Reply to We need homes. A lot of homes. Not just affordable, but also middle-income homes.

Forum Index » Metropolitan DC Local Politics

Reply to "We need homes. A lot of homes. Not just affordable, but also middle-income homes."

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]So tired of these threads getting derailed by NIMBYs in upper NW who are convinced that the whole conversation is about middle class people who are bitter that they can't afford a SFH in Cleveland Park. We don't even want to live there! I don't care about your house. I mean, from a policy perspective, I think we should up zone large swaths of NW DC, especially along major thoroughfares, but not because I personally want to live there -- just because a lot of that part of town is underutilized for no good reason.

But when I say "we need more housing in DC, both affordable low income housing and affordable middle income housing), I'm mostly thinking about, like Michigan Park, Brookland, Kingman Park, SE waterfront east of Navy Yard, and Wards 7 and 8. Like I'm not heavily invested in making sure people can get into "the Wilson triangle" or whatever. We just genuinely need more housing (both rental and owned) that is affordable to people who make less than 100k a year, or even 150k a year increasingly, because we need somewhere for teachers, firefighters, restaurant workers, small business owners, etc. to live. We're not talking about colonize your little enclave in CCDC. We're just saying there is simply insufficient inventory in DC to provide housing to people at all income levels, and that's bad for the city.

Everyone saying, "then go where the housing is cheaper" is being disingenuous. It's one thing for a middle income couple with a couple kids to say "Yeah, let's move to Odenton - more space, decent schools, less expensive." That's fine and that will always happen. But that can't be your entire housing plan, lol. Especially not in DC where traffic gets worse everyday and people are super short sighted about public transit. I mean, it's barely working in NYC, but at least public transit there can handle bringing most of the low and middle income workers in from outer boroughs and suburbs every day. DC's infrastructure can't do that, full stop.

If you think the answer to lack of housing in DC is "move outside the city" then I hope you are also in favor of vastly expanding the metro system and investing in other rail and transit options. But usually the same people who don't want to increase density also think that answer to traffic and congestion is just more Easy Pass lanes.

It's like talking to very small children, honestly.[/quote]

Adding housing units isn't going to reduce housing prices at all. If anything, it will drive them up. It's like you're just picking and choosing which parts of economics you like, and ignoring the rest. [/quote]

DP.  Ok so where exactly do you want people to live end how would you like them to commute into the city?  I thought PP’s post was spot on.[/quote]
It’s because they took Intro to Micro Freshman year and learned nothing else, but unfortunately have developed an entire worldview and policy framework around an elementary misunderstanding of how economics works. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics