More MOCO Upzoning - Starting in Silver Spring

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There's rent vs buy calculators out there and the numbers are going to vary if you compare say an autoworker who had a lot of their net worth in a home bought in 1965 Detroit vs a government worker in 1965 Bethesda. In the end it comes down to you can't have housing both be a source of wealth growth for homeowners and something that everyone is going to be able to attain.

You might end up what we have now: strong political will to maintain high housing prices, vs the strong political will to build more housing.

I don’t live in Detroit. I live in Montgomery County. There is strong political will to build housing here. What there isn’t are developers who are willing to drive prices down. You have to get it through your head that developers hold almost all the sway over how much housing is produced here. Every market is different, so this doesn’t hold everywhere. Just here.

And for the 1965 government worker in Bethesda (or Wheaton or Silver Spring) was both attainable and a source of wealth. The idea that housing can’t be both has been driven by corporate landlords who want to limit housing choice so that they can fix prices.

Yes buying in (some) suburbs in 1965 was attainable and allowed tremendous wealth gains. Those gains come exactly from that housing now not being as attainable to someone in the same SES those 1960's buyers had when they bought. Thus, building more housing.

This is just fundamentally untrue. Go and take a look at the Case-Schiller Index. Housing has not historically been guaranteed to always go up and create wealth.

People purchased housing mainly for non-economic reasons and during the 60s in particular, as people started fleeing cities, they purchased housing to buy into stability and stability peace of mind.

It is true it is not a guarantee. And it is true that people purchased for non-economic reasons in the 60's etc... But then somewhere a switch flipped, people saw that case-schiller through its history is still trending up (even when off peak) and started the self-reinforcing belief that housing is some secret to wealth. Which is not really compatible with the attainable goal.

The switch flipping was the movement to compact growth as the housing paradigm. Before that, housing was both a vehicle for wealth creation and was attainable. Most people don’t know what Case-Schiller is and even if they do know they don’t keep track of it. For most people, the benefit of ownership is fixing costs and gaining more space for other investment. For anyone who bought in 2014, their housing is priced in constant 2014 dollars, but they’re paying in 2024 dollars.

Most people also don’t think about housing supply increases as devaluing their own houses, and the fact is that apartment construction doesn’t really impact the value of SFH at all. If anything, apartment construction near SFH pushes SFH prices up over time because apartments bring in more people and more people means create a critical mass to support walkable retail and transit, which make neighborhoods more attractive.

The YIMBY policies need to start answering for their outcomes, and those outcomes aren’t pretty. Rents are up. Production in Montgomery County is at historic lows. New SFH deliveries are very low, and ownership is increasingly unattainable for all but the highest ranking government workers. All of this has gotten worse as Montgomery County has increasingly followed the YIMBY path, and it’s gotten worse despite pretty aggressive (and expensive) market interventions by the county government.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There's rent vs buy calculators out there and the numbers are going to vary if you compare say an autoworker who had a lot of their net worth in a home bought in 1965 Detroit vs a government worker in 1965 Bethesda. In the end it comes down to you can't have housing both be a source of wealth growth for homeowners and something that everyone is going to be able to attain.

You might end up what we have now: strong political will to maintain high housing prices, vs the strong political will to build more housing.

I don’t live in Detroit. I live in Montgomery County. There is strong political will to build housing here. What there isn’t are developers who are willing to drive prices down. You have to get it through your head that developers hold almost all the sway over how much housing is produced here. Every market is different, so this doesn’t hold everywhere. Just here.

And for the 1965 government worker in Bethesda (or Wheaton or Silver Spring) was both attainable and a source of wealth. The idea that housing can’t be both has been driven by corporate landlords who want to limit housing choice so that they can fix prices.

Yes buying in (some) suburbs in 1965 was attainable and allowed tremendous wealth gains. Those gains come exactly from that housing now not being as attainable to someone in the same SES those 1960's buyers had when they bought. Thus, building more housing.

This is just fundamentally untrue. Go and take a look at the Case-Schiller Index. Housing has not historically been guaranteed to always go up and create wealth.

People purchased housing mainly for non-economic reasons and during the 60s in particular, as people started fleeing cities, they purchased housing to buy into stability and stability peace of mind.

It is true it is not a guarantee. And it is true that people purchased for non-economic reasons in the 60's etc... But then somewhere a switch flipped, people saw that case-schiller through its history is still trending up (even when off peak) and started the self-reinforcing belief that housing is some secret to wealth. Which is not really compatible with the attainable goal.

The switch flipping was the movement to compact growth as the housing paradigm. Before that, housing was both a vehicle for wealth creation and was attainable. Most people don’t know what Case-Schiller is and even if they do know they don’t keep track of it. For most people, the benefit of ownership is fixing costs and gaining more space for other investment. For anyone who bought in 2014, their housing is priced in constant 2014 dollars, but they’re paying in 2024 dollars.

Most people also don’t think about housing supply increases as devaluing their own houses, and the fact is that apartment construction doesn’t really impact the value of SFH at all. If anything, apartment construction near SFH pushes SFH prices up over time because apartments bring in more people and more people means create a critical mass to support walkable retail and transit, which make neighborhoods more attractive.

The YIMBY policies need to start answering for their outcomes, and those outcomes aren’t pretty. Rents are up. Production in Montgomery County is at historic lows. New SFH deliveries are very low, and ownership is increasingly unattainable for all but the highest ranking government workers. All of this has gotten worse as Montgomery County has increasingly followed the YIMBY path, and it’s gotten worse despite pretty aggressive (and expensive) market interventions by the county government.

Are there good examples of infill apartment development without requirement for mixed use or for commercial allocation, and without coverage of differential public facilities burden and the like that resulted in walkable retail of the type desired by those in SFHs within the development window (i.e., not 8+ years out)?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There's rent vs buy calculators out there and the numbers are going to vary if you compare say an autoworker who had a lot of their net worth in a home bought in 1965 Detroit vs a government worker in 1965 Bethesda. In the end it comes down to you can't have housing both be a source of wealth growth for homeowners and something that everyone is going to be able to attain.

You might end up what we have now: strong political will to maintain high housing prices, vs the strong political will to build more housing.

I don’t live in Detroit. I live in Montgomery County. There is strong political will to build housing here. What there isn’t are developers who are willing to drive prices down. You have to get it through your head that developers hold almost all the sway over how much housing is produced here. Every market is different, so this doesn’t hold everywhere. Just here.

And for the 1965 government worker in Bethesda (or Wheaton or Silver Spring) was both attainable and a source of wealth. The idea that housing can’t be both has been driven by corporate landlords who want to limit housing choice so that they can fix prices.

Yes buying in (some) suburbs in 1965 was attainable and allowed tremendous wealth gains. Those gains come exactly from that housing now not being as attainable to someone in the same SES those 1960's buyers had when they bought. Thus, building more housing.

This is just fundamentally untrue. Go and take a look at the Case-Schiller Index. Housing has not historically been guaranteed to always go up and create wealth.

People purchased housing mainly for non-economic reasons and during the 60s in particular, as people started fleeing cities, they purchased housing to buy into stability and stability peace of mind.

It is true it is not a guarantee. And it is true that people purchased for non-economic reasons in the 60's etc... But then somewhere a switch flipped, people saw that case-schiller through its history is still trending up (even when off peak) and started the self-reinforcing belief that housing is some secret to wealth. Which is not really compatible with the attainable goal.

The switch flipping was the movement to compact growth as the housing paradigm. Before that, housing was both a vehicle for wealth creation and was attainable. Most people don’t know what Case-Schiller is and even if they do know they don’t keep track of it. For most people, the benefit of ownership is fixing costs and gaining more space for other investment. For anyone who bought in 2014, their housing is priced in constant 2014 dollars, but they’re paying in 2024 dollars.

Most people also don’t think about housing supply increases as devaluing their own houses, and the fact is that apartment construction doesn’t really impact the value of SFH at all. If anything, apartment construction near SFH pushes SFH prices up over time because apartments bring in more people and more people means create a critical mass to support walkable retail and transit, which make neighborhoods more attractive.

The YIMBY policies need to start answering for their outcomes, and those outcomes aren’t pretty. Rents are up. Production in Montgomery County is at historic lows. New SFH deliveries are very low, and ownership is increasingly unattainable for all but the highest ranking government workers. All of this has gotten worse as Montgomery County has increasingly followed the YIMBY path, and it’s gotten worse despite pretty aggressive (and expensive) market interventions by the county government.

Are there good examples of infill apartment development without requirement for mixed use or for commercial allocation, and without coverage of differential public facilities burden and the like that resulted in walkable retail of the type desired by those in SFHs within the development window (i.e., not 8+ years out)?

How fun that you filled your reply with jargon and insiderisms (some of them completely impenetrable for people outside of industry).

I’ll make it easy: none of your conditions actually matter. Requiring retail space doesn’t make commercial tenants magically appear and it certainly doesn’t make them stay. You need customers for that, so what matters is whether the retail space is close enough to enough discretionary income to produce enough revenue.

Your time limit doesn’t matter either. Aging SF neighborhoods have certainly benefited from more businesses within walking distance, hence the walk score and other walkability marketing programs. You seem to be suggesting that neighborhoods can’t get more walkable over time, and East Silver Spring is a great example of that.

If you want to argue that the population within a store’s walkshed isn’t a viability factor, or that retailers don’t seek high-density locations, please try.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There's rent vs buy calculators out there and the numbers are going to vary if you compare say an autoworker who had a lot of their net worth in a home bought in 1965 Detroit vs a government worker in 1965 Bethesda. In the end it comes down to you can't have housing both be a source of wealth growth for homeowners and something that everyone is going to be able to attain.

You might end up what we have now: strong political will to maintain high housing prices, vs the strong political will to build more housing.

I don’t live in Detroit. I live in Montgomery County. There is strong political will to build housing here. What there isn’t are developers who are willing to drive prices down. You have to get it through your head that developers hold almost all the sway over how much housing is produced here. Every market is different, so this doesn’t hold everywhere. Just here.

And for the 1965 government worker in Bethesda (or Wheaton or Silver Spring) was both attainable and a source of wealth. The idea that housing can’t be both has been driven by corporate landlords who want to limit housing choice so that they can fix prices.

Yes buying in (some) suburbs in 1965 was attainable and allowed tremendous wealth gains. Those gains come exactly from that housing now not being as attainable to someone in the same SES those 1960's buyers had when they bought. Thus, building more housing.

This is just fundamentally untrue. Go and take a look at the Case-Schiller Index. Housing has not historically been guaranteed to always go up and create wealth.

People purchased housing mainly for non-economic reasons and during the 60s in particular, as people started fleeing cities, they purchased housing to buy into stability and stability peace of mind.

It is true it is not a guarantee. And it is true that people purchased for non-economic reasons in the 60's etc... But then somewhere a switch flipped, people saw that case-schiller through its history is still trending up (even when off peak) and started the self-reinforcing belief that housing is some secret to wealth. Which is not really compatible with the attainable goal.

The switch flipping was the movement to compact growth as the housing paradigm. Before that, housing was both a vehicle for wealth creation and was attainable. Most people don’t know what Case-Schiller is and even if they do know they don’t keep track of it. For most people, the benefit of ownership is fixing costs and gaining more space for other investment. For anyone who bought in 2014, their housing is priced in constant 2014 dollars, but they’re paying in 2024 dollars.

Most people also don’t think about housing supply increases as devaluing their own houses, and the fact is that apartment construction doesn’t really impact the value of SFH at all. If anything, apartment construction near SFH pushes SFH prices up over time because apartments bring in more people and more people means create a critical mass to support walkable retail and transit, which make neighborhoods more attractive.

The YIMBY policies need to start answering for their outcomes, and those outcomes aren’t pretty. Rents are up. Production in Montgomery County is at historic lows. New SFH deliveries are very low, and ownership is increasingly unattainable for all but the highest ranking government workers. All of this has gotten worse as Montgomery County has increasingly followed the YIMBY path, and it’s gotten worse despite pretty aggressive (and expensive) market interventions by the county government.

Are there good examples of infill apartment development without requirement for mixed use or for commercial allocation, and without coverage of differential public facilities burden and the like that resulted in walkable retail of the type desired by those in SFHs within the development window (i.e., not 8+ years out)?

How fun that you filled your reply with jargon and insiderisms (some of them completely impenetrable for people outside of industry).

I’ll make it easy: none of your conditions actually matter. Requiring retail space doesn’t make commercial tenants magically appear and it certainly doesn’t make them stay. You need customers for that, so what matters is whether the retail space is close enough to enough discretionary income to produce enough revenue.

Your time limit doesn’t matter either. Aging SF neighborhoods have certainly benefited from more businesses within walking distance, hence the walk score and other walkability marketing programs. You seem to be suggesting that neighborhoods can’t get more walkable over time, and East Silver Spring is a great example of that.

If you want to argue that the population within a store’s walkshed isn’t a viability factor, or that retailers don’t seek high-density locations, please try.

So, I guess that's a, "No, there aren't such examples." YIMBY's love to paint pictures, but they do so with imaginary colors. All the while,they deride those living in the communities they seek to change for wanting more solid and responsive planning.

[Anonymous]

I went to Reston Town Center for the first time this week and was amazed at how it was such a large and successful model of walkable urbanism. It made every walkable urban development in Montgomery County look pathetic by comparison. It also featured a few things that Moco Planning seems to hate. First is freeway access. Second was thousands of free parking spaces. Third was employers.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I went to Reston Town Center for the first time this week and was amazed at how it was such a large and successful model of walkable urbanism. It made every walkable urban development in Montgomery County look pathetic by comparison. It also featured a few things that Moco Planning seems to hate. First is freeway access. Second was thousands of free parking spaces. Third was employers.

Bethesda and Silver Spring has these, plus transit. How does Reston do with bike connections?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I went to Reston Town Center for the first time this week and was amazed at how it was such a large and successful model of walkable urbanism. It made every walkable urban development in Montgomery County look pathetic by comparison. It also featured a few things that Moco Planning seems to hate. First is freeway access. Second was thousands of free parking spaces. Third was employers.

Bethesda and Silver Spring has these, plus transit. How does Reston do with bike connections?

Neither downtown Bethesda nor downtown Silver Spring have direct freeway access.

In addition, the one thing that struck me was how these planners in Moco didn’t seem to study in college because otherwise they would have heard about central place theory. Instead of promoting all of these multitude of “activity centers” they should just focus on one or two. Because otherwise none of them reach scale to be successful.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There's rent vs buy calculators out there and the numbers are going to vary if you compare say an autoworker who had a lot of their net worth in a home bought in 1965 Detroit vs a government worker in 1965 Bethesda. In the end it comes down to you can't have housing both be a source of wealth growth for homeowners and something that everyone is going to be able to attain.

You might end up what we have now: strong political will to maintain high housing prices, vs the strong political will to build more housing.

I don’t live in Detroit. I live in Montgomery County. There is strong political will to build housing here. What there isn’t are developers who are willing to drive prices down. You have to get it through your head that developers hold almost all the sway over how much housing is produced here. Every market is different, so this doesn’t hold everywhere. Just here.

And for the 1965 government worker in Bethesda (or Wheaton or Silver Spring) was both attainable and a source of wealth. The idea that housing can’t be both has been driven by corporate landlords who want to limit housing choice so that they can fix prices.

Yes buying in (some) suburbs in 1965 was attainable and allowed tremendous wealth gains. Those gains come exactly from that housing now not being as attainable to someone in the same SES those 1960's buyers had when they bought. Thus, building more housing.

This is just fundamentally untrue. Go and take a look at the Case-Schiller Index. Housing has not historically been guaranteed to always go up and create wealth.

People purchased housing mainly for non-economic reasons and during the 60s in particular, as people started fleeing cities, they purchased housing to buy into stability and stability peace of mind.

It is true it is not a guarantee. And it is true that people purchased for non-economic reasons in the 60's etc... But then somewhere a switch flipped, people saw that case-schiller through its history is still trending up (even when off peak) and started the self-reinforcing belief that housing is some secret to wealth. Which is not really compatible with the attainable goal.

The switch flipping was the movement to compact growth as the housing paradigm. Before that, housing was both a vehicle for wealth creation and was attainable. Most people don’t know what Case-Schiller is and even if they do know they don’t keep track of it. For most people, the benefit of ownership is fixing costs and gaining more space for other investment. For anyone who bought in 2014, their housing is priced in constant 2014 dollars, but they’re paying in 2024 dollars.

Most people also don’t think about housing supply increases as devaluing their own houses, and the fact is that apartment construction doesn’t really impact the value of SFH at all. If anything, apartment construction near SFH pushes SFH prices up over time because apartments bring in more people and more people means create a critical mass to support walkable retail and transit, which make neighborhoods more attractive.

The YIMBY policies need to start answering for their outcomes, and those outcomes aren’t pretty. Rents are up. Production in Montgomery County is at historic lows. New SFH deliveries are very low, and ownership is increasingly unattainable for all but the highest ranking government workers. All of this has gotten worse as Montgomery County has increasingly followed the YIMBY path, and it’s gotten worse despite pretty aggressive (and expensive) market interventions by the county government.

Are there good examples of infill apartment development without requirement for mixed use or for commercial allocation, and without coverage of differential public facilities burden and the like that resulted in walkable retail of the type desired by those in SFHs within the development window (i.e., not 8+ years out)?

How fun that you filled your reply with jargon and insiderisms (some of them completely impenetrable for people outside of industry).

I’ll make it easy: none of your conditions actually matter. Requiring retail space doesn’t make commercial tenants magically appear and it certainly doesn’t make them stay. You need customers for that, so what matters is whether the retail space is close enough to enough discretionary income to produce enough revenue.

Your time limit doesn’t matter either. Aging SF neighborhoods have certainly benefited from more businesses within walking distance, hence the walk score and other walkability marketing programs. You seem to be suggesting that neighborhoods can’t get more walkable over time, and East Silver Spring is a great example of that.

If you want to argue that the population within a store’s walkshed isn’t a viability factor, or that retailers don’t seek high-density locations, please try.

DP. Anyone who uses the term “walkshed” shouldn’t be taken seriously.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I went to Reston Town Center for the first time this week and was amazed at how it was such a large and successful model of walkable urbanism. It made every walkable urban development in Montgomery County look pathetic by comparison. It also featured a few things that Moco Planning seems to hate. First is freeway access. Second was thousands of free parking spaces. Third was employers.

Bethesda and Silver Spring has these, plus transit. How does Reston do with bike connections?

Neither downtown Bethesda nor downtown Silver Spring have direct freeway access.

In addition, the one thing that struck me was how these planners in Moco didn’t seem to study in college because otherwise they would have heard about central place theory. Instead of promoting all of these multitude of “activity centers” they should just focus on one or two. Because otherwise none of them reach scale to be successful.

MoCo can’t execute central place theory because employers have overwhelmingly decided to locate in better central places (Tysons/Dulles corridor and DC), so the county can’t support residential at central place scale anywhere. Instead of acknowledging that their housing-first land use policy and their no roads transportation policy repel employers, they’ve turned to small scale apartments as their supposed growth engine so that they can claim some their policies are working. It’s really pathetic.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I went to Reston Town Center for the first time this week and was amazed at how it was such a large and successful model of walkable urbanism. It made every walkable urban development in Montgomery County look pathetic by comparison. It also featured a few things that Moco Planning seems to hate. First is freeway access. Second was thousands of free parking spaces. Third was employers.

Bethesda and Silver Spring has these, plus transit. How does Reston do with bike connections?

Neither downtown Bethesda nor downtown Silver Spring have direct freeway access.

In addition, the one thing that struck me was how these planners in Moco didn’t seem to study in college because otherwise they would have heard about central place theory. Instead of promoting all of these multitude of “activity centers” they should just focus on one or two. Because otherwise none of them reach scale to be successful.

I’m not sure that the YImBYs care
much about practical application or optimal solutions. Their goals are purely idealogical. They are under some strange impression that fair means equal, and it’s not fair until everyone can live everyplace, even if that means gentrifying some areas and dragging down others via decreased property values and declining schools. It’s like with the bike lanes, many of them will readily admit that the issues isn’t about bike travel, it’s about “traffic calming.”

You can’t take anything they say at face value.

[Anonymous]

Imagine if you NIMBYs spent more time voting and less time arguing online. You lost, get over it. Cities need to grow, you aren't entitled to your "home value" or whatever else nonsense you come up with.

Move to some generic suburb and leave the cool cities for us please.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Imagine if you NIMBYs spent more time voting and less time arguing online. You lost, get over it. Cities need to grow, you aren't entitled to your "home value" or whatever else nonsense you come up with.

Move to some generic suburb and leave the cool cities for us please.

This thread is about MoCo, where YIMBYs have delivered declining growth and skyrocketing housing costs. Is the problem that YIMBYism doesn’t actually deliver on its promises or are our YIMBYs just really incompetent?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There's rent vs buy calculators out there and the numbers are going to vary if you compare say an autoworker who had a lot of their net worth in a home bought in 1965 Detroit vs a government worker in 1965 Bethesda. In the end it comes down to you can't have housing both be a source of wealth growth for homeowners and something that everyone is going to be able to attain.

You might end up what we have now: strong political will to maintain high housing prices, vs the strong political will to build more housing.

I don’t live in Detroit. I live in Montgomery County. There is strong political will to build housing here. What there isn’t are developers who are willing to drive prices down. You have to get it through your head that developers hold almost all the sway over how much housing is produced here. Every market is different, so this doesn’t hold everywhere. Just here.

And for the 1965 government worker in Bethesda (or Wheaton or Silver Spring) was both attainable and a source of wealth. The idea that housing can’t be both has been driven by corporate landlords who want to limit housing choice so that they can fix prices.

Yes buying in (some) suburbs in 1965 was attainable and allowed tremendous wealth gains. Those gains come exactly from that housing now not being as attainable to someone in the same SES those 1960's buyers had when they bought. Thus, building more housing.

This is just fundamentally untrue. Go and take a look at the Case-Schiller Index. Housing has not historically been guaranteed to always go up and create wealth.

People purchased housing mainly for non-economic reasons and during the 60s in particular, as people started fleeing cities, they purchased housing to buy into stability and stability peace of mind.

It is true it is not a guarantee. And it is true that people purchased for non-economic reasons in the 60's etc... But then somewhere a switch flipped, people saw that case-schiller through its history is still trending up (even when off peak) and started the self-reinforcing belief that housing is some secret to wealth. Which is not really compatible with the attainable goal.

The switch flipping was the movement to compact growth as the housing paradigm. Before that, housing was both a vehicle for wealth creation and was attainable. Most people don’t know what Case-Schiller is and even if they do know they don’t keep track of it. For most people, the benefit of ownership is fixing costs and gaining more space for other investment. For anyone who bought in 2014, their housing is priced in constant 2014 dollars, but they’re paying in 2024 dollars.

Most people also don’t think about housing supply increases as devaluing their own houses, and the fact is that apartment construction doesn’t really impact the value of SFH at all. If anything, apartment construction near SFH pushes SFH prices up over time because apartments bring in more people and more people means create a critical mass to support walkable retail and transit, which make neighborhoods more attractive.

The YIMBY policies need to start answering for their outcomes, and those outcomes aren’t pretty. Rents are up. Production in Montgomery County is at historic lows. New SFH deliveries are very low, and ownership is increasingly unattainable for all but the highest ranking government workers. All of this has gotten worse as Montgomery County has increasingly followed the YIMBY path, and it’s gotten worse despite pretty aggressive (and expensive) market interventions by the county government.

Are there good examples of infill apartment development without requirement for mixed use or for commercial allocation, and without coverage of differential public facilities burden and the like that resulted in walkable retail of the type desired by those in SFHs within the development window (i.e., not 8+ years out)?

How fun that you filled your reply with jargon and insiderisms (some of them completely impenetrable for people outside of industry).

I’ll make it easy: none of your conditions actually matter. Requiring retail space doesn’t make commercial tenants magically appear and it certainly doesn’t make them stay. You need customers for that, so what matters is whether the retail space is close enough to enough discretionary income to produce enough revenue.

Your time limit doesn’t matter either. Aging SF neighborhoods have certainly benefited from more businesses within walking distance, hence the walk score and other walkability marketing programs. You seem to be suggesting that neighborhoods can’t get more walkable over time, and East Silver Spring is a great example of that.

If you want to argue that the population within a store’s walkshed isn’t a viability factor, or that retailers don’t seek high-density locations, please try.

DP. Anyone who uses the term “walkshed” shouldn’t be taken seriously.

Do you also object to the term "watershed"?

Would you prefer "the area in which people would reasonably walk to get to a particular place"?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I went to Reston Town Center for the first time this week and was amazed at how it was such a large and successful model of walkable urbanism. It made every walkable urban development in Montgomery County look pathetic by comparison. It also featured a few things that Moco Planning seems to hate. First is freeway access. Second was thousands of free parking spaces. Third was employers.

Bethesda and Silver Spring has these, plus transit. How does Reston do with bike connections?

Maybe transit isn’t worth as much to make a community thrive as you think.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There's rent vs buy calculators out there and the numbers are going to vary if you compare say an autoworker who had a lot of their net worth in a home bought in 1965 Detroit vs a government worker in 1965 Bethesda. In the end it comes down to you can't have housing both be a source of wealth growth for homeowners and something that everyone is going to be able to attain.

You might end up what we have now: strong political will to maintain high housing prices, vs the strong political will to build more housing.

I don’t live in Detroit. I live in Montgomery County. There is strong political will to build housing here. What there isn’t are developers who are willing to drive prices down. You have to get it through your head that developers hold almost all the sway over how much housing is produced here. Every market is different, so this doesn’t hold everywhere. Just here.

And for the 1965 government worker in Bethesda (or Wheaton or Silver Spring) was both attainable and a source of wealth. The idea that housing can’t be both has been driven by corporate landlords who want to limit housing choice so that they can fix prices.

Yes buying in (some) suburbs in 1965 was attainable and allowed tremendous wealth gains. Those gains come exactly from that housing now not being as attainable to someone in the same SES those 1960's buyers had when they bought. Thus, building more housing.

This is just fundamentally untrue. Go and take a look at the Case-Schiller Index. Housing has not historically been guaranteed to always go up and create wealth.

People purchased housing mainly for non-economic reasons and during the 60s in particular, as people started fleeing cities, they purchased housing to buy into stability and stability peace of mind.

It is true it is not a guarantee. And it is true that people purchased for non-economic reasons in the 60's etc... But then somewhere a switch flipped, people saw that case-schiller through its history is still trending up (even when off peak) and started the self-reinforcing belief that housing is some secret to wealth. Which is not really compatible with the attainable goal.

The switch flipping was the movement to compact growth as the housing paradigm. Before that, housing was both a vehicle for wealth creation and was attainable. Most people don’t know what Case-Schiller is and even if they do know they don’t keep track of it. For most people, the benefit of ownership is fixing costs and gaining more space for other investment. For anyone who bought in 2014, their housing is priced in constant 2014 dollars, but they’re paying in 2024 dollars.

Most people also don’t think about housing supply increases as devaluing their own houses, and the fact is that apartment construction doesn’t really impact the value of SFH at all. If anything, apartment construction near SFH pushes SFH prices up over time because apartments bring in more people and more people means create a critical mass to support walkable retail and transit, which make neighborhoods more attractive.

The YIMBY policies need to start answering for their outcomes, and those outcomes aren’t pretty. Rents are up. Production in Montgomery County is at historic lows. New SFH deliveries are very low, and ownership is increasingly unattainable for all but the highest ranking government workers. All of this has gotten worse as Montgomery County has increasingly followed the YIMBY path, and it’s gotten worse despite pretty aggressive (and expensive) market interventions by the county government.

Are there good examples of infill apartment development without requirement for mixed use or for commercial allocation, and without coverage of differential public facilities burden and the like that resulted in walkable retail of the type desired by those in SFHs within the development window (i.e., not 8+ years out)?

How fun that you filled your reply with jargon and insiderisms (some of them completely impenetrable for people outside of industry).

I’ll make it easy: none of your conditions actually matter. Requiring retail space doesn’t make commercial tenants magically appear and it certainly doesn’t make them stay. You need customers for that, so what matters is whether the retail space is close enough to enough discretionary income to produce enough revenue.

Your time limit doesn’t matter either. Aging SF neighborhoods have certainly benefited from more businesses within walking distance, hence the walk score and other walkability marketing programs. You seem to be suggesting that neighborhoods can’t get more walkable over time, and East Silver Spring is a great example of that.

If you want to argue that the population within a store’s walkshed isn’t a viability factor, or that retailers don’t seek high-density locations, please try.

DP. Anyone who uses the term “walkshed” shouldn’t be taken seriously.

Do you also object to the term "watershed"?

Would you prefer "the area in which people would reasonably walk to get to a particular place"?

lol. Trying to defend a totally made up fad word.