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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Two things happened.

The first and most important thing is that Montgomery County started losing private sector jobs, some of them directly to Virginia. The reasons for this are many, but they include Maryland’s corporate taxes, Montgomery County’s energy tax, and Montgomery County’s refusal to build more roads. People who can afford to do so generally prefer to live closer to work than further away, which is why people who live in Montgomery County schlep across the bridge every morning while their bosses roll in from their single family homes in Fairfax.

The second is that developers stopped building single family houses in Montgomery County. People with the means to do so generally prefer owning. The county council has incentivized rental apartments and disincentivized single family homes, so a lot of people who work in Montgomery County moved to Fredrick so they could buy a single family home.

The county council likes to pretend that building apartments grows the county’s economy and tax base, but developers aren’t eager to build in Montgomery County because the shrinking private sector employment base makes building risky. So now the council pays developers to build housing, and the county has to figure out a way to pay for services for people whose landlords aren’t paying property taxes. [/quote]

+1 and I’d add that they push most of the rental units and affordable housing into a few parts of the county. Because of that, you have a very complacent elite that doesn’t really care so much about the rest of moco as long as their parts are protected (think the W school district areas especially). The best and brightest aren’t running for Council.

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