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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Jawando.

Glass only cares about rich people who can bike to work or eat vegan. [/quote]
Jawando doesn’t want to build houses. Also Glass made the RideOn free, so maybe he doesn’t only care about bikers, he cares about our world not overheating.[/quote]

Jawando does want to build houses. He just votes against nonsensical subsidies for $5k apartments and zoning plans that have no infrastructure or strategic vision to back them up. It’s ridiculous to paint him as anti-housing. The YIMBYs dislike him because he’s pro-consumer. [/quote]

Not sure I quite agree with your framing of the issue here, my friend. MoCo is facing a housing affordability crisis — young people, teachers, and firefighters, among other crucial groups, are being priced out of the county — and the solution to a housing affordability crisis is to build more smart and affordable housing. That’s Econ 101, supply and demand. Now, does this mean promoting feckless, unsustainable, and unaffordable housing development every which way? Of course not. But it does mean supporting common-sense proposals like Bill 29-20 (which Jawando was one of two councilmembers to vote against) to build more affordable housing along transit corridors. I have concerns with Jawando’s track record on affordable housing.[/quote]

DP.  We don't agree on the approach suggested.  The Econ 101 reference supplies more rhetorical support than robust, given complex issues at hand varied stakeholders and highly differential impacts.[/quote]

Fair point, DP. But I think one could say the same about your claim that the “YIMBYs dislike [Jawando] because he’s pro-consumer.” Would you be willing to expand a little on what kind of approach you would support to the housing affordability crisis? The example provided in the post to which you most directly replied seems to be an example of Jawando rejecting an inoffensive, pragmatic suggestion to a problem that has been roiling the county for years. Track records should matter.[/quote]

We need competition policy. That starts with going after price fixing and establishing modest rent stabilization (the second is done already; Friedson will probably prevent the first from moving through PHP because his donors make money from price fixing).

To add to those policies, we should revise the tax regime so that land speculation is really expensive. This should be done through targeted property tax measures and through recordation tax changes. All these things should be done in combination with permitting reforms, plan approval reforms, and targeted upzoning in residential neighborhoods close to metro stations. The various PILOTs should all be repealed because they just make land more expensive.

Bill 29-20 was nothing more than a bailout for Five Square, which subsequently donated more than $10k to Friedson. They made a bad land deal and claimed they couldn’t be profitable if they had to pay property taxes. When the county bails out developers who make bad deals, the county effectively props up land prices. Better to let the developer fail and have the building rights be repriced at market value at auction.

Moreover, bill 29-20 provided major benefits to the private developer but little public benefit. We got two eight-story towers with astronomical rents. To the extent the subsidy passed through to renters, it was only to renters around 200 percent AMI. We shouldn’t be subsidizing housing at that income level. Jawando was fiscally responsible and smart to oppose.

If you think housing is Econ 101, you either forgot Econ 101 or you didn’t take it. [/quote]

Agree re: price fixing and competition policy. A little hurt by the disgusting ad hominem attack at the end, but whatever. You probably have a lot going on. Bill 29-20 explicitly requires that 25% of the moderately priced dwelling units be reserved for individuals with 50% or less of the area median income. This seems like textbook public benefit. Thanks for sharing your point of view. Let’s keep it civil going forward.[/quote]

That’s 50 percent of the 15 percent MPDUs which otherwise would have been affordable at 65-70 percent AMI. The price for this subsidy won’t be known until the developer builds out, but it’s easily going to average more than $1 million a year for a few dozen MPDUs, half of which will be deeply affordable. I thinking our housing dollars could have been better spent because that’s a lot of money to pay for a few dozen units. For $1 million a year; the county could rent many more units at market rate and then sublet at a discount. So there’s “little public benefit” from the special MPDU requirement (which Friedson opposed), and if you consider ways in which the money funding the subsidy could have been spent on housing more effectively, bill 29-20 has negative public benefit.

The county has been doing supply side since Doug Duncan. It’s time to bring in some other tools to the table because supply side hasn’t worked. Friedson definitely won’t do that because the other tools take money away from his donors, who love supply side because they get the subsidies directly. Glass isn’t creative enough so he’s not the guy other either. Jawando is the best choice to try some different things to balance the housing market more in favor of consumers. [/quote]

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