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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][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. Building out nothing but safety net is horrible. It provides no middle housing. No incentivize to attract businesses that provide skilled jobs. [/quote]

DP. Why aren’t people talking more about producing homes for sale? Lots of concern about rental production but no concern about the shortage of homes for sale. The production of homes for sale is even lower than rental production. Friedson, despite claiming to be anti-tax, has voted for raising impact taxes on single family homes and townhouses (more commonly built for purchase) while decreasing impact taxes on multifamily units (more commonly built as rentals). [/quote]

The problem someone needs to fix is this:

People (and sometimes corporations) buying up houses they convert to rentals.

There are far too many regular people who own dozens of houses in our county. They are leveraging debt to build a real estate portfolio. We don’t need more rentals in SFH neighborhoods.

ICYMI: CE candidate Mithun Banerjee is one of these people. PNC is moving to foreclose on at least one of his properties. (Google the local news articles or many cases, including all the taxes he has failed to pay on his various properties).

So, no…I don’t want sweetheart deals for developers to build multifamily units in SFH neighborhoods…because I don’t want some regular guy who owns dozens of houses to increase his portfolio while cosplaying landlord.

Aim higher, MoCo.

[/quote]

Why would you have a problem with small landlords who often offer much better deals and flexibility for people with credit issues than large corporate investment firms? You have a weird fixation on “regular people” even though they are the best type of possible rental owner especially when compared to out of state investment groups.

I also can’t understand why you think that there is no need for SFH rentals in the county. Families need a place to stay as well and it’s better to pay 3k/month to live in the same neighborhood that would cost 6k/month to purchase. It seems to me like you just don’t like people who are not multi millionaires/large corporate interests. I prefer smaller scale markets and business relationships myself.[/quote]

It would be even better if more people could get the housing and price stability afforded to owners. It would be better for those families to pay $3k/month as a mortgage instead of rent. [/quote]

Not necessarily. If you are paycheck to paycheck, renting is better. You don't have unanticipated costs. Like paying for a new HVAC or roof. [/quote]

I didn’t say everyone. I said more people. [b]A lot of people who have good credit and stable finances are locked out of ownership right now. [/b]More people should be able to own their homes. They benefit personally and the housing market benefits because those people leave the renter pool, decreasing demand. [/quote]

Untrue. There are so many houses that cost $500K to $600K that are perfectly livable. The median HHI is $170K. How are those people "locked out"? If people are poor savers and bad at managing their finances, then they are not good candidates for ownership. And frankly, building new housing won't help their situation because it will be even more expensive, and there isn't enough land to build so much supply to make any dent in prices in the places where people actually want to live.[/quote]

There aren’t a long of houses on the market in that price range. In the first quarter a little over 2,000 homes were sold at all price ranges. The median price was $650,000. The county has almost 400,000 households. 2,000 sales in a county this populous is nothing. For some reason there’s a group of people who want to close off home ownership and just add rentals. I don’t get it. Home ownership used to be the foundation of opportunity in this county. [/quote]

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