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]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]

Before that: mid/high-rise residential/mixed-use in areas that already had been zoned for it before the latest development push, but under-built.[/quote]
They just lurch from fad to fad, instead of focusing on the basics.

15 years ago the fad was building height. Taller buildings were going to solve the housing crisis. Developers needed to build to the moon.

Then the cost of construction shifted in favor of stick built, mid-rise five-over-ones and so Planning turned on a dime to say that this was the ideal, so long as they restricted parking.

Then the fad shifted to “missing middle” and have been trying to sell it as “attainable housing” that will provide entry level housing for sale at lower price points, despite the fact that MD property law does not easily accommodate unless they are rental or condos. And it’s not like they don’t know that.

[b]During the Thrive debate they let slip what their real objectives are, which is to decrease the number of homeowners in the county. And the reason they got mad at Jawando is that his ZTA exposed the real goal, conversion of SFH communities to 4-8 unit apartment buildings. They subsequently backdoored triplex rentals as ADUs and now are trying to use this community along University as their guinea pigs.[/b]

A lot of the SFHs there are rented at a very reasonable cost. The only people who will benefit will be the absentee owners of those houses. I’m not so invested to figure out who they are but I’m sure a little research would probably reveal a few ahas. [/quote]

I am so happy that other people see this, too.  [/quote]

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