that cherry-picks housing to be built.

There is both housing that is now available and housing that could be built under current zoning (a very large amount under-built close to Metro). People can live in the currently available housing. They may want alternatives to that in the same areas, and I don't begrudge them that interest, but I would say that the need for public services, like schools, trumps that interest in localities where current capacities are not adequate.

While one could say that the same people who would move into newly zoned/built multiplex properties would then just fill that existing capacity, resilulting in the same level of overcrowding, this would ignore the market dynamic based on that desire for those alternatives -- without the zoning change, many families will choose to live slightly farther out in areas that aren't currently overcrowded. This would result in marginally longer commutes and the various ills that might come from that, but I would say that those ills are of less consequence, in both the short and long terms, than the ills of inadequate public facility capacity.

MoCo should address the situation in a way such that we are sure that capacities of public facilities like schools are made adequate by the time that the additional housing of interest comes online. That has been ignored/under-addressed, now, for far too long, and we shouldn't be trusting, then, that the various agencies will change to make it work without a more directly coordinated approach.

Increasing supply and lowering housing prices creates induced demand for housing too. To some extent if you build new low income housing people will appear to fill these housing units. There is also induced demand by people using more space per person when affordability increases. I’m not saying that we should not pursue more affordable housing. However, MOCO will end having a disproportionate share of tax negative residents if it is not careful. Growth in low income residents needs to be matched with new high income residents or the county will not have enough money to maintain the current level of services.

Induced demand? How many houses do people need? I can see how building roads induces demand: people will drive more. But will people want more than one house?

There is absolutely induced demand from building more houses. Building more houses will decrease the rate out migration and create a stronger incentive for people to relocate to the county. In moderation this is good, but the fiscal implications can be disastrous if growth is too rapid. Induced demand encouraging relocation be the strongest for low income household because they are the most responsive to housing prices and have limited budgets.

"I don't think MCPS should build housing that poor people might move live in, it would just encourage them."

+1

Basically the gist of those anti purple line posts as well.

If the county decides to do this and voters support this development that’s great, but this does not resolve the funding question. How do you suggest that gets additional revenue to cover this shortfall? MOCO Local income taxes are already at the statutory cap. This funding shortfall from tax negative development will need to be covered by raising property taxes. What is the upper limit for property tax rates that you think is reasonable for MOCO to charge. 1.0%, 1.5%, 2.0%, etc. There is no right answer to this question, I’m just curious what you believe the max reasonable real estate property tax rate is?

You're making whole bunch of bonkers assumptions to come up with your ideas about future tax revenue and then saying we should base housing policy based on your future tax revenue ideas based on your bonkers assumptions.

That DP from just before. I'm not saying their assumptions are true, but you are saying they aren't without backing that up with your own assumptions/analysis.

My assumption is that their assumptions are bonkers.