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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Jawando appears to be the only NIMBY candidate, so he’s got my money and my vote.  Let’s get back to proper and sane planning.[/quote]

Agree. On Reddit subs, it seems that the developer shills are out in full force with anti jawando silliness which signals to me that jawando is my guy. As usual, the YIMBYs fail to realize that while they are the most vocal, they are not in the majority. [/quote]

If you could get two of the candidates to give you a million dollars in tax abatements a year in exchange for forgoing maybe $75k in revenue a year by providing a little deeply affordable housing among the MPDUs that you have to provide anyway, you’d have your shills out in force too. Especially if the third candidate wanted more affordable housing and prevailing wage in exchange for that big a subsidy. This comes down to who’s more likely to keep the subsidies flowing while gutting renter protections. The developers spend big because they expect Friedson or Glass to deliver big for them. You can’t even honestly call any if this pro-growth. It’s all about extracting higher margins from what they already own. [/quote]

I thought the developers won't benefit from the tax abatements, only the land speculators will

Make it make sense[/quote]

The metro one was done for a builder that already had development rights so for them it worked as a bailout after they made a bad land deal. No one else has used it yet because they didn’t have development rights already. For any future deals, the tax abatement will be capitalized into the land and function as a subsidy for the landowner, in this case WMATA.

However you think the PILOT is distributed you can’t plausibly claim that a $1.1 million tax abatement every year for 15 years is a good trade for 16 MPDUs affordable at 50 percent AMI instead of 70 percent AMI. We wouldn’t even have that concession or the affordable housing concession in the office PILOT if Evan Glass hadn’t proposed them. Friedson was willing to give these subsidies away for nothing. To the extent these are good policies, it’s because of Glass, not Friedson. Glass gets this better than Friedson does. Anyone who’s truly for affordable housing should vote Glass not Friedson. If you’re for developers making more money, vote Friedson.

For the revenue that the county forgoes on the WMATA PILOT, it could have bought at least twice as many condos, rented them out, and still had money to spare. The math on Andrew Friedson’s subsidies never maths. He’s either not very smart or he’s lying. Which do you think it is?[/quote]

Different poster here. No on the county purchasing condos and renting them out. First, we don’t pay taxes on our own property. So there would be no “reclaiming” any revenue stream. Second, that would make us landlords, responsible for maintenance and repairs. Which means hiring more staff. And everyone in county government knows we don’t appropriately manage our current county facilities/infrastructure. So we’d be slumlords.

Which is exactly why we are leveraging the private market to help build housing. It’s not perfect. No human system is. But it’s far better than a government-only solution. [/quote]

$1.1 million in foregone taxes a year in exchange for a developer forgoing much less in revenue is a horrible deal for taxpayers. It would have been worse if Evan Glass hadn’t stepped up to fix these bills as much as he could. There’s a place for tax abatements in housing policy but we should be getting better deals that result in more affordable housing. The foregone revenue from these deals could be spent directly to alleviate housing shortages in market segments that the private sector will not serve. Friedson is too deferential to the private sector’s profit motives to get us good deals. [/quote]

Glass doesn't get a free pass, though. He's proposed and delivered poor-social-ROI incentives of his own.

The "incentives are needed to keep us competitive" thought, in the absence of a clear calculus that shows that societal ROI, and not just for beneficiaries who may be new to the county, but broadly for those whom the government, elected or otherwise, is supposed to represent, is the same kind of folly that sees largely negative effect from competition to attract a stadium or the like, lining a team owner's pocket on the backs of area residents.  Find a [i]good[/i] way of attracting economic development -- one that more clearly provides that societal benefit.  That's the hard work that government officials are [i]supposed[/i] to do.

To the question about Friedson, he's clearly not dumb and he's clearly a politician, so the reasonable conclusion is...[/quote]

You want nothing but low income housing here, with rent stabilization. Which means we attract nothing but low income low skilled workers. A safety net is great. [b]Building out nothing but safety net is horrible. [/b]It provides no middle housing. No incentivize to attract businesses that provide skilled jobs. [/quote]

Ding! Ding! Ding!

Thank you. Someone gets it. Please run for council. 
We'll have to slip you in past the small horde of social activists who think the county government has an endless supply of funds and exists only to produce 100,000,001 social programs, but I think we can do it. [/quote]

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