Reply to MOCO - County Wide Upzoning, Everywhere

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]And the pattern continues.....a string of interesting and substantive exchanges gets killed by a few people who would rather just throw juvenile insults.[/quote]

Is there anything to discuss until the council receives and starts assessing the plan?

Refresher on the plans linked.

https://www.facebook.com/share/v/jhBKNXxLDZTYRbFL/?[/quote]

PP here.  I have read the entire plan.  The Council HAS received and started assessing the plan.

And yes, there is a ton to assess.  And now is the time to do it.  The plan is complicated and multifaceted, and there is legitimate debate to be had over whether it will achieve its goals, and even if so, if it will create other issues.  Are there ways to mitigate those issues.  Now is exactly the time to dig in understand it, and advocate for what you think the best outcome is.

Buried in these 100+ pages is some great discussion that has helped me understand it better and refine my position.  I am using that to advocate directly to council and to my neighbors.

I could do without the middle school sniping.[/quote]

I was just operating from the planning board post from 7/24:

The Planning Board voted unanimously on July 18 to approve our recommended updates to the county's update to the Growth and Infrastructure Policy and send it to the County Council for review.

Updated every four years, the GIP administers one of the most important functions our department and the Planning Board provide to the community – ensuring that public facilities, particularly schools and transportation infrastructure, are adequate to support new development, and that existing growth tools are equitable, fair, and effective.

A key focus of the 2024-2028 GIP is ensuring it helps reach the goals established in Thrive Montgomery 2050 to increase housing options for all, improve transit, and strengthen the economy in equitable, sustainable ways.

[b]Visit the policy’s website (montgomeryplanning.org/gip) for more details on the update – the approved Planning Board Draft will be posted when it is transmitted to County Council by the end of July.[/b][/quote]

Ah, you are looking at a different, but related, policy. 
The proposals under discussion here are: https://montgomeryplanning.org/planning/housing/attainable-housing-strategies-initiative/
[/quote]

[b]Why so many related policies with so much overlap?[/b]

Is this a lack of coordination or subterfuge?[/quote]

I don't say this to be flip, but...because that is how government works.  The attainable housing strategy is primarily a collection of zoning changes.  The GIP is a policy about how to manage infrastructure impacts of growth.  It isn't at all the part that people primarily care about when it comes to land use.  The attainable housing policy does reference this though.

I absolutely it is complicated.  But I don't attribute that to either a lack of coordination or subterfuge, simply how it all works.

Zoning impacts economic development, impacts housing, impacts infrastructure...[/quote]

DP.  Just because that is the way it works does not mean that those pushing density are not [i]utilizing[/i] the way it works to introduce concepts in an overlapping way such that the frog boils without becoming aware that the temperature is rising.

One only need to look at when they made public the more extreme parts of the Attainable Housing Strategies (19-unit apartments within 500 feet of all the transportation corridors, all of the single-family residential zones being affected instead of more limited transportation-proximate properties, the extra quad-plex density for the maximum radius from rail that had been floated, etc.).  That all pretty much was a "Surprise!" to the public at the very end when the report was released.  And there continued to be little surprises here and there as they discussed nuance in the working sessions.

If they had been honest about the general aim when pushing Thrive, which they now use as justification for the high densities, they would have let [i]all[/i] of the targeted areas know just how dense things in their neighborhoods [i]might maximally[/i] become/just what their neighboring properties [i]might[/i] appear with maximum density.  Instead, neighborhood interactions were limited and we got that photo of a high-craftsman-quality brick duplex -- something that is very unlikely even to be representative of the upcoming duplexes, much less more dense units -- in the few public presentations/meetings.

But, then, the frog would know the water was boiling and jump out.[/quote]

I won’t quibble with any of what you say about the attainable housing strategy itself.

But on this specific issue, a poster was just simply (and understandably) mistaken as to the initiative in question.  The county, in fact any county, can and should have multiple initiatives moving at one time.[/quote]

Great.  And yes.  But only if they are forthright with the public about their aims and responsive to fully-informed feedback.  Otherwise, [i]their particular utilization[/i] of those multiple initiative paths is just poor government, and damaging to those they are supposed to represent.[/quote]

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