Reply to More MOCO Upzoning - Starting in Silver Spring

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Ruh-ruh! What happened here? 
Washington Business Journal(?)— A Dallas company has backed out of a contract to buy a Silver Spring office building less than three months after winning approval to redevelop the site with multifamily.

Already backing out of contract…[/quote]
Im going to guess that the moment they tried to restrict parking and told JLB they had to have 25% MPDUs, the company turned around and walked out the door. A couple of months trying to work with Planning and Permitting can cause even the deepest pockets to second guess their investments. 
[/quote]

They were already done with planning, but generally I agree with you. Everyone thinks planning caters to developers, but that’s wrong. It actually caters to a small but influential group of local land use lawyers who have been big donors to Friedson, GGW, and Montgomery4All, among others. The approval processes seem to be designed to help the lawyers run up big bills. Reforming the planning processes, which deliver no value for the developers or the community, is some of the lowest hanging fruit in reducing development costs and speeding up projects. Yet they only talk about it occasionally and never do it.

In this case, the developer claims the project no longer made sense in today’s market. There were some things about the project that made no sense, especially including more parking spaces than housing units right across from a metro station. But we’re constantly told that we’re in the midst of a housing crisis caused by zoning so how can it be that approved housing across the street from a metro station no longer makes sense in today’s market. Maybe it’s not zoning at all but the weak job market that’s causing weak housing production. Or maybe the heart of the housing crisis isn’t a shortage of mid-rise apartments but instead a shortage of SFH that’s put upward pressure on mid-rise apartment rents, creating a risk of a glut of mid-rise apartments if this county ever decides to stop penalizing SFH production with excessive fees and taxes. [/quote]
You have hit the nail on the head.

Entrenched corruption, combined with ideologues and declining economic prospects are a recipe for a doom loop.

It’s funny that the obvious answer for housing production is incrementalism but they just skip straight over the next obvious increment that is driving housing production to meet population growth elsewhere in the country: SFHs on smaller lots. [/quote]

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