MOCO - County Wide Upzoning, Everywhere

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think we maybe need to get some facts straight.

This proposal would allow up to four residences to be built on a lot where just one residence is allowed. This would mean that an individual or a developer could purchase a SFH lot when it becomes available and build what amounts to a small set of townhomes. This ASSUMES that all existing setback and other lot coverage rules are maintained.

It is ALREADY allowed to have accessory dwelling units on a SFH property, either detached or attached. So already you can have multiple families on a lot.

These individual buildings will be relatively expensive. We are not talking about large apartment blocks with rent-capped units...but townhomes. Taxes will be paid.

The valid issues to be addressed are parking and school capacity. Everything else is catastrophizing.

There is a lot here that is false or intentionally misleading. Which is typical for you folks.

First, can we have a discussion without talking about "you folks" and slinging insults?

Second, I'm happy to be corrected on anything wrong, or for anybody to add needed nuance to the statements. You know....have a conversation.

DP but they’re getting rid of setback requirements.

WTF, no setback requirements. You at least need 5 or 10 ft setback to prevent encroachment on the neighbors property line. Impervious surfaces matter too unless MOCO wants to increase flooding. Especially with climate change making storms worse this seem like a short-sighted solution.

[Anonymous]

zoning makes zero difference to housing prices. sorry. people are going to be very disappointed.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There is zero chance that MoCo will not lose its taxpaying and upper income citizens because of this change. What is even stupid is that MoCo has plenty of underutilized commercial land that can be converted to housing of multiple types. Much of that land will never be office or retail.

I think that they are ok with that. What they lose in quality they plan to make up for in volume.

How so? More volume of poverty and social needs who take more in tax expenditures then they can possibly pay in tax is a net negative. MoCo is going the way of Baltimore where they mane it extremely difficult to do business and drive out everyone with means who actually make up the bulk of the tax base. The area will crumble when all of the taxpayers who can pay taxes leave. You cannot make up tax revenues from a $250k household by bringing in 5 $50k households to replace. The $50k households will barely pay tax and require all sorts of subsidies, vouchers for lunches and will likely pay $0 in income taxes after all of the write offs and deductions. The county will get more poor with more volume, because the volume is going to come from poverty and low income households.

The family moving into a duplex or triplex is not living in poverty. Those homes will still cost around 500K minimum. They will pay taxes, or the landlord will pay taxes.

That is incorrect. Most of these small multifamily units are not going to provide homeownership opportunities. Investors will be buying up single family houses to replace them with multifamily rental properties. It will reduce the number of ownership opportunities and make homeownership less attainable for MOCO residents. The risk adjusted return for selling individual units of small multifamily buildings is usually not favorable.

+1. Duplexes will only pencil in areas that aren’t well served by mass transit. Triples may do a little better. Quads are most likely to pencil, but at that point we’re talking about pretty small units that are likely to be rentals.

For taxes, I think Friedson put something in a tax bill last year that would exempt some of these from impact fees and property taxes. I think it was something like anything with 25 percent affordable units would be property tax exempt. That means you could build a quad with a small basement MPDU (that would be naturally affordable anyway) and get out of paying property taxes and impact fees. If he hasn’t passed it yet, expect that to come next when zoning doesn’t magically make these units appear.

I’m all in for the upzoning as long as the county carefully reviews existing and proposed tax exemptions to make sure upzoning doesn’t result in more properties that don’t pay property taxes and as long as everyone is realistic about needing more roads to make this work.

It would be insane to extend MDPUs to these units. The Council just increased the control period to 99 years. That’s well beyond the economic life of any of these potential structures and basically is an admission that the Council doesn’t intend to enforce controls on maintaining the stock of regulated units.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:zoning makes zero difference to housing prices. sorry. people are going to be very disappointed.

California got rid of zoning laws requiring SFHs in 2021. Since then, guess how many people have taken advantage? About 500. There's 40 million people in California.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:zoning makes zero difference to housing prices. sorry. people are going to be very disappointed.

Actually, the best research on the topic has determined that this type of up-zoning primarily benefits incumbent property owners by increasing property values but does not appreciably increase housing supply.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1078087418824672

Evidence from Minneapolis suggests that what moves the needle on housing supply is mid-to-large multifamily dwellings.

Additionally, if someone was truly trying to promote effective gentle density, Seattle has strong evidence that the best method is through promoting lot consolidation and townhouses.

So an evidence based approach would be to promote more of each and there is broad scope and support for Planning to do so. Instead you can see that they are driven by ideology.

If this plan does work, it will require subsidies and make the county worse off economically. It’s the opposite of what we should be doing.

[Anonymous]

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Owning a a SFH is THE #1 way the middle class in America is able to build wealth. The elites can’t stand it anymore and want to take away the last leg left for the middle class for building wealth. They want to ruin everyone’s SFH’s so that they can buy at rock bottom prices. Then they can tear them all down and build rental units. Congrats, we can become a nation of permanent renters enslaved to corporate landlords and sh!tty investors who have bulldozed all good middle class SFH neighborhoods left. They want to steal the land from the middle class. They will accomplish it by lobbying idiot SJWs by promising housing affordability, equity, and other crap. In reality this will play out in the crapification of neighborhoods on purpose so that they can drive people out of their homes. They’ll swallow them up as investments and turn the entire county into renters.


Trash and asinine idea that will make everyone poorer.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think we maybe need to get some facts straight.

This proposal would allow up to four residences to be built on a lot where just one residence is allowed. This would mean that an individual or a developer could purchase a SFH lot when it becomes available and build what amounts to a small set of townhomes. This ASSUMES that all existing setback and other lot coverage rules are maintained.

It is ALREADY allowed to have accessory dwelling units on a SFH property, either detached or attached. So already you can have multiple families on a lot.

These individual buildings will be relatively expensive. We are not talking about large apartment blocks with rent-capped units...but townhomes. Taxes will be paid.

The valid issues to be addressed are parking and school capacity. Everything else is catastrophizing.

There is a lot here that is false or intentionally misleading. Which is typical for you folks.

First, can we have a discussion without talking about "you folks" and slinging insults?

Second, I'm happy to be corrected on anything wrong, or for anybody to add needed nuance to the statements. You know....have a conversation.

DP but they’re getting rid of setback requirements.

WTF, no setback requirements. You at least need 5 or 10 ft setback to prevent encroachment on the neighbors property line. Impervious surfaces matter too unless MOCO wants to increase flooding. Especially with climate change making storms worse this seem like a short-sighted solution.

They use climate change to justify whatever they decide depending on what they want to do. They will probably say that it’s climate mitigation to remove set backs.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:zoning makes zero difference to housing prices. sorry. people are going to be very disappointed.

Actually, the best research on the topic has determined that this type of up-zoning primarily benefits incumbent property owners by increasing property values but does not appreciably increase housing supply.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1078087418824672

Evidence from Minneapolis suggests that what moves the needle on housing supply is mid-to-large multifamily dwellings.

Additionally, if someone was truly trying to promote effective gentle density, Seattle has strong evidence that the best method is through promoting lot consolidation and townhouses.

So an evidence based approach would be to promote more of each and there is broad scope and support for Planning to do so. Instead you can see that they are driven by ideology.

If this plan does work, it will require subsidies and make the county worse off economically. It’s the opposite of what we should be doing.

And the underused commercial property in the County could easily be converted into hundreds and hundreds of townhouses. And there is no risk that all of those townhouses will be high end homes. All price ranges.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There is zero chance that MoCo will not lose its taxpaying and upper income citizens because of this change. What is even stupid is that MoCo has plenty of underutilized commercial land that can be converted to housing of multiple types. Much of that land will never be office or retail.

I think that they are ok with that. What they lose in quality they plan to make up for in volume.

How so? More volume of poverty and social needs who take more in tax expenditures then they can possibly pay in tax is a net negative. MoCo is going the way of Baltimore where they mane it extremely difficult to do business and drive out everyone with means who actually make up the bulk of the tax base. The area will crumble when all of the taxpayers who can pay taxes leave. You cannot make up tax revenues from a $250k household by bringing in 5 $50k households to replace. The $50k households will barely pay tax and require all sorts of subsidies, vouchers for lunches and will likely pay $0 in income taxes after all of the write offs and deductions. The county will get more poor with more volume, because the volume is going to come from poverty and low income households.

The family moving into a duplex or triplex is not living in poverty. Those homes will still cost around 500K minimum. They will pay taxes, or the landlord will pay taxes.

No, they’ll be rentals. Property tax doesn’t cover the same as income taxes. A single multiplex property tax will not make up for 4 below poverty line families who will all get stuffed into there and who’ll pay $0 income taxes because of their low inc9me and who’ll need more in tax expenditures than they pay.


You also think all of these multiplexes are going to be high quality. lol. We all know they’ll be cheap garbage flips or the units will have properties that are barely taken care of. It will just bring low income to good neighborhoods and ruin everything. I cannot wait until this stupendously backfires on the county and they panic as their budgets get blown up after there is mass exodus of high tax paying citizens.

Why in the world do you think these people would be below the poverty line and not paying income taxes?

See areas of the county that were solidly middle class 20-30 years ago.

This is the underwritten story. Many middle class SFH neighborhoods in the County have degenerated, making them less attractive.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There is zero chance that MoCo will not lose its taxpaying and upper income citizens because of this change. What is even stupid is that MoCo has plenty of underutilized commercial land that can be converted to housing of multiple types. Much of that land will never be office or retail.

I think that they are ok with that. What they lose in quality they plan to make up for in volume.

How so? More volume of poverty and social needs who take more in tax expenditures then they can possibly pay in tax is a net negative. MoCo is going the way of Baltimore where they mane it extremely difficult to do business and drive out everyone with means who actually make up the bulk of the tax base. The area will crumble when all of the taxpayers who can pay taxes leave. You cannot make up tax revenues from a $250k household by bringing in 5 $50k households to replace. The $50k households will barely pay tax and require all sorts of subsidies, vouchers for lunches and will likely pay $0 in income taxes after all of the write offs and deductions. The county will get more poor with more volume, because the volume is going to come from poverty and low income households.

Yes, a 99 year restriction is ridiculous. It risks locking up assets into economical unproductive uses for a period long beyond financial viability. It is almost impossible to anticipate what the economy and housing market will look like 50-100 years from now and this does not benefit the county.

The family moving into a duplex or triplex is not living in poverty. Those homes will still cost around 500K minimum. They will pay taxes, or the landlord will pay taxes.

That is incorrect. Most of these small multifamily units are not going to provide homeownership opportunities. Investors will be buying up single family houses to replace them with multifamily rental properties. It will reduce the number of ownership opportunities and make homeownership less attainable for MOCO residents. The risk adjusted return for selling individual units of small multifamily buildings is usually not favorable.

+1. Duplexes will only pencil in areas that aren’t well served by mass transit. Triples may do a little better. Quads are most likely to pencil, but at that point we’re talking about pretty small units that are likely to be rentals.

For taxes, I think Friedson put something in a tax bill last year that would exempt some of these from impact fees and property taxes. I think it was something like anything with 25 percent affordable units would be property tax exempt. That means you could build a quad with a small basement MPDU (that would be naturally affordable anyway) and get out of paying property taxes and impact fees. If he hasn’t passed it yet, expect that to come next when zoning doesn’t magically make these units appear.

I’m all in for the upzoning as long as the county carefully reviews existing and proposed tax exemptions to make sure upzoning doesn’t result in more properties that don’t pay property taxes and as long as everyone is realistic about needing more roads to make this work.

It would be insane to extend MDPUs to these units. The Council just increased the control period to 99 years. That’s well beyond the economic life of any of these potential structures and basically is an admission that the Council doesn’t intend to enforce controls on maintaining the stock of regulated units.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There is zero chance that MoCo will not lose its taxpaying and upper income citizens because of this change. What is even stupid is that MoCo has plenty of underutilized commercial land that can be converted to housing of multiple types. Much of that land will never be office or retail.

I think that they are ok with that. What they lose in quality they plan to make up for in volume.

How so? More volume of poverty and social needs who take more in tax expenditures then they can possibly pay in tax is a net negative. MoCo is going the way of Baltimore where they mane it extremely difficult to do business and drive out everyone with means who actually make up the bulk of the tax base. The area will crumble when all of the taxpayers who can pay taxes leave. You cannot make up tax revenues from a $250k household by bringing in 5 $50k households to replace. The $50k households will barely pay tax and require all sorts of subsidies, vouchers for lunches and will likely pay $0 in income taxes after all of the write offs and deductions. The county will get more poor with more volume, because the volume is going to come from poverty and low income households.

The family moving into a duplex or triplex is not living in poverty. Those homes will still cost around 500K minimum. They will pay taxes, or the landlord will pay taxes.

That is incorrect. Most of these small multifamily units are not going to provide homeownership opportunities. Investors will be buying up single family houses to replace them with multifamily rental properties. It will reduce the number of ownership opportunities and make homeownership less attainable for MOCO residents. The risk adjusted return for selling individual units of small multifamily buildings is usually not favorable.

+1. Duplexes will only pencil in areas that aren’t well served by mass transit. Triples may do a little better. Quads are most likely to pencil, but at that point we’re talking about pretty small units that are likely to be rentals.

For taxes, I think Friedson put something in a tax bill last year that would exempt some of these from impact fees and property taxes. I think it was something like anything with 25 percent affordable units would be property tax exempt. That means you could build a quad with a small basement MPDU (that would be naturally affordable anyway) and get out of paying property taxes and impact fees. If he hasn’t passed it yet, expect that to come next when zoning doesn’t magically make these units appear.

I’m all in for the upzoning as long as the county carefully reviews existing and proposed tax exemptions to make sure upzoning doesn’t result in more properties that don’t pay property taxes and as long as everyone is realistic about needing more roads to make this work.

It would be insane to extend MDPUs to these units. The Council just increased the control period to 99 years. That’s well beyond the economic life of any of these potential structures and basically is an admission that the Council doesn’t intend to enforce controls on maintaining the stock of regulated units.

Yes, a 99 year restriction is ridiculous. It risks locking up assets into economical unproductive uses for a period long beyond financial viability. It is almost impossible to anticipate what the economy and housing market will look like 50-100 years from now and this does not benefit the county.

[Anonymous]

Where are these $970,000 price homes they say are the average price here in MoCo? Where in the hell did that $number$ come from? It’s all a load of falsehoods. Someone is in the developers pockets.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There is zero chance that MoCo will not lose its taxpaying and upper income citizens because of this change. What is even stupid is that MoCo has plenty of underutilized commercial land that can be converted to housing of multiple types. Much of that land will never be office or retail.

I think that they are ok with that. What they lose in quality they plan to make up for in volume.

How so? More volume of poverty and social needs who take more in tax expenditures then they can possibly pay in tax is a net negative. MoCo is going the way of Baltimore where they mane it extremely difficult to do business and drive out everyone with means who actually make up the bulk of the tax base. The area will crumble when all of the taxpayers who can pay taxes leave. You cannot make up tax revenues from a $250k household by bringing in 5 $50k households to replace. The $50k households will barely pay tax and require all sorts of subsidies, vouchers for lunches and will likely pay $0 in income taxes after all of the write offs and deductions. The county will get more poor with more volume, because the volume is going to come from poverty and low income households.

The family moving into a duplex or triplex is not living in poverty. Those homes will still cost around 500K minimum. They will pay taxes, or the landlord will pay taxes.

That is incorrect. Most of these small multifamily units are not going to provide homeownership opportunities. Investors will be buying up single family houses to replace them with multifamily rental properties. It will reduce the number of ownership opportunities and make homeownership less attainable for MOCO residents. The risk adjusted return for selling individual units of small multifamily buildings is usually not favorable.

+1. Duplexes will only pencil in areas that aren’t well served by mass transit. Triples may do a little better. Quads are most likely to pencil, but at that point we’re talking about pretty small units that are likely to be rentals.

For taxes, I think Friedson put something in a tax bill last year that would exempt some of these from impact fees and property taxes. I think it was something like anything with 25 percent affordable units would be property tax exempt. That means you could build a quad with a small basement MPDU (that would be naturally affordable anyway) and get out of paying property taxes and impact fees. If he hasn’t passed it yet, expect that to come next when zoning doesn’t magically make these units appear.

I’m all in for the upzoning as long as the county carefully reviews existing and proposed tax exemptions to make sure upzoning doesn’t result in more properties that don’t pay property taxes and as long as everyone is realistic about needing more roads to make this work.

It would be insane to extend MDPUs to these units. The Council just increased the control period to 99 years. That’s well beyond the economic life of any of these potential structures and basically is an admission that the Council doesn’t intend to enforce controls on maintaining the stock of regulated units.

I doubt that they will require MPDUs in four-unit buildings (currently only applies to projects with more than 20 units) but there’s nothing preventing a landlord from voluntarily providing one MPDU in a four-unit building. Getting a tax abatement for a basement apartment that will be affordable even at market rate would be a sweet deal. On a building assed at $2 million, would be worth about $20k a year, making the effective monthly rent on the basement unit about $1650 plus whatever the landlord gets in rent from the tenant. At market rate, the basement unit might not even be worth $1650, but there’s no question the county council would make this deal.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There is zero chance that MoCo will not lose its taxpaying and upper income citizens because of this change. What is even stupid is that MoCo has plenty of underutilized commercial land that can be converted to housing of multiple types. Much of that land will never be office or retail.

I think that they are ok with that. What they lose in quality they plan to make up for in volume.

How so? More volume of poverty and social needs who take more in tax expenditures then they can possibly pay in tax is a net negative. MoCo is going the way of Baltimore where they mane it extremely difficult to do business and drive out everyone with means who actually make up the bulk of the tax base. The area will crumble when all of the taxpayers who can pay taxes leave. You cannot make up tax revenues from a $250k household by bringing in 5 $50k households to replace. The $50k households will barely pay tax and require all sorts of subsidies, vouchers for lunches and will likely pay $0 in income taxes after all of the write offs and deductions. The county will get more poor with more volume, because the volume is going to come from poverty and low income households.

The family moving into a duplex or triplex is not living in poverty. Those homes will still cost around 500K minimum. They will pay taxes, or the landlord will pay taxes.

No, they’ll be rentals. Property tax doesn’t cover the same as income taxes. A single multiplex property tax will not make up for 4 below poverty line families who will all get stuffed into there and who’ll pay $0 income taxes because of their low inc9me and who’ll need more in tax expenditures than they pay.


You also think all of these multiplexes are going to be high quality. lol. We all know they’ll be cheap garbage flips or the units will have properties that are barely taken care of. It will just bring low income to good neighborhoods and ruin everything. I cannot wait until this stupendously backfires on the county and they panic as their budgets get blown up after there is mass exodus of high tax paying citizens.

Why in the world do you think these people would be below the poverty line and not paying income taxes?

You are really stupid if you think all of these dense units are going to be bought and owned by higher income families. They’re going to be bought up by slum lords, conglomerates, and investment funds who have zero motivation to maintain the properties because their entire goal is to minimize expenditures on property maintenance. They’re going to rent them out to low income masses.

Few, if any, upper income families will buy a duplex in a neighborhood of these dense units.

Exactly, it’s going to be a slumlord gold rush.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think we maybe need to get some facts straight.

This proposal would allow up to four residences to be built on a lot where just one residence is allowed. This would mean that an individual or a developer could purchase a SFH lot when it becomes available and build what amounts to a small set of townhomes. This ASSUMES that all existing setback and other lot coverage rules are maintained.

It is ALREADY allowed to have accessory dwelling units on a SFH property, either detached or attached. So already you can have multiple families on a lot.

These individual buildings will be relatively expensive. We are not talking about large apartment blocks with rent-capped units...but townhomes. Taxes will be paid.

The valid issues to be addressed are parking and school capacity. Everything else is catastrophizing.

There is a lot here that is false or intentionally misleading. Which is typical for you folks.

First, can we have a discussion without talking about "you folks" and slinging insults?

Second, I'm happy to be corrected on anything wrong, or for anybody to add needed nuance to the statements. You know....have a conversation.

DP but they’re getting rid of setback requirements.

Where have you seen this? I haven't. Genuinely curious.