Opinion: What does it mean when a politician no longer listens to their constituents? It means they are getting their money elsewhere

September 27, 2024 – By Robert Passovoy

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This Op. Ed. Is in response to the Attainable Housing Strategies Initiative that is being pushed by the Montgomery County Council in the attempt to address the problem of housing shortages in the county. Their own website (https://montgomeryplanning.org/planning/housing/attainable-housing-strategies-initiative/) outlines their concerns (1 million residents and is ‘expected’ to add 200,000 people). In their opening paragraph they admit that it’s not about housing people but loss of tax revenue and ‘workforce talent’.

The proposed changes can be seen on this map: https://montgomeryplans.org/portal/apps/instant/basic/index.html?appid=528296a7aead4348a5a1c26198d3bc83.

If your town has dark colored R-200 zoning block, congrats, your town is proposed for this change.

In my best interests of transparency, I feel it’s necessary to make some very clear statements about myself, my experiences and how I came to the conclusions that this Op. Ed. will be reflecting.

I have absolutely no contacts with anyone in the real-estate, construction, home improvement or political industries of this county. In fact, the very first time I interacted with any of those was when I went to the listening meeting at Germantown Community Center on September 23^rd, 2024. My work industry has nothing to do with zoning, construction or neighborhood planning. I have never run for political office. This does, however, not mean that I am an idiot, ignorant or not qualified to comment on something that will harmfully effect my life. Despite what people may think, we have the capacity to read, absorb information and make informed opinions about topics we don’t have a college degree in.

With that out of the way, lets get started.

I am a relatively new resident of Montgomery County, having moved to Maryland some twelve years ago, and moving to Germantown about four years later. My home in Germantown is a side unit townhome that was designed to fit the cookie cutter nature of the neighborhood. Originally, I lived in the near-west suburbs of Chicago about a mile west of the city limits and all under the authority of Cook County. Twenty eight years of my life were spent in that neighborhood, many memories slowly obliterated by the ever spreading grind of the urban sprawl.

The neighboring towns of Oak Park and Forest Park suffered the worst of their proximity to the city, once historic towns slowly being rotted away by the construction of high density housing and deteriorating property values. Downtown Oak Park on Lake Street used to be a beautiful place filled with small businesses that provided to the town. Now a small handful of those businesses remain, slowly being crushed by decaying infrastructure, impossible tax burdens, or a nonexistent police force. Spreading like a cancer to the west are the high rise condo units that seem to squash everything about the town that was beautiful and reduce it to gray corporate sludge as big businesses come in and force out the small. You can even see it in the map above, oozing out from the DC boarder. Trust me, I am not excited to see the beauty of Germantown bulldozed, especially around South Germantown Recreational park and Seneca Creek State Park (which is going to be chopped in half for the sake of this initiative)

Dramatic isn’t it? Just to be clear, I am not some bitter old curmudgeon desperately trying to relive the glory days of my childhood home in the 1960’s. I am a 40 year old engineer who has watched his home slowly be ground to dust by the forces of ‘Progress’. The very same ‘Progress’ that is being proposed to Montgomery County by it’s council. Before I go into details about their ideas, the consequences and why they are bad, I feel it’s important that I inform all of you about a few key pieces of information.

1. The council is not willing to place this on the electoral ballot. This is partially due to there being no precedent for it, but being… you know… the council… they have the power to do it. Why don’t they want such a dramatic change in the hands of the citizens?
2. This effects some towns more than others. Some towns (notably where some of the council members live) are completely exempt from this zoning change. Isn’t that interesting?
3. There are huge plots of land that are ripe for development, and thousands of under-contract home constructions that have not started…yet they want more.
4. Absolutely ZERO consideration for historical sites has been considered by the council.
5. No environmental protection or traffic planning has been done
6. No assurances of actual affordability have been made

Knowing that, lets talk about the effect of this rezoning. If one were to read the flowery language of the proposal, it would seem on it’s face to be innocuous and harmless. In fact, it’s an expansion of property owners rights. It allows a property owner to convert a single family home into a duplex or triplex, effectively subdividing the plot into smaller homes. This is all done with the equally flowery language of ‘affordable housing’ ‘fairness’ and ‘accessibility’ and other buzzwords to convince the average homeowner that this is somehow a great moral good.

So much of a moral good that you are selfish for not wanting it… you don’t want to be branded as selfish now do you?

What does it mean when a politician has to shame you for not liking their proposed changes? Broadly speaking, it means the politician is trying to hide something. In this case, they are trying to hide their complete ignorance of what happens when higher density housing is brought into a neighborhood of single family homes.

While it is true that some home owners may indeed subdivide their plots to produce some passive income, it is far more likely that large developers (like the ones not developing the thousands of plots they already have contracts on) would be the actors in this case. Having the resources of a large business, they can purchase land for more than it’s worth and bulldoze the home, and build up low quality units. This has a domino effect of reducing property values in every home surrounding the new construction due to the increased strain on infrastructure, eyesore buildings and a lack of parking. The neighbors are then pressed sell as well, frequently to the same construction and development company that made the offending units, making the whole process repeat again. Eventually the whole neighborhood is choked with cars with nowhere to park, sanitary infrastructure incapable of handling the increased waste, overburdened police and schools. Property values continue to drop, opening the land up for further construction of even higher density housing. In a decade, a good neighborhood can be converted into a slum, all of the value of it’s land extracted and placed directly in the hands of the developer and the politician who allowed it to happen.

Yes, the politicians (aka, the council) have every interest in doing this for their own financial gain. By increasing Montgomery County’s population, they will have increased tax revenue, allowing them to pay themselves more money and use more of our taxes for their own personal pet projects. Rest assured, if it was their interest to reduce the cost of living in Montgomery County, they would reduce taxes instead of trying to push more people into the county artificially, instead of using the resources they already have.

In their own opening statement of this initiative, they even expose themselves as being interested solely in the tax income. They state that 200,000 people are ‘expected’ to move into the county, this number is a complete fabrication, with zero basis in reality. View this number instead as what it truly is, a goal. They WANT 200,000 more people in the county. They then state it’s not about quality of life, but solely for tax money (the idea of prospective work force talent is also a joke, as most people in MoCo work outside of MoCo). Nowhere did they ask the population of the county ‘Do you want 200,000 more residents living here’, nowhere did they ask the population ‘can we build higher density housing in your neighborhood’. They are telling us where they will build it, how they will build it, and why. Your needs, lives and desires never once crossed their minds in the proposal of this zoning change. Need more evidence, take a look at this handy link to see just how much money the council has gotten from the developers that are already abusing the county.

But remember, fellow citizen of Montgomery County, we are being selfish.

We are selfish for wanting to move to a beautiful town, and have that town -remain- beautiful for our children and grandchildren. We are selfish for not wanting the largest investment of our lives to lose it’s value. We are selfish for not wanting our streets to be more congested then they already are. So terrible a people are we that we want our communities to be safe for our children to be raised in with good schools and effective police.

Ultimately no one has the right to live in Montgomery County you need to earn it. You must be able to afford the homes in question and the taxes involved with them. There is no free ride, no free lunch, everyone has to pay for the ability to live here. The desire to open the county up to people who can’t afford it is cruelty wearing empathy’s tattered skin, as it hurts the community as a whole and assures the financial destruction of the people fooled to move here. Have -you- ever heard of a county reduce their taxes after raising them?

I feel that I need to impress upon people of this county one of the small elements of wisdom that came from living in Cook county, Illinois: Politicians of all varieties and parties are just prostitutes too ugly for Las Vegas. They want your attention, your money and your support. They do not care about your life, family or dreams, just your vote. Believing they have nothing to gain personally from this change, that they really care about you and your living conditions is a little like believing the stripper really loves you.

They don’t. Never trust someone in a position of political power, always be suspicious of their motives and expect to have a knife shoved in your back. The moment people started coming out and accusing their neighbors of being selfish or ignorant of the realities of this zoning action showed their hand. They want to turn MoCo into a tax money machine to enrich themselves while bleeding it dry. You should resist this change with every fiber of your being, and vote out the council at the next election, even if it means voting for a party you don’t like. It may be the only way to send the message to the county that ‘no means no’.

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