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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]What "the people" want are sfh or duplexes with some room around them (lawn, play area). That's literally what people are clamoring for. For apartments, they want larger apartments. Some of the rabbit warrens on Wisconsin and Connecticut could probably be overdue for conversions/retrofitting to three bedrooms and more community space amenities. That's "what the people want". Not tiny holes/boxes.[/quote]
This is exactly right! So why is Hans Riemer and his fellow YIMBY nuts intent on preventing the county from being able to offer people what they want? I literally saw a presentation from the Planning Department that argued that townhouses were bad and that “stacked” four-plexes were a preferred housing type. I would love someone to explain to me who wants to drag a stroller and groceries and everything else up four flights of stairs? There’s a reason the traditional walk-up has always been considered typical tenement housing. There’s a reason it’s associated with slums, it’s not clear why they don’t seem capable of learning from history and are intent on turning our county into a slum. If we don’t offer the market what it wants, people will get it elsewhere and we’re going to be left with slums and poverty. The situation is totally insane. [/quote]

Planning’s main clientele is deep-pocketed developers who only do big projects. They don’t seem to have an interest in enabling development that competes with spacious two-bedrooms in glass towers. The glass towers use land more efficiently, but there’s a lot of land not suitable for the glass towers, and we could post big housing gains if the county made it easy to build duplexes or triples in those places. Planning was lukewarm when one councilmember suggested doing just that and also wanted to saddle these small projects with a lot of red tape that would not apply to building a single family home. The whole approach is incoherent if you want more housing but makes sense if you just want to maximize profits for big developers. [/quote]
What riles me about Planning is basically how much they lie by omission or in highly ridiculous presentations of proposals or data.

A favorite image they like to show is a gradual reduction in building size and mass from large to small. However that is not consistent with how the sector plans and zoning works. The promote this sense of aesthetically pleasing order that is easy to agree with, however that is not the effect of the policy they support. In addition, I cannot get over their “missing middle” presentation. They present pictures of “options” for parking with nice hardscrape when there is nothing to enforce that and we all know the outcome will be asphalt with painted lines. There is a presumption that they promote that this housing will be condo when it is just as or more likely to be apartments. They also don’t account for basic things like where the trash receptacles will go. For people familiar with college towns and know this type of housing, what happens is that they will be apartments with dumpster out front.

Townhouses are a regional housing type that people are comfortable with that can add “infill”. EYA is building townhouses all over Bethesda and no one is complaining. I am not sure why people want to promote tri-plexes or four-plexes or anything else when it’s clear what the market wants and there is any easy way to provide it. The “problem” is that the townhomes sell for over a million, but by the YIMBY logic this should not be a problem because we desperately need more units which will lead to overall price eventually falling for less desirable housing or whatever (less desirable housing is already cheap).

Anyway, I don’t understand the thinking behind any of it. The fact that through whatever corruption and ideology prevents them from providing the market what it wants for the common good feels very Soviet for people that fancy themselves liberals. It honestly depresses me.

Get ready for the next fiasco of incompetent Montgomery County Soviet central planning when the Purple Line doesn’t get finished in years, but the developments get delivered anyway leading to massive congestion. Riemer will say “wait for the Purple Line” and then it comes and it will be an empty train that no one takes because why the hell would they think to plan county development around transit when transit ridership has been consistently falling for a decade and these locations are far from freeways? Instead they should follow Fairfax’s lead and center development around Rockledge and Montgomery Mall. Hundreds of millions in sunk cost in infrastructure improvements are going to waste. [/quote]

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