Reply to There is no housing crisis in MoCo or most of the DMV for that matter

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]According to today's article in the Washington Post, "The D.C. region needs to build 87 new homes per day. It’s not close," we are not doing nearly enough to build low income, affordable and workforce housing. Just to meet our housing target we'd need to build "1,600 Watergate apartment complexes this decade" according to the article. Funny how people are fighting over preserving single family homes, historic districts, etc., in light of the current housing crisis. [/quote]

So build giant Watergate-sized apartment complexes in urban areas instead of wasting your time and effort trying to drag down SFH neighborhoods building random fourplexes.  No one is saying that you can’t build in places that make sense.  In fact, you can build to your heart’s content and likely get support from the population at large if you’d drop the upzoning nonsense.[/quote]

Would you move to a Watergate like complex in an urban area? Would any current home owner?

What urban area would welcome such a development? What about more than one of them?

This solution just makes housing somebody else's problem. [/quote]

So, the issue is not sufficient housing but housing in prime locations. That, to me is entitlement and not actual need.[/quote]

There is plenty of entitlement to go around here. Existing home owners feel entitled to keep their zoning while advocating/voting for population growth policies. These new people and younger generations feel entitled to the same standard of living. The history of this, and any other urban area, is that if the population grows, something has to be upzoned. Whether that's agricultural land on the periphery being upzoned to SFHs, or close in suburbs being upzoned to "missing middle", or urban areas being upzoned to Watergate complexes, someone's cheese is going to get moved.

So the question becomes who pays the price for this growth? It should be the close in SFHs for two reasons. The first being, that more than any other group they are responsible for the current situation. The close in suburbs were littered with the "In this House..." and "Refugees Welcome..." type signs, so its time for them to practice what they preach. If you want to fill the county with such people, you should have to live with them rather than making them someone else's problem.

The second is that car-dependent suburbs are just awful in that they consume a lot of space, are not fiscally sustainable and create downstream problems for urban areas. Widen my highway, build more parking, don't you dare build that Purple-line near me. That's entitlement. [/quote]

While I personally like/prefer single family homes and live in one with my family, having keenly watched trends over the past twenty years with density clustered around subway stations and transit, and with the removal of the agricultural and rural preserves in Prince William County and elsewhere for housing and data centers, I [b]predict[/b] that most housing in the inner ring suburbs and DC itself will be missing middle within 15-20 years. Except for some enclaves, like along Foxhall Rd or Old Dominion Drive in outer McLean, there won’t be many single family homes left. That’s the next evolution for this area, specifically. So my prediction doesn’t extend to other cities like Philadelphia or Baltimore, where there is no housing crisis. I could be wrong but I see the writing on the wall. Due to the DC hight limit, developers and planners have typically pushed innovation (re density) in the inner ring suburbs. DC itself is now playing catch up. [/quote]

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