Reply to Baltimore Sun article about Howard County rezoning

Forum Index » Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS)

Reply to "Baltimore Sun article about Howard County rezoning"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]

That's not quite true.

County funding and resources and curriculum standards for schools is uniform across the board. What made River Hill more desirable than Wilde Lake was market forces driven by the people themselves. The county didn't set up River Hill / Clarksville to become a high end district, [b]it naturally evolved that way[/b]. The same for the Columbia districts themselves. So the county didn't make River Hill a prestigious high school any more it made Wilde Lake a less than desirable school (actually, Wilde Lake is perfectly fine). It was the individual actions of homeowners and people's own decisions that led to River Hill being River Hill today. What the county is doing is interfering with the individual decisions and market forces by abruptly distorting it.

If we want to accept your theory, we could also argue that there's a strong case to be made that the county acted in bad faith to the River Hill homeowners. A government does not exist in isolation of the people, it's supposed to represent the people but clearly the county is not representing the affected families and homeowners either.[/quote]

There is NOTHING about land use that "naturally evolves."

As for bad faith - maybe the property owners of River Hill believed that they would never be rezoned. Maybe that was even officially the Howard County government position at one time, I don't know. But circumstances are subject to change. Rezoning, by itself, does not constitute bad faith. Not when it rezones people who don't own property, not when it rezones people who believe that their properties will gain value, and not when it rezones people who believe that their properties will lose value.

You don't have a right to socioeconomically-segregated public schools. You just don't.[/quote]

Your post is utterly rubbish. Land use naturally evolves through the individual actions of people, whether developers or buyers, over the years and in reaction to market forces. Population changes greatly affects the character of an area over the years and decades and quite often there's little a jurisdiction can do about it. Baltimore, for example, cannot rezone its way out of poverty. But zoning does help to play a role by laying the predictable frameworks for land use in a stable way (which is the point of zoning, it was actually introduced to prevent unexpected and unpredictable rapid changes affecting long term stability and property values, such as opening a factory in the middle of a residential area). This is why the county is guilty if we are to accept your definition of zoning reach because if it allowed a zoning and districting to exist for decades, which people used to make their decisions in good faith of what to buy and where to live and what to build. "good faith" may mean nothing to you but is actually a valid legal understanding. The county is suddenly changing the rules without advance warning, creating instability and badly affecting market conditions (which in Howard is driven heavily by schools). A government exists because people have faith and confidence in the said government. But when the government becomes arbitrary it creates market instability. The government does not exist to impose your views on other people.

The difficulty of imposing zoning on an unwilling population is neatly observed in the Baltimore Sun article by the person who commented that the River Hill families will most likely just sell and move to stay in the River Hill district. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics