Norman Knopf's law partner David Brown was honored as a "community hero" in 2004 and showed his hostility to renters in a 2013 letter.
[dead link since retrieval of the letter copied and pasted below]
http://m.gazette.net/gazettenet/db_285534/contentdetail.htm?contentguid=w3dq0lqW
It’s time the development process needs to have a new paradigm developed.
Before any projects are approved first by the Planning Commission and later by the County Council, there ought to be input from independent economists and sociologists.
Here in North Bethesda, the land of the construction crane, myriad developments have been approved and have begun. Here are some questions that might not have been asked:
(1) What are the economic rationales based on? If on experience, that assumes the future will be a continuation of the past or present. We are living in times unlike the past. For example, future generations will be electronic-educated with different work goals. Have existing developments reached the promised potential?
(2) Since virtually all of the residential units are rentals, won’t that change the societal effect on the area? Renters do not have a financial interest in the community. Renters tend to move more often than homeowners.
(3) Do decision makers understand true traffic effect? For example, the only traffic counts are for vehicles passing through intersections. Where do they start, stop and end? The conference center promised at least 10 percent of its attendees will use public transportation. Has anyone checked on that? (I live across the road from the center, and I doubt 1 percent fill that category. Most cars are single occupants.
(4) What is the economic Plan B in case Plan A does not work out? A lot can change between the time construction begins and when it opens for use. The Wisconsin where I live is a perfect example of that because it was being built when the economy was strong, but when it opened its unit sale prices were so far out of line buyers stayed away until the prices dropped radically.
There is an old saying: Measure twice before hammering once. A lot more innovative thought needs to go into development decisions and their processes.
David H. Brown, North Bethesda
Renters have an interest in living in a nice community, with good schools particularly if they have children. They rent, often houses as well as apartments, because they can't afford appreciated resale existing home sale prices such as the resale prices demanded by those who bought into "The Wisconsin" condo low and want to resell at enough profit to pay for replacement housing and moving costs. People may also rent to save a down payment to buy. Renters could also have been foreclosed on or short sold previously owned homes in the post 2007-9 housing market and general economic 'great recession' with spotty and savagely unequal rates of state and local GDP growth from 2011 to the present. Landlords have an interest in maintaining the community, surrounding their immediate properties, to keep rents high including house and townhouse landlords. As much as 1/3 of Montgomery County, MD are renters. And [corrected link] many renters don't move (page 18-19)
[screen shots added May 30, 2019 update]
as often as David H. Brown would have former readers of the now defunct Gazette believe.
Now-exposed tenant-hater David H. Brown moved on in 2014 to calling out a lack of coordination in changing uses for the land now used for Lord and Taylor that is also the former site of the now demolished White Flint Mall. There is another Lord and Taylor just over the District of Columbia border near the Friendship Heights WMATA Red Line metrorail station. Parking at that location is restricted entry and may require payment.
Another unasked, and unanswered, question in the planning and land use policy community of tenant and homeowner citizens, property owners and county government is how many customers of the Lord and Taylor store that is all that's left of White Flint Mall drive from upper northwest DC or southwest Montgomery County bordering subdivisions in the built-up, single use, residentially-zoned 'green wedges' between the Wisconsin avenue, River Road and Massachusetts avenue corridors. License plate views in the parking lots as well as sales tax receipts paid by each location to either DC city or Maryland state governments can start to answer the question if Lord and Taylor's reluctance to close their store is based on customer residency overlap because of free parking in the White Flint store and paid parking at the Friendship Heights store.
Montgomery County and Maryland state government subsidy packages offered to Amazon.com if they choose to build HQ2 where White Flint Mall stood are based, in part, on easier coordination of large development, and reuse of large pieces of land, if only one owner builds a 'development' to serve one use that is not residential.
Planner and council development oversight process 'fatigue' with mixed use development oversight results after 12, and maybe 16, years of civic/citizens hostility to virtually all new housing units proposed. "Oversight fatigue" continues unless the new housing units are 'well designed' and 'respect the character of the neighborhood' (code words for regressively more expensive and raising resale prices proportionately). Supremacy of an increasingly unaffordable resale housing market over the new housing market results. The supremacy of profit-taking in the resale, and one existing rental unit turnover at a time, and rental housing markets enabled by 'community friendly' council members and county executives Marc Elrich, Phil Andrews and Isaiah Leggett and their friends in the civic/citizens association and Montgomery County Civic Federation (100% existing homeowner) 'community,' is further perpetuated by lawsuits brought by land use lawyers like Norman Knopf and David H. Brown who lose their cases while still driving up new housing developer costs. Elrich's, Andrews' and Leggett's resistance to 'smart growth' is protected by lawyers for existing homeowner resale profit interests.
Most 'smart growth' mixed use development near public transit has become a higher density of higher income people. Lower income and working class people displaced out of Montgomery County if their name doesn't 'come up' a 'winner' on waiting lists for various types of mostly HUD housing choice voucher-subsidized housing and MPD (moderately priced dwelling) Units, where moving out of Montgomery County, MD, is the 'free market' and individually privatized solution to reducing the waiting list time if not enough affordable housing units are both produced and retained. A slow and steady displacement of residents, to Frederick, Prince George's and Howard Counties and the District of Columbia, on the basis of income class results, because of massive existing homeowner resistance in the service of the special interest of individual resale profits for each homeowner, as Montgomery County, Md grew anyway between 2003 and 2018.
[dead link since retrieval of letter copied and pasted below]
http://m.gazette.net/article/20140910/OPINION/140919787/-1/white-flint-development-plan-lacks-coordination
Wednesday, September 10, 2014
White Flint development plan lacks coordination
Thanks to the county’s unimaginative approach to development, new construction will continue to be DIY — do it yourself. What we have is a hodge-podge of buildings totally lacking in symmetry of design. For example, here in the North Bethesda/White Flint sector, exteriors lack cohesion. In any parcel, one building is a poor relation to its neighbor.
Why is this happening? Absence of bureaucratic courage to be innovative. Why? There are those who wonder who is in charge of change, Council or the Planning Commission. It is my understanding that the planners are an advisory arm of the lawmakers.
When a new project is submitted for approval, decision makers consider design symmetry a long-lost cousin. In a word, lack of coordination.
But, we should not be surprised. There is little if any thought given to understanding where vehicles begin their trips, where they stop and how often, plus where they end. There are lots of calculations about vehicles passing through intersections, and which way they may turn. In truth, many of those trips begin/end way beyond a particular sector.
Part of the problem stems from economic/vehicular/societal assumptions. It would help to know who are the people flooding into new residential units. Where they work, shop, how often they use public transportation versus private vehicle usage, etc. would be helpful. “Build, and they will come” is a dangerous motto.
The current North Bethesda/White Flint development plan lacks coordination with surrounding sectors. For example, take Wisconsin Avenue/Rockville Pike/Md. 355 is not just one long roadway. The “buck” stops at vastly different “communities” as if they were cocoons.
Instead of relying solely on developer predictions of viability, county development decision makers should hear from independent experts in fields such as economics, society psychology, etc. It also would do well to have higher educations students take part in fact gathering and analysis for class credit. Some of their ideas and conclusions might be refreshing.
It is a given that developers gain profits, and the county gains tax revenue. There is nothing wrong with that. But, a little more imagination and coordination could encourage decision makers to have the courage to create a new era of development that could raise the bar for the rest of the nation.
David H. Brown, North Bethesda
The writer has been a rotating chairman of the Rockville Board of Appeals.
