In the spirit of what I wrote here the disability right to live in a community one chooses to live in (not an RTC/institution) is intersectional with local planning and land use AKA zoning.
There are some people with disabilities who are wealthy but the frequently quoted statistic "70% of people with disabilities are unemployed or underemployed" creates an unfortunately safe 'generalization' that most people with disabilities are working class or living in poverty. Or people with disabilities are 'spending down' private money from family or crowd-funding (high technology panhandling) to lessen the struggle to retain, or obtain, eligibility for 'safety net' social welfare programs offering help with rent, food, utility bills and even cell phone and internet access.
An affordable housing task force recommended, among other things, allowing owners of single family homes to add accessory apartments without approval of a 'zoning variance' or 'special exception' in a permitting process.
Please bear with copy and paste because of old source material with questionable link permanence again:
http://www.gazette.net/stories/040908/bethnew210711_32358.shtml
Leggett targets high housing costs with tax break, impact fee
Task force also ponders streamlining development rules
by Bradford Pearson | Staff Writer
Montgomery County’s first-time homebuyers could see a property tax break while commercial developers could pay a new impact fee as part of County Executive Isiah Leggett’s plan to provide more affordable housing.
He has also proposed streamlining some regulations and selling bonds to make a 40 percent increase to a fund the county uses to buy properties for affordable housing.
Leggett’s proposals were the culmination of a study by a task force he formed in February 2007. The 40-member group, which comprised housing experts, developers, community members and government officials, released a 74-page report Friday.
‘‘It is critically important to provide housing opportunities to families and individuals of all income levels,” said Leggett (D). ‘‘It makes us a better, more vibrant and a balanced county.”
Rick Nelson, director of the county Department of Housing and Community Affairs and co-chairman for the task force, said the trick now is putting the words into action.
‘‘We’ve come up with some good ideas to supply affordable housing,” he said. ‘‘But we need to find a way to make them a reality.”
The task force report lacked some specifics; it did not suggest an amount for the impact fee, for example. But Leggett said he will outline his plan in four or five pieces of legislation he will present to the County Council. The bills will be introduced in the next few months, said Mary Anderson, a county spokeswoman.
‘‘Our work force lives in West Virginia, Pennsylvania and the outskirts of Maryland,” said Council President Michael J. Knapp (D-Dist. 2) of Germantown, who agrees with Leggett’s proposal. ‘‘Now is the time to take action. All of our work force should live here.”
Of the 8,689 full-time workers employed by the county government, 43 percent live outside the county, said Donna Bigler, a county spokeswoman.
As the cost of housing in Montgomery County rises, the people who work in the county can no longer afford to live in it, said Leggett, in a speech Friday at the 17th annual Affordable Housing Conference in North Bethesda. In an effort to retain county employees, Leggett proposed temporarily reducing property taxes and other fees associated with purchasing a home in Montgomery County.
Anderson said Leggett will work on the specifics of the plan over the next few weeks.
While Leggett was running for office in 2006, he outlined many of the suggestions seen in the report, including the increase in the Housing Initiative Fund and the tax credits for first-time homebuyers. Three months after he was inaugurated, he established the task force.
While Leggett stressed the importance of homeownership, he also said there is a need to retain and improve affordable apartments and condominiums. He outlined new construction of affordable units in Olney, North Bethesda and Rockville, and preserving existing low-cost units.
Development deals with the county are being finalized for 117 mixed-income units — 60 percent of units would be sold below market rate — on Bowie Mill Road in Olney, as well as 80 units of affordable senior housing on Fleet Street in Rockville.
[bold emphasis added]
Within the past year, Housing and Community Affairs has also assisted HOC in purchasing 49 two- and three-bedroom apartments in Rockville’s King Farm, which will be sold as affordable housing to county residents.
According to the HOC, more than 20,000 households are on the county’s waiting list for some type of low-income public housing.
The county has 69,000 apartments and condominiums in buildings of 12 or more units; 27,000 of them are labeled as affordable, Anderson said. Affordable means a household making less than 50 percent of the median household income in the county — $98,000 — would dedicate 30 percent of its income toward housing.
While Anderson said no goal is set for the number of units Leggett is hoping to create or refurbish, she said he will be basing his plan off the county’s Housing Policy, adopted in 2001. In that plan, the county worked to create 1,160 new affordable units per year and preserve another 1,700 units.
Also tucked in the plan is a measure to allow accessory apartments — small apartments attached to homes or garages — to be approved without a special permit, as is currently granted by the county’s hearing examiner.
Jim Humphrey, planning and land use chairman for the Montgomery County Civic Federation, said that while the federation supports some of the goals set forth by Leggett, that is not one.
‘‘This is just a dreadful idea,” he said. ‘‘Of all the citizens across the county we spoke with about this, not one who got an exception thought it was expensive or time-consuming. To take this step out of the process is terrible.”
To pay for the new measures, Leggett proposed a nearly 40 percent increase in the county’s Housing Initiative Fund, from $39 million to $54 million. Through the sale of county bonds, he hopes to raise the total to $80 million within the next year and $100 million within two years.
Leggett is also proposing an Affordable Housing Impact Fee, which will be levied on new commercial development, including office and retail space. The fee, which has not been determined yet, will be based on the square footage of each development.
Even without any specifics, real estate executives were wary.
‘‘I think that’s a barrier for the developer. ... If there’s a fee it will prevent people from buying the land and doing any kind of development,” said John Lin, president and CEO of CapStar Commercial Realty. ‘‘For a developer if they can’t get over that first hump,having a fee, they might decide not to do any building at all.”
Kevin Maloney, president and CEO of Maloney & Metz, a commercial real estate services company, said he didn’t think it was fair to tax the commercial building industry to pay for affordable housing.
‘‘I think it’s piling on ... it’s taxing anywhere they would like to tax,” said Maloney, chairman of Bethesda-Chevy Chase Chamber of Commerce.
To learn more
By 2011 Montgomery County, Maryland allowed accessory apartments 'by right' of ownership not by a 'case by case' permitting process. Unfortunately many of the accessory apartments in Montgomery County, Md as well as Washington D.C., became 'gig economy' or 'second job' income sources from renting them to travelers, not permanent residents, on house-sharing web sites like airbnb.com, Home Away and VRBO. There is little infrastructure demand except on transportation infrastructure of roads and bus and rail transit systems for travel between airports, bus and rail stations and the accessory apartment that became an 'accessory hotel room.'
A letter stated that low-income residents who use bicycles and probably live without a car (that they cannot afford to own) can shift car ownership costs to housing rental (taxes included in rent) or long term purchase with mortgage and tax payments
On the contrary, low-income residents use bikes as a way to get around, and the benefits of cycling are many, not the least of which is its low cost for the user, leaving more income for other needs, such as housing. It reduces neighborhood traffic and relieves the pressure on parking, both of which were called out in this article.
replying to the article about to what extent the unintended consequence of new housing being used as 'sharing economy' hotel rooms instead of 'permanent housing' was a problem in limiting the supply of affordable housing.
People shifting their transportation costs to housing costs is a manifestation of how individuals privatize the costs of 'living with,' rather than reversing, the national and global issue of worsening income and wealth inequality. Inability to 'socialize the costs' of a 'civil society' combined with the fewer and fewer people with more and more wealth being unwilling to pay their 'fair share' of taxes
In an era of unreliable public transit and little political will to fund new transit projects, when low-income communities still face many barriers in connecting to the rest of the city and the looming dangers of climate change will affect them disproportionately, our government and our communities should be promoting increased use of active transportation, including cycling. Cyclists and bicycle infrastructure are not the enemy. Please stop depicting them as such.
to make existing shared (common carrier) transit systems more reliable as well as expanding them demonstrates a systemic manifestation of a lack of "political will."
And back to the copied and pasted (from questionably permanent link above) 2007 link from a local newspaper that went out of business in June 2015 that may have 'put their archives out of business' as well:
‘‘I think that’s a barrier for the developer. ... If there’s a fee it will prevent people from buying the land and doing any kind of development,” said John Lin, president and CEO of CapStar Commercial Realty. ‘‘For a developer if they can’t get over that first hump,having a fee, they might decide not to do any building at all.”
Kevin Maloney, president and CEO of Maloney & Metz, a commercial real estate services company, said he didn’t think it was fair to tax the commercial building industry to pay for affordable housing.
‘‘I think it’s piling on ... it’s taxing anywhere they would like to tax,” said Maloney, chairman of Bethesda-Chevy Chase Chamber of Commerce.
Developers who build and manage housing need to accept greater fees or taxes for mixed income, class-integrated, housing instead of mollifying local opponents of building new housing (such as Montgomery County Civic Federation Planning and Land Use committee members as well as cbar.info among other local civic associations) at higher densities than detached houses or townhouses by building mostly high density luxury (class A apartment) housing to create a community populated with a mostly higher density of high income people. A simple walk through Bethesda along Arlington and Old Georgetown (Md rt 187) roads shows that is what most of the stiffly-resisted new housing has become once built and occupied.
Developers who tear down older smaller homes to build bigger homes on the same lot (suburban renewal), including Jim Humphrey's after an April 2015 sale, sold at sale prices over a million dollars (custom design-build homebuilders) are the only developers whose campaign donations fail to receive the same scrutiny and shaming by Montgomery County council and executive candidates who proclaim their refusal to accept campaign donations from developers and unions (as if the amounts of money donated were equivalent they are not). Perhaps custom design-build developers receive less shaming because the added residential density doesn't produce any additional housing units. The added residential density is only a bigger 'footprint' on the same parcel of land that raises the resale market prices ever upward to more problematically unaffordable price points.
The individual cost-shifting of money once spent for a car to housing was also advocated in the Montgomery County, Md unincorporated town of Bethesda
where according to commenter "Richard" a person could afford housing by replacing their car with subscription car and bike rental (not car-sharing or bike-sharing) as well as transit fares with added time to plan every single trip. People, according to commenter "Richard," should simply move each time they change jobs instead of commuting a shorter or longer distance. Road congestion can be lessened, for people who can still afford both housing and a car, by simply pricing people out of car ownership who wish to stay residents in a hyper-gentrifying community they like to live in.
The old racial segregation slogan of 'know your place' has been simply green-washed in the 21st century as class-segregation of eco-friendly, lower carbon and climate change-resilient communities that the 70% of people with disabilities, among other working class and poverty-burdened people, who are unemployed or underemployed cannot afford the choice to live in.
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