Reply to Removal of development cap in downtown Bethesda

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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]I'm getting the distinct impression here that the person who has the most planning interest/experience on this thread is really out of touch and doesn't seem to have a position other than calling all the other posters' ideas and opinions wrong.[/quote]
I am starting to come to the conclusion that Planning as a whole is a profession that’s as a whole completely out of touch. [/quote]

Planning may be a profession that is completely out of touch. I don't know, I am not a planner.

I am a homeowner, though, in fact a longtime homeowner, and I know for certain that longtime homeowners who refuse to acknowledge the existence of a housing crisis are completely out of touch. [/quote]
“Homeowner” = you own a 1BD condo in downtown Silver Spring. [/quote]

No, actually, I have owned a detached single family house in Montgomery County for over two decades.

Your response says a lot about your opinions, though. Because a person who owns the one-bedroom condo they live in, whether in downtown Silver Spring or elsewhere, actually is just as much a homeowner as any other homeowner, not more, not less.[/quote]

When I was a renter I cared about services and infrastructure so I’m not sure why we need to distinguish residents in this way. When I was deciding where to live I also cared about services and infrastructure. I’m not sure how disinvesting in infrastructure benefits current or future residents but it sure does save money for developers so I guess we should roll with it?[/quote]

The question is not, do renters care about services and infrastructure?

The question is, what are renters' priorities?[/quote]
[b]
The question is, "What are residents' priorities?"[/b]

So far, we have a reasonable handle on infrastructure and services being important when considering changes to development.[/quote]

Well, yes. But all we are hearing about, at least on DCUM, are the priorities of some (not even all) homeowners. And those priorities seem to be: no new housing where I live.[/quote]

That's a rather unnuanced and strawman-ish way of characterizing:

"I want my community to have good infrastructure and services, and would not want to see additional development in a manner that fails to ensure that these are not degraded."

And yet we still seem to have nothing that supports the phantom narrative of this not being the priority from the bulk of area residents, whether homeowners or renters.[/quote]

Summary: I am the homeowner of a house, and I prefer not to have multi-unit housing my neighborhood, because I believe multi-unit housing in my neighborhood would degrade my neighborhood.

Which is fine, you get to have the preferences you have. Similarly, other people get to have other preferences. I think it's a basic part of adult cognition to recognize that people who are not you might have preferences that are different from yours. [/quote]

Here we have, again, an entirely misrepresentative restatement of another's position.  As mentioned, the position is that any development should not come at the cost of lesser/more overtaxed services/infrastructure for area residents.  There has been more than one respondent noting that position in one way or another.

Development of multi-unit housing in a way that does not degrade levels of service or infrastructure for existing residents would be a considerably different proposition.  It seems that, for some reason, there is an objection by those pushing density to such reasonable conditions.

However, those objections are illustrated not with a clear position, critiquable reasoning or evidence to support the vague allusion to the "other preferences" mentioned, but with logical  fallacies of rhetoric such as these strawman mischaracterizations.[/quote]

Hey guess what? This is 2025 and we live in America. We actually know how to build sewers and roads and infrastructure. Believe it or not. You pay some company, they come out and build stuff. Then it's done. And it works.

You NIMBYs seem to think companies or the state can't do that. Why? Do you know how the world works?[/quote]

The state/MoCo could make sure they had enough to pay those companies to do those things.  They could tie desired development to such adequacy.

This is not what they do, though.  The gaps we see in infrastructure & services are the result.[/quote]

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