Reply to More MOCO Upzoning - Starting in Silver Spring

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I went to a meeting of Action Committee for Transit. The discussion was mostly about the need for more housing in Rockville to draw people there to support already existing amenities. It wasn't about the need to house more people, but the need to draw people to downtown Rockville from other areas.[/quote]

Oh, are you talking about the meeting where the speaker was a planner for the City of Rockville, and the Rockville Town Center master plan was the speaker's topic? I was at that meeting too, and yes, unsurprisingly, the discussion at that meeting was about the Rockville Town Center master plan. I'm not sure how that's relevant to the University Boulevard corridor plan, though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHQ0T8gqH_4
https://www.rockvillemd.gov/2309/Rockville-Town-Center-Master-Plan-Update[/quote]

Shocking that a planner would focus on housing and not jobs. I don’t know what happened to college planning programs but they seem to churn out nothing but people who think you can grow an economy without jobs. [/quote]

MoCo's unemployment rate is like 2.7%. Makes sense to focus on housing, specially on putting housing in places that don't add traffic.[/quote]
The county cannot sustain itself without creating high wage private sector jobs. There has been a net loss of these jobs over the past decade. Planning is leading a race to the bottom for this county. Fast casual restaurant jobs are not going to sustain the tax base nor provide the economic growth needed for the pay for all of the things that people want to pay for. [/quote]

And the people who work those jobs will either live in the county or commute to it. Thus housing and transit. If they live in the county, then even better for the tax base.[/quote]

DP.  You are deliberately being obtuse.  The PP's point is that these Thrive-type housing development efforts do little or nothing to address the County's need to attract the higher-paying jobs that would tend to enable the county to "thrive," and, presumably, that a relative lessening of the value of existing detached SFH housing stock in the affected areas would tend to result in a a relatively lower population of public-funds-net-positive households.[/quote]

What thriving unemployment rate are you looking to have in MOCO?[/quote]

That DP.  Again, you appear to be intentionally obtuse.  A low unemployment rate with a lower percentage of associated jobs being high-wage does not create the public-funds-net-positive that helps communities thrive nearly as well as a low unemployment rate with a [i]high[/i] percentage of such jobs.  The county's planning is not particularly conducive to the latter, but aims to create a balance of housing that increasingly edges towards public-funds-net-negative households, likely displacing more of the a-bit-above-middle-for-the-area-but-public-funds-net-positive households in the process, given the locations on which they are concentrating their change efforts.

And, as before, short, doubt-raising questioning rather than substantive discussion is a ploy of political rhetoric, not a good argument.[/quote]
Without job growth, the county is solely reliant on in-migration of affluent households who work elsewhere. What’s the value proposition that this county offers instead of living closer to your job? High taxes and a horrible commute.

What’s worse is that while Planning is targeting housing growth towards “affordable” or “attainable” housing to low-AMI households which induced more in-migration of low income households, they put up huge obstacles to build housing that would be attractive to wealthy households moving here. The outcome is that the poor population is growing and the rich population is aging out to retirement.

Anyone that thinks a tax base for a county that is growing increasingly poor can be sustained by a static number of about 100k people who either work outside of the county or are retired are fooling themselves.

If Planning was smart, they would get rid of MPDUs and require a 1-to-1 offset of housing new production targeting the top of the market for every regulated affordable or attainable unit approved.

Thrive allows for new housing types, including housing that is not street facing. [b]It’s past time that lot splitting gets approved so that there can be a big rush of new housing production on those massive lots in Bethesda and Potomac.[/b][/quote]

Yet, unsurprisingly, those properties that could be so divided are not in the area defined in the suggested policy change.  The truly wealthy are not (or not terribly) affected.

It's more modest areas like that along University Blvd that are the targets.  That is both because the cheaper acquisition cost accrues to the developers' bottom lines and because the reisistance (and resilience of resistance) afforded by high affluence makes success of such an area plan less likely.  Not to mention the political influence that comes with that high affluence, of course.[/quote]

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