MOCO - County Wide Upzoning, Everywhere
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Anonymous
You think they cherry picked data to show that their premier idea (upzoning) isn’t going to result in meaningful housing growth? |
Anonymous
Why, are we going to get grounded? The council will do whatever they want regardless of the opinions of their constituents, they’ve made that abundantly clear in the past. At least if residents fight hard enough we might force them into some compromise that is acceptable. |
Anonymous
You really sound like a NIMBY right now. There’s good reason the county’s policy is to have growth for all types of housing affordable at all income levels, mostly because expensive housing takes high-income households out of competition for less expensive housing. Townhouses (a type of SFH) are part of the mix in Westbard and could be part of the mix in White Flint and on undeveloped land in Rockville, Gaithersburg, and Clarksburg (which has only achieved two thirds of its plan potential). They could also be part of the mix when Montgomery Mall is redeveloped. There are plenty of places to put SFH. The county still has a lot of land left to build. You can’t NIMBY SFH and expect to have a healthy housing market. |
Anonymous
Am I summarizing this correctly? When you say SFH, you actually mean townhouses, and you think townhouses could go on White Flint, on unspecified "undeveloped land" in Rockville, Gaithersburg, and Clarksburg (townhouses are actually currently being built in all three of these places), and on Montgomery Mall "when" it's redeveloped. Yes? If so, who is saying this should NOT happen? |
Anonymous
Acceptable to who? You? When you say "we" and "residents", who do you mean? I'm a resident, and I generally support the proposals. |
Anonymous
SFH can be attached or detached. Attached (including some quads) are already quite numerous through county. The PP said “I don't think it will go over well” with the county council to have more SFH, so that’s who’s saying it should not happen. One of the failures of YIMBYism in MoCo is when the advocates say they’re YIMBYs, what they really mean is that they’re only for the type of housing in the location they think it should be. |
Anonymous
Oh! That was me! And this is what I actually said:
Yes, it's true that there are rows of townhouses in many parts of the county, including rows of four townhouses (although it's usually more), but I have never heard anybody call a row of four townhouses a "quadplex" or fourplex. If a fourplex is multi-unit housing, and a SFH is by definition single-unit housing, what would multi-unit single-unit housing even be? |
Anonymous
In Germantown and Gaithersburg there are blocks of four homes arranged in a cloverleaf fashion. They’re condos and they’re technically quads. There a number of piggyback developments there was well, also condos and technically MFH. But, yeah, what you actually said up there was anti-SFH and you’ve been more direct in other posts but I don’t have time to go back to them. You’re a NIMBY but you just NIMBY different things than other NIMBYs. |
Anonymous
The only ones I know of are in Clarksburg, where the residents do in fact call them quads, but nobody calls them townhouses, and they're not the fourplexes the Planning Department is talking about when they talk about fourplexes. What I actually said up there was that the county council will not react well to being told that they should prioritize their constituents who can afford SFHs over their constituents who can't. This is not anti-SFH, this is - if anything - anti- elected officials prioritizing affluent people over non-affluent people. Constituents are people. Residential units are not constituents. Am I ok with making it legal for multi-unit housing to replace single-unit housing? Yes, I am. That doesn't mean I hate single-unit housing. It means I support more housing. It also means I support the rights of property owners. As you know, the zoning proposals do not outlaw single-unit housing. Single-unit housing will still be allowed by right everywhere where it is currently allowed. |
Anonymous
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Hold up, we’re calling townhomes SFH now? How is that?
And how is that different than a triples or quadplex being proposed? |
Anonymous
Very simple. Income taxes are largely paid by top income families. In 2021, at the Federal level, top 1% paid 45% of all Federal income taxes, top 10% paid 75%, top 50% paid 97%, and bottom 50% paid 3%. Maryland may be different but only by degree. MC may be different but only by degree. In essence, income tax revenues, whether Federal, state, or county, are heavily reliant on upper income taxpayers. CA and NY are well aware of this fact. Being generous, we can estimate that 30-40% of MC residents pay almost no income taxes, whether Federal, state, or county. MC no doubt would receive property tax revenues from residents in triplexes but those property tax revenues will not likely cover the MC services, including schools. That one family in a SFH is far more likely to be a net tax benefit to MC than those 3 families in a triplex. Simple economic fact. Of course, those 3 families need housing and whatever services they might need. But reducing the quantity of SFHs is not the answer, especially given the vast quantities of underutilized commercial land in MC. MC arguably needs more rich families not fewer as social services are in reality paid by those families. No argument or criticism there but it is a fact that CA and NY recognize. |
Anonymous
First: We aren't trading 1:1. If you put a triplex where a SFH was you get *roughly* the same in property tax and each property only needs to generate 1/3 of what the SFH generated in income tax Second: You seem to be assuming that we are swapping largely mansions for hovels, and that SFH equates to wealthy and multifamily equates to poor. That isn't even currently true. And it is more likely that the SFHs that convert into triplexes at least in the first wave are NOT the mansions in Potomac. It will be the older smaller homes on larger lots, with owners who are not in the top 1% to begin with. |
Anonymous
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Lost in all of the banter about economics and x-plex definitions is, among other things, the set of neighborhoods most likely to be in the crosshairs for the increased density, especially that granted by corridor 500-foot proximity allowing up to 19-unit structures (more where recently established state law awards bonus densities). These are the existing detached SFH neighborhoods in closer-in locations in the southeast of the county, built out for some time and already underserved with regard to infrastructure, but less costly for development acquisition than their counterparts to the west. With the plan doing little to nothing to ensure that adequate infrastructure will be in place (e.g., by placing moratoria on locations where infrastructure capacity is inadequate), the County Council will be working to the relative detriment of these neighborhoods, mostly in Silver Spring, and any in the immediate vicinity, whether detached SFH or higher density, that would be affected by the greater infrastructure deficit.
Ironically, existing detached SFH properties in these neighborhoods are currently among the more attainable in the closer-in portions of the county, with among the greatest diversity, economic and otherwise, for detached SFH neighborhoods. Significant portions of Bethesda are not among the areas to which highest density would apply, and other portions of Bethesda and Chevy Chase (and the most expensive areas of Takoma Park) have various protections and/or prohibitive land acquisition cost. Meanwhile, encouragement of clustered, close-walk-to-Metro, high density in areas currently zoned for such but under-built (unsurprisingly, downtown Silver Spring among them) as an option to increase housing stock appears to have ceased. And nobody appears to be considering additional greenfield options farther out which might better afford infrastructure, and at a lower cost, when seeking to increase the stock of SFH (detached or otherwise). It appears that they are fine with all of this, as, I'm sure, are small to mid-scale developers and interested real estate investment groups. Well done, County Council, well done. |
Anonymous
So, each unit needs to have one-third the income to generate the same taxes? Even though are three times as many units and possibly three times as many people? They need to generate the same income taxes? I know that the YIMBYs can be a little weak in the maths, but did you even make it through fractions in school? As to the second point, no one said that. You are just in the midst of some fantasy. |
Anonymous
They don’t want rational solutions, this is an idealogical battle. They don’t like that some people cannot afford to live in some places, so they think that it’s some kind of wrong to be righted. |