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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]How about as a thought experiment we see if the net effect of this is to raise or lower the price of houses in Arlington? My bet is on raising. Tearing down a 900K house and building three 1.1 million townhomes does not solve an affordability crisis. Plus the price of land just jumped considerably.

Also for fun, will this make Arlington more or less diverse? My bet is on less.[/quote]

Oh sure, it is well known that when you increase the supply of something, the price goes up.

Wait, what?[/quote]

What you are missing is the old Arlington real estate market is now dead. Every single lot in Arlington just got a lot more $$$. Before you could build one house. Now you can build 6. Some lots will now be worth double what they were before. Wait and see. This is not going to make the market more affordable.[/quote]
So the number of housing units that can be put on a lot will increase sixfold, while the price of the lot only doubles, but that won't make more units more affordable for more people? Huh.[/quote]

Listen. Anything 4 and above is likely to be an apartment. The money to be made here is duplexes and townhomes which will sell on a unit basis. I did the math for you before, but I'll try again. Right now there is a lot in Lyon Park that sold for $900K. A developer is going to build three townhomes on it for $1.1 million each. (And make a killing, by the way, but that same lot will now sell for $1.5.) So you replace one unit that cost $900K with three units that cost $1.1 million. Cost per unit goes up. That's the math.[/quote]

No, the math is the cost of a single McMansion on the lot, times the odds that the existing house would be turned into a McMansion under previous zoning. [b]I don’t know why NIMBYs keep ignoring this.[/b] The status quo isn’t that every older house gets bought by a family who wants to live there. It’s that a hundred seventy older houses that could be candidates for missing middle, get turned into McMansions instead. [/quote]

Yes we know why. When you continually state a falsehood after being demonstrated that the assertion is false, then the falsehood is a feature not a bug.

Just as the NIMBYs' overwrought fears about MMH are rooted in fantasy, so too is their political strength. They showed last Fall that they could only muster 30% of the vote for the anti-MMH candidate. Now in the Democratic primary they're hoping that they can squeeze through one of the anti-MMH people. Perhaps they'll get one even with ranked choice voting just because there are two seats up simultaneously. Perhaps.

But I'm guessing "no". The NIMBYs have a lot of land in Arlington (b/c SFH lots) but not a lot of people when all is said and done.[/quote]

Audrey Clement is a local joke an an idiot to boot. And even at this moment, most of Arlington still has no idea what missing middle even is or what just happened. Stop pretending the last election was a referendum on this. It was not. The next one will be, though. [/quote]

The Republicans would have raced to run a candidate if they thought they could have exploited this and won. But they didn’t.

Instead, the Republicans such as Cunningham and Roy are running in the Democratic primary. They’re hoping to get their people out in a low-turnout primary, betting that more, uh, “Democratic” Democrats get cocky and sit out the race.

The Peter Rousselot, John Vihstadt opposition doesn’t have anything but some fearful SFH owners. They can’t grow their base because they don’t have arguments or evidence that hold up. That’s why you keep hearing them getting corrected over and over and over.

Meanwhile the proponents have the evidence behind them, and they have a real positive benefit to show voters. Namely, the chance that more townhouses, triplexes, and other units will be constructed around the County. 2, 4, or 6 units occupying the same footprint as one SFH are going to be less expensive than that SFH. Because math.

Vihstadt works in housing finance. He understands this. Rousselot’s been around the block and of course understands this as well. But there just aren’t enough Trumpy types in Arlington to carry the day on MMH.

Poor Peter. Poor John. Still wandering in the wilderness.[/quote]

I mean, sure, except for all of the parts where you are wrong.

If you have evidence that this de zoning works and doesn’t just make things worse, let’s see it.  Seems that it’s all just housing Brawndo.  Some of these reference the same MIT research, but I don’t have time to research academic articles for people that want to make policy with their feelings.

http://theadvocatecornell.com/2022/02/03/does-upzoning-work/

https://betterdwelling.com/broad-upzoning-makes-housing-less-affordable-and-doesnt-add-supply/

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0042098020940602?journalCode=usja

https://48hills.org/2019/01/yimby-narrative-wrong/[/quote]

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