Reply to MOCO - County Wide Upzoning, Everywhere

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]There is zero chance that MoCo will not lose its taxpaying and upper income citizens because of this change.  What is even stupid is that MoCo has plenty of underutilized commercial land that can be converted to housing of multiple types.  Much of that land will never be office or retail.[/quote]

I think that they are ok with that.  What they lose in quality they plan to make up for in volume.[/quote]

How so?  [b]More volume of poverty and social needs[/b] who take more in tax expenditures then they can possibly pay in tax is a net negative.  MoCo is going the way of Baltimore where they mane it extremely difficult to do business and drive out everyone with means who actually make up the bulk of the tax base.  The area will crumble when all of the taxpayers who can pay taxes leave.  You cannot make up tax revenues from a $250k household by bringing in 5 $50k households to replace.  The $50k households will barely pay tax and require all sorts of subsidies, vouchers for lunches and will likely pay $0 in income taxes after all of the write offs and deductions.  The county will get more poor with more volume, because the volume is going to come from poverty and low income households. [/quote]

The family moving into a duplex or triplex is not living in poverty.  Those homes will still cost around 500K minimum.  They will pay taxes, or the landlord will pay taxes.[/quote]

That is incorrect. Most of these small multifamily units are not going to provide homeownership opportunities. Investors will be buying up single family houses to replace them with multifamily rental properties. It will reduce the number of ownership opportunities and make homeownership less attainable for MOCO residents. The risk adjusted return for selling individual units of small multifamily buildings is usually not favorable. [/quote]

+1. Duplexes will only pencil in areas that aren’t well served by mass transit. Triples may do a little better. Quads are most likely to pencil, but at that point we’re talking about pretty small units that are likely to be rentals.

For taxes, I think Friedson put something in a tax bill last year that would exempt some of these from impact fees and property taxes. I think it was something like anything with 25 percent affordable units would be property tax exempt. That means you could build a quad with a small basement MPDU (that would be naturally affordable anyway) and get out of paying property taxes and impact fees. If he hasn’t passed it yet, expect that to come next when zoning doesn’t magically make these units appear.

I’m all in for the upzoning as long as the county carefully reviews existing and proposed tax exemptions to make sure upzoning doesn’t result in more properties that don’t pay property taxes and as long as everyone is realistic about needing more roads to make this work. [/quote]
It would be insane to extend MDPUs to these units. The Council just increased the control period to 99 years. That’s well beyond the economic life of any of these potential structures and basically is an admission that the Council doesn’t intend to enforce controls on maintaining the stock of regulated units. [/quote]

Yes, a 99 year restriction is ridiculous. It risks locking up assets into economical unproductive uses for a period long beyond financial viability. It is almost impossible to anticipate what the economy and housing market will look like 50-100 years from now and this does not benefit the county. [/quote]

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