Reply to MOCO - County Wide Upzoning, Everywhere

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][b]Can someone explain what upzoning will accomplish? 
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I just want someone to lay it all out, in detail, so we can all come back later and point out how it didn't do *any* of the things we were promised. [/quote]

Allow property owners to build two-unit, three-unit, or four-unit residential buildings, by right, in addition to one-unit residential buildings, in certain areas of Montgomery County where currently only one-unit residential buildings may be built by right.[/quote]

There you go again focusing on process instead of outcomes. One reason YIMBYism has failed to deliver housing affordability is that YIMBYs are too focused on rules and plan approvals instead of actual housing production.

The YIMBY approach is especially ineffective and harmful in the Montgomery County market where we have a lot of approved plans but not enough construction. There are other drivers of the county’s poor housing growth that are much more important than land use regulation. The first is that developers view MoCo as a riskier submarket than DC or Fairfax because job growth in the county is so weak. Not only can developers reliably make more money in Fairfax and DC now, but a building boom in either of those places (or Loudoun or Prince William) would gut the MoCo market. The other reason is that it’s cost prohibitive to add SFH (attached or detached) on the little land where adding SFH is actually allowed because the YIMBYs have put in place punitive fees in those areas. Sure, a lot of land only allows SFH, but there’s already SFH in those places, so if one gets torn down and rebuilt, you’re not adding any SFH. Prices for SFH have risen faster than for any other housing type, which sends a clear signal about what customers demand. Adding SFH would relieve upward price pressure across the housing market but YIMBYs can’t bring themselves to support SFH construction.

YIMBYs like to claim the pro-growth high ground, but if you look at their track record in MoCo they’ve produced anti-growth outcomes.  The only thing that’s grown is developers’ profits. [/quote]

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