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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
"You live in a house built by a developer" is such a tired trope.[/quote]

DP. The point of "a developer built your house" is: what if, when the developer proposed the building you now live in, the neighbors had been able to stop it?

I personally know people who live in new developments, who oppose the building of even newer neighboring developments. I've never had the heart to tell them that the pre-existing neighbors didn't want their new development, either.[/quote]

I think it's totally OK for current community to have a say in the future of where they live.[/quote]

Sure, as long as you acknowledge that if the community had had an equivalent say when your house was built, your house probably wouldn't have been built.[/quote]

So NIMBYs would have been more effective in preventing growth than they are today? In Montgomery County, projects have been downsized at developers' requests, not residents' requests. [b]The YIMBYs stomp their feet every time a community asks for a project to be smaller but never says a peep when developers come back and seek to reduce previously approved density. The outcome is the same: less housing.[/b] Why is one OK but the other isn't?[/quote]
The outcome in Westbard fascinates me. The developer has proposed to scrap half of the proposed apartment units which would have produced the MPDUs (which YIMBYs used to accuse the community as being against affordable housing) and now requests to convert it into an assisted living facility. It is effectively a bait and switch that seems to be a common end-around the planning and permitting process and I have not seen or heard anything from the usual YIMBY suspects about this outcome, despite it resulting in a major impact to the amount of both market rate and regulated "affordable" housing units produced.

Similarly, look at the Carr property in downtown Bethesda, another bait and switch. Project site plan originally approved with 480 units. Later the developer reduces the units to 456 and then later comes back and requests to make 80 of those units "short-term rentals" and the MDPU requirement only applies to the remaining units and there is no impact to the overall project footprint. Again, where are the usual YIMBY voices? Where is the howling and screaming?

I would honestly respect YIMBYs more if they were not dishonest about their goals. On the one hand they extol great urbanism of European cities, evoking continuous low-rise density with abundant tree canopy, public open space and parks. However, in practice the YIMBYs actually advocate for allowing developers free reign to build imposing and lifeless monstrosities that promote an urban environment that is exactly the opposite of what they claim to extol and any opposition to moderating developers is countered with vicious attacks and attempts at public shaming to effectively label people as racist (everyone knows who I am talking about).

Requesting a setback to allow for a wider sidewalk with planted trees is bad because it reduces the number of units that developers can build which affects the availability of overall supply which prevents their mythical housing supply/price mechanism from working when hurts affordable housing for low income residents which makes the person requesting this effectively racist. Let's be clear, this chain of events is the exact logic and as you can see in this thread, to point out the fallacies of these arguments is to be met with attacks. It's bizarre.

The Planning Department is guilty of this too. Presenting these preposterous utopian renderings of things like continuous step downs in density (which I think most people think is fine) but cannot actually be implemented in practice. They also lack the ability to plan for actual day to day details of the lived experience, which is troubling. Where in their plans have they accounted for parking of delivery vehicles, for example? Or, when you look at their Silver Spring 4 stack "missing middle" proposals, where in their proposed site plans does the dumpster go? These are the practicalities of life and it really is telling how little interest there are in these things, which really need to be accounted for at the planning stage.[/quote]

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