Category: CSG in the News

New YIMBY group hopes to increase housing in D.C.

Posted on by Christopher Richter

It’s that time again, time to rewrite Washington, D.C.’s Comprehensive Plan. This plan influences every decision done by the city’s agencies, including the Zoning Commission who is in charge of what can be built where in the District. Curbed sister site Vox reported that because of this time of change a new, diverse political coalition has been formed to “defeat the blocking power of change-averse incumbent homeowners.”

This coalition is a mixture of affordable housing proprietors, real estate developers, urbanists, and poverty advocates. Groups include developer EYA, anti-poverty group Bread for the City, and organizations like the Coalition for Smarter Growth and local blog Greater Greater Washington. To put it simply, the group is composed of YIMBY groups, the opposite of NIMBY (which stands for Not in My Back Yard).

According to Vox, the most “conceptually significant” proposed change to the Comprehensive Plan is to increase the overall amount of homebuilding, while “reprioritizing the creation and preservation of affordable housing, and strengthening protections of lower-income tenants,” as stated by David Whitehead, Greater Greater Washington’s top housing organizer.

After over eight months of input from housing and development stakeholders, the amendments proposed include focusing on housing with at least three bedrooms in order to accommodate families and adding housing for all income levels in every part of the city with an emphasis on transit and commercial corridors.

For a full overview of this new group’s plans, be sure to check out this document, uploaded by Greater Greater Washington. Below, see the full list of members that have given input to the amendment proposals:

  • All Souls Housing Corporation
  • Bread for the City
  • Coalition for Nonprofit Housing and Economic Development
  • Coalition for Smarter Growth
  • D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute
  • Enterprise Community Partners
  • EYA
  • Greater Greater Washington
  • Latino Economic Development Center
  • Local Initiatives Support Corporation
  • The Menkiti Group
  • MidAtlantic Realty Partners
  • Neighborhood Legal Services Program
  • Trammell Crow Company
  • United Planning Organization
  • Ward3Vision

The Office of Planning will release their official amendments in the fall with reviews and votes on a final version held in early 2018.

Click here to read the original story.

It’s Back

Posted on by Christopher Richter

Study of second bridge recommended.

The National Capital Region Transportation Planning Board voted July 19 to study the feasibility of an Upper Potomac River bridge as an option in the area’s long-range transportation plan.

Yet the discussion on even getting that far was “very intense,” said Stewart Schwartz, executive director of the Coalition for Smarter Growth.

Marc Elrich, Montgomery County councilmember who represents the county on the Transportation Planning Board, made a motion to pull discussion of the bridge from study but the vote was 17-12 to reject the amendment and leave it in, Schwartz said.

Schwartz’s group is opposed to the idea of the bridge, preferring area governments spend resources on improving the current Metro system and encouraging transit oriented development.

“There is a $6.2 billion shortfall for building and improving the Metro system,” he said. “And I hear various people say the American Legion Bridge will need major reconstruction [in the time it takes to study a second bridge],” he said.

“[The bridge] would be totally at odds with the region’s vision in the Region Forward Plan and would undermine the network of transit-oriented development which is so much in demand today. It would worsen auto-dependent sprawl and traffic, worsen the east-west economic divide, and undermine efforts to fight climate change,” Schwartz wrote in a press release.

In a phone interview he explained that a new bridge would not relieve traffic congestion on the American Legion Bridge, rather it would increase development leading to more commuters.

“Because of induced driving demand, it would add new traffic without reducing traffic at the American Legion Bridge,” he wrote in the press release. “The upstream bridge would also represent a threat to the region’s drinking water supplies — creating a risk of toxic spills upstream from drinking water intakes during bridge construction and from tanker truck spills.”

Schwartz said the largest opposition his group faces is the 2030 Group, the group urges the study of an outer Potomac River bridge, according to its website.

Neither the idea of a bridge study nor the controversy of the idea are new. Other efforts to move the idea of an outer bridge took place in 1980, 1988, 1997, 2000 and 2003, according to Schwartz.

Click here to read the original story

Urban Turf profile on Van Ness: Redevelopment with a community-oriented focus

Posted on by Christopher Richter

Van Ness isn’t going to “become the city’s next hip commercial strip,” concludes Urban Turf in its new profile of the Van Ness commercial strip. “[W]hile the last decade has seen the blooming of popular business corridors along 14th Street and other thoroughfares further east, the redevelopment happening here has a different, more community-oriented focus.”

Reporter Zak Salih spoke to Van Ness Main Street’s Theresa Cameron and Forest Hills Connection’s Marlene Berlin about the community-led efforts to revitalize Van Ness. And like so many projects Marlene is part of, it begins with a walk.

Read the neighborhood profile at dc.UrbanTurf.com.

Photo courtesy of Forest Hills Connection. Click here to read the original article.

A promising new coalition looks to rewrite the politics of urban housing

Posted on by Christopher Richter

An innovative new political coalition in Washington, DC, is trying to remap the contours of the urban housing debate by uniting poverty advocates, real estate developers, affordable housing proprietors, and urbanists under the banner of more construction. The idea is that by banding together, such a diverse coalition can defeat the blocking power of change-averse incumbent homeowners. This would free them up to stop fighting among themselves for scraps and start sharing the wealth that DC and other coastal cities can easily create by changing their approach to land use.

The specific occasion for the coalition is a scheduled rewrite of the city’s comprehensive plan, a guiding document that influences the decisions of city agencies — and most of all the Zoning Commission — in deciding what should be built and where.

But the underlying principle is applicable to a wide range of cities and political decisions. DC, like most expensive central cities and their suburbs, currently takes a fundamentally defensive approach to land use aiming to “protect” the most affluent and expensive areas from change. That leaves for-profit developers of market rate housing and builders and custodians of subsidized affordable housing locked in a zero-sum struggle for scarce buildable land, while leaving city governments straining under the budgetary cost of providing subsidies for those in need.

An alternative approach emphasizes the benefits of market-rate construction and the reality that allowing more of it in the places where land price is highest can reduce displacement, create new funding streams for subsidized housing, and ultimately provide the fuel for a more inclusive city.

A new coalition beyond YIMBY

Around the country, various YIMBY groups — a play on the old acronym NIMBY for Not in My Back Yard — have sprung up to advocate for more density and more market-rate housing development in expensive cities, backing candidates for local office and having some influence over state-level initiatives in California. YIMBYism has even gone mainstream enough to have its own conferences.

But even as YIMBYs are, in their way, obsessed with the price of housing, they’ve had relatively little success engaging the longstanding “affordable housing” communities that exist in American cities. Affordable housing advocates and especially those who build and maintain “affordable” developments are dealing with a population that is simply too poor to afford anything that would get built under anything resembling current market prices. Changing land use rules to allow for more construction would, in some sense, increase affordability in almost any expensive city. But it wouldn’t necessarily do anything to address the specific needs of the affordable housing population.

That’s what’s different about the new coalition, which united YIMBY urbanists like the Coalition for Smarter Growth and Greater Greater Washington with affordable housing groups like the All Souls Housing Corporation and the Coalition for Nonprofit Housing and Economic Development. Cementing the deal are several of the city’s big real estate development groups (EYA, Midatlantic Realty Partners), broad anti-poverty groups (Bread for the City), and the wonks at the DC Fiscal Policy Institute.

The basic glue holding it together is that what affordable housing groups really need is resources — land, money, and buildings that can accommodate a population in need of subsidy. And rather than fight with the market rate developers for a small amount of resources in a handful of greenfield or ex-industrial locations, they could team up to push for an expansion in the overall amount of building allowed.

A comprehensive plan that says yes

Perhaps the single most conceptually significant proposed change to the comprehensive plan concerns the drab-sounding Framework Element 218.3, which serves as an overall thesis statement for how the city looks at the relationship between development and affordability. It currently states that “the recent housing boom has triggered a crisis of affordability in the city, creating a hardship for many District residents and changing the character of neighborhoods.”

This perfectly captures the mentality of a defensive planning process and the kind of political coalition that dominates most coastal cities. The basic framework is that residents in affluent neighborhoods get to say no to new development (thus preventing the dread changing of neighborhood character), and in exchange, residents of poorer neighborhoods get to hope that blocking new market rate development will stop gentrifiers from moving in.

The proposed change inverts cause and effect, arguing that “[t]he recent housing boom is the consequence of rising demand. That demand has contributed to a crisis of affordability in the city, creating a hardship for many District residents and changing the character of neighborhoods.”

Prices rise, in other words, because of demand. And the question for a planning document is not how to prevent that demand from changing the city, but how to channel that demand in a constructive way that builds an inclusive city.

As David Whitehead, Greater Greater Washington’s top housing organizer, puts it, their vision for a new plan entails “reprioritizing the creation and preservation of affordable housing, and strengthening protections of lower-income tenants,” but doing so in the context of increasing the overall amount of homebuilding. The proposals go line by line through the existing comprehensive plan, attempting to strike defensive or exclusionary language in favor of welcoming new construction conditional on a degree of inclusiveness.

Big gains if someone wants them

The political impediments to persuading entrenched upper-middle-class homeowners to embrace any kind of change are large.

But the key to the emergence of new coalitions for change is the recognition that the possible gains from change are also very large. An eye-popping 2015 study by Chang-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti concludes that constraints on construction in expensive metropolitan areas “lowered aggregate US growth by more than 50% from 1964 to 2009.” A separate paper of theirs concludes that getting the most constrained metro areas to relax their regulations not all the way, but simply to be as tight as the average American metro area, could grow the overall size of the economy by about 9.5 percent.

What’s particularly striking is that though these possible national gains are large, the economic gains to the specific high-demand metropolitan areas themselves would be even higher, since much of the increase in economic activity would be localized there.

Some of the extra economic potential generated would, naturally, need to go to expanding infrastructure and basic utilities to accommodate the additional people. But broadly speaking, increased development for high demand cities should open up vast new fiscal and economic horizons that can be used to finance subsidized housing or just about anything else the local community needs.

Decades ago, sociologists John Logan and Harvey Molotch theorized that for this reason, urban politics would be dominated by “growth machine” coalitions that united developers who wanted to build with politicians, who wanted to hand out goodies to their constituents. In practice, that hasn’t happened, and many cities greatly strangle growth, finding themselves locked in a politics of housing scarcity and budget austerity. But the logic of the growth machine is strong and in many ways compelling — if organizers can do the practical work needed to put the coalition in place.

Click here to read the original story.

The Purple Line Finally Gets Some Good News

Posted on by Jason Adle

After two rulings that have resulted in a year of delays for the Purple Line, backers of the light rail project have finally gotten a break.

An appeals court ruled Wednesday that Maryland can continue working on the project even as a lawsuit continues, overturning a lower court decision that put work on ice. Most critically, it means that the state can pursue hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding for the project, which would connect 16 miles between Bethesda and New Carrollton.

“The order will allow construction to commence and we will continue to do everything we possibly can to keep the Purple Line moving forward,” Maryland State Attorney Brian Frosh said yesterday.

Republican Governor Larry Hogan gave the project a surprise green light two years ago. Construction was slated to begin in late 2016 on the 16.2-mile light rail line. It would be run by the Maryland Transit Administration, not Metro, though there are connections to the Red, Green, and Orange lines along some of the 21 stops.

But it has faced fierce opposition from an organized group of neighbors, who at one point considered focusing their fight on the environmental impact to a tiny, shrimp-like creature.

Instead, they’ve had successes arguing that transit officials failed to sufficiently account for the impact of Metro’s safety and ridership issues. A U.S. District Court judge ruled in August of 2016 that the MTA needed to re-do its ridership calculations. This May, the same judge said that the state hadn’t sufficiently completed a “hard look” at the issues posed by WMATA and ordered additional study.

The project’s backers worried that it could mean the end of the line for the Purple Line, as it put already appropriated federal funds in jeopardy and meant the state couldn’t proceed on work or seek more federal funding.

Yesterday’s ruling overturned the 2016 decision, and reinstated the Purple Line’s federal environmental approval.

“The Purple Line is essential for access to jobs, for revitalization inside the Beltway, and for providing a transportation and smart growth option that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” said Stewart Schwartz, the executive director of the Coalition for Smarter Growth. “We hope this means that the full funding grant agreement can be executed and funding flow to the project.”

The Department of Transportation will now determine if there is enough certainty to sign a funding agreement and begin dispensing the hundreds of millions of federal dollars that have already been appropriated.

Click here to read the original story.

Planners Back Study For Another Potomac River Bridge — Again

Posted on by Jason Adle

As long as traffic congestion remains of one the Washington area’s most vexing problems, the idea of building another Potomac River bridge may be the most divisive potential solution, guaranteed to spur contention whenever it resurfaces in ongoing efforts to improve regional mobility.

This was in evidence on Wednesday, when the National Capital Region Transportation Planning Board (TPB) voted to include the bridge idea on a list of 10 major highway, transit, and land use initiatives warranting further study to assess their possible benefits to the region’s transportation system.

During the two-hour TPB meeting, the bridge was the only issue debated, completely overshadowing the other projects to be studied, including toll lanes on the rest of the Beltway, I-270, Dulles Toll Road, and Route 50; bus rapid transit in Montgomery and Prince George’s Counties and Northern Virginia; free public transit rides for poor residents; and placing more offices and housing near undeveloped Metrorail stations.

While no specific location for a new span was decided upon, some officials on the northern side of the Potomac condemned the possibility that it could be built upriver from the American Legion Bridge, connecting Rt. 28 in Virginia to the I-270 corridor in Maryland through Montgomery County’s agricultural reserve.

 

Montgomery County Council member Marc Elrich, who represents his county at the TPB, proposed removing the bridge study from the final list of initiatives but his amendment failed to garner adequate support. On Tuesday, the County Council unanimously passed a resolution to oppose another study.

Indeed, opponents argued on Wednesday that the idea already has been studied for decades by both Democratic and Republican administrations in Virginia, who repeatedly failed to convince their neighbors in Maryland to support such a project.

And a recent study, which focused not on a new span but instead on traffic and transit volumes at 11 existing Potomac River crossings, cast doubt on the potential benefits of building another bridge upriver from the hopelessly congested American Legion Bridge.

The study by the Virginia Department of Transportation concluded in 2015 that extending toll lanes across the American Legion to I-270 “be the top priority for addressing western Potomac River crossings,” although the recommendations did “not eliminate the benefits of a future ‘outer crossing’ to address the needs for interconnectivity/crossing the Potomac River.”

The conclusion was based on research that showed only a fraction of cars crossing the American Legion Bridge during rush hour originated from western Loudoun and Fairfax Counties with destinations, after crossing the river, to the north and west.

More study to come

Mountains of past studies notwithstanding, the Transportation Planning Board’s staff and consultants will take another look at it. To supporters, it is a no-brainer: a region expecting another million residents in the coming decades needs more ways to cross the Potomac.

Evan Pritchard, the executive director of the Northern Virginia Transportation Alliance, said the region should have built multiple bridges across the Potomac decades ago to avoid the current traffic quagmire.

“The need for additional river crossing north of the American Legion Bridge is as apparent today as it was half a century ago,” Pritchard said in testimony to the TPB.

To opponents, another bridge would pave the way to more suburban sprawl, minimal congestion relief, and drain finite dollars away from more pressing transportation needs, including Metro.

Stewart Schwartz, the head of the Coalition for Smarter Growth which opposes major highway projects, said the region’s future lies in public transportation.

“If you build it, you will certainly induce new land use in those outer areas that will induce more traffic, and you will be left with a new crowded bridge plus an old crowded American Legion Bridge,” said Schwartz, who said the idea of ‘outer beltway’ belongs in the 1950s.

After studying the 10 initiatives for next few months, the TPB is expected by the end of 2017 to decide which ones should be added to the region’s long-range transportation plan, likely provoking another public debate like the one that engulfed Wednesday’s meeting.

But TPB chair Bridget Donnell Newton, the mayor of Rockville, sought to refute the notion that Marylanders have made up their minds. She called on officials on both sides of the river to approach the study with an open mind.

“It behooves us to take off our parochial hats, put on our regional hats, and work together,” she said. “It is difficult for people to do that. Sometimes it is because we become entrenched in our decisions and we don’t want to hear new information.”

Click here to read the original story.

Transportation Planning Board will study new crossing over the Potomac

Posted on by Jason Adle

WASHINGTON — Over strong objections from Maryland, Montgomery County and other leaders, the region’s Transportation Planning Board voted Wednesday to study a new Potomac River crossing north of the Beltway’s Legion Bridge.

It is part of a broader effort to identify big-ticket, regionwide projects that could improve the region’s terrible traffic.

Virginia business groups, AAA Mid-Atlantic and groups that generally lobby for increased road construction across the region spoke in support of the additional Potomac crossing, which has been considered for years.

Speaking against it were environmental groups; groups that support transit options; the Coalition for Smarter Growth; and representatives from Montgomery County, Prince George’s County and the state of Maryland.

“A northern crossing is antithetical to everything our county, and I believe our region, is committed to: smart growth, environmental stewardship, preservation of agricultural lands, and greenhouse gas reductions,” said Montgomery County Council President Roger Berliner during a public comment period.

‘We need real solutions’

“We need real solutions to address [terrible traffic], not fantasy solutions that will never happen — I repeat — never happen. And, just as importantly, [that] don’t truly contribute to solving the problem,” Berliner said.

Berliner cited Virginia Department of Transportation studies that found most drivers on the congested Legion Bridge are going to or from a point near the Beltway.

He and his Montgomery County Council colleagues support a greater focus on toll lanes along I-270 that would connect across a widened Legion Bridge to the I-495 Express Lanes in Virginia.

Expanding toll lanes even more to cover the entire Beltway as well as other roads like U.S. 50 is a separate part of the 10-item proposal.

Transportation Planning Board Staff Director Kanti Srikanth said that toll and express bus expansion is based on the idea that most highways around the region are “hopelessly congested” at rush hour.

Supporters of an additional bridge crossing argue it could be built along with improvements to the Legion Bridge and that it could provide an important backup option in the event of any issues.

“I hope that we don’t go another 10, 20, 50 years without looking at filling the missing gaps in our transportation system in this region,” said Loudoun County Supervisor Ron Meyer. “This has been a missing gap for 70 years. Our role as the Transportation Planning Board is to look at long-term plans, so talking about who’s governor now for the next year … it’s not a part of the conversation we’re having … we have to look long term here.”

Prince William County Supervisor and Northern Virginia Transportation Authority Chairman Marty Nohe supported keeping the outer crossing on the list of projects for further study because the list is expected to be narrowed down in December based on preliminary analysis.

“If in fact this project is so terrible, if it really is that bad, then the analysis will prove that and Ron and I will look really stupid,” Nohe said. “But I don’t know that yet because I don’t have the analysis yet.”

While the plan does not provide a specific location for the bridge, the expected location is between Virginia State Route 28 near Dulles Town Center and somewhere just across the river in Maryland that would allow for the construction of a highway connection to Gaithersburg.

Montgomery County Councilmember Marc Elrich, who unsuccessfully moved to remove the outer crossing from the board’s analysis, said there is no money or political will to pave over parts of Montgomery County’s agricultural reserve.

Montgomery County and the state of Maryland have consistently opposed the idea of a bridge, but would be responsible for much of the cost because the river is technically controlled by Maryland.

“Why would we put this into something to study? I would not do this to any other jurisdiction,” Elrich said. “For a lot of us, this is just a bridge too far.”

Concerns over who benefits

Prince George’s County Councilmember Dannielle Glaros expressed concerns that the project would only help Fairfax, Loudoun or Prince William counties rather than serving as the type of regional project the TPB is hoping to champion under this new aspirational section of the region’s long-range plan.

“It really talks about a narrow portion of the region … that has been the most-favored region, and could actually exasperate the east-west divide that clearly exists in our region,” Glaros said.

“I wish I could take you all out to Sterling and Herndon, Virginia, and walk you through those neighborhoods where we just had a young girl killed by an MS-13 gang member, and you can walk those neighborhoods and tell me that we don’t need economic empowerment in those neighborhoods,” Loudoun County Supervisor Ron Meyer responded.

“If you want to empower Sterling, empower Herndon, empower one of the most economically depressed areas in our region, this bridge would be the No. 1 thing that could do it, that could give them access to jobs and give jobs access to them.”

Arlington County Board Chair Jay Fisette reminded the board that it has no real power to force even the plans that are ultimately selected as priorities, but he hopes regional agreement and pressure could lead to changes that cut down on traffic issues.

“Nothing we do … can require any jurisdiction to alter any existing or future plans … we don’t have the authority to do it,” Fisette said. “We do have the authority to say no to a project.”

Fauquier County Supervisor Peter Schwartz worries that the analysis that will be done over the next few months may not show the true impacts of some of the proposals because planners have struggled to accurately project how the addition of a new road or transit project would change people’s choices and habits.

“That future behavior has always sunk all of our projects by overwhelming the additional capacity because it led people to change,” Schwartz said.

He worries that means people will read the analysis to support pre-existing views on certain projects like the outer crossing.

“It will be the same food fight that it’s been every time it’s come up in the past, and was frankly evidenced by the public comments and some of the discussion that’s gone on today,” Schwartz said.

Hopes for wide-ranging solutions

As the list is narrowed down, business groups hope for wide-ranging solutions.

“The Express Lanes travel network, the commuter and Metro rail enhancements, and a northern bridge crossing will serve as major opportunities for our region to preserve and attract talent and business,” said Northern Virginia Chamber of Commerce vice president Mike Forehand. “It’s our hope that further study will beget action, as we do not have time to wait.

Whatever options are chosen, Metro planner Shyam Kannan emphasized that the region’s existing issues need to be addressed first.

“Before we get ahead of ourselves and start to think about these wonderful things that could make this region much more mobile, I think it’s important to remember … we can’t even begin to think about these things until we resolve the funding crisis that is WMATA,” Kannan said.

“We are beyond levels of incredulity with regard to the conversation. The Board discussion last week … involved essentially trying to raise money by holding bake sales at Metro parking lots on Thanksgiving. We are scraping the bottom of the barrel. That’s how bad it’s gotten.”

Click here to read the original story

A New Potomac River Bridge? Same Old Argument

Posted on by Jason Adle

An old transportation idea is back, and it remains as divisive as ever.

On Wednesday, the National Capital Region Transportation Planning Board is scheduled to decide whether to include a proposed new Potomac River bridge among nine other major transportation projects on a list for further consideration.

Studied and debated for decades, the idea to build a new span west of the congested American Legion Bridge, is again splitting officials on either side of the river who have different visions of improving regional mobility.

In Virginia, some public officials and business interests are calling for another study of a bridge that could connect Rt. 28 in Virginia to Maryland. In Maryland, key decision makers remain steadfastly against even studying, let alone building, a multi-billion dollar bridge.

The mere presence of a bridge study on the planning board’s agenda spurred the Montgomery County Council to unanimously approve a resolution on Tuesday condemning the idea.

The county opposes building a new span west of American Legion Bridge for several reasons, according to Council President Roger Berliner: First, the bridge would land in an agriculture reserve; second, it would contradict the county’s smart growth principles, and third, it would drain state transportation dollars from more pressing priorities, namely WMATA.

“We do have real problems with congestion. We need real solutions, not fantasy bridges that will never happen,” said Berliner, who said the idea has been studied many times over the years, most recently in 2014. Virginia shut down that study because Maryland officials remained opposed to the bridge concept amid disagreements over its actual congestion-relief benefits.

“It should not be studied for another nanosecond,” Berliner said.

Bob Buchanan, a real estate developer and president of The 2030 Group whose members include regional business leaders, said it would be wrong to dismiss the potential benefits of a new bridge for regional mobility and the economy.

“It’s really a shame that one jurisdiction wants to hold the rest of the region hostage to its political views,” said Buchanan, who said business leaders in Montgomery County may differ from the stance of their elected leaders.

“Let’s study and understand what our options are. I think it would be unwise not to do that. Our congestion is getting worse,” said Buchanan, who said Metro’s troubles have received attention disproportionate to its importance to ordinary commuters.

Metro “constitutes less than 20 percent of all our daily trips. No one is talking about some of the big regional priorities when it comes to roads.”

In a news release, the Coalition for Smarter Growth, which derisively calls the bridge idea an “outer beltway,” criticized Buchanan and other real estate developers for lobbying for new road construction to open up rural land to development.

“The upper Potomac Bridge and other segments of an outer beltway are back, as a result of the latest multimillion dollar lobbying campaign that began back in 2010,” said the coalition’s executive director Stewart Schwartz in the statement.

Click here to read the original story.

Isiah Leggett’s signature plan for Shady Grove is less lucrative than promised

Posted on by Jason Adle

The idea was ambitious when Montgomery County Executive Isiah Leggett pitched it in 2008: transform 90 acres of county-owned industrial land at the Red Line’s Shady Grove terminus into a transit-friendly urban village.

Leggett’s Smart Growth Initiative would be a break-even proposition for taxpayers over time, he said, and might even make money as the county got an attractive new residential neighborhood and replaced outdated warehouses and garages with state-of-the-art facilities elsewhere.

But nearly a decade in, as Leggett (D) nears the end of his 12-year tenure, this signature project has not gone forward as expected. Only a fraction of the money anticipated from land sales to private developers has been paid so far. And the county’s difficulty in finding a new site for a school system bus depot has slowed progress on a major portion of the planned Shady Grove community, including a new park and elementary school.

Critics on the Montgomery County Council say Leggett overpromised and underdelivered, adding to the county’s $3.2 billion debt by borrowing against land sales proceeds that have yet to materialize.

“This is just not a good news story,” said Council President Roger Berliner (D-Potomac-Bethesda), one of three council incumbents running for county executive in the 2018 Democratic primary.

But Leggett says he devised a creative way to replace outdated buildings and pursue transit-
oriented development policies far more quickly, and effectively, than had been done in the past. Even his own staff was skeptical, he recalled in an interview.

“I was the sole person who believed we could move all these pieces,” he said. “You can argue that a few dollars didn’t come in at the precise time. . . . The county comes out far ahead in the long term.”

In Leggett’s calculus, proceeds from land sales to private developers, along with fresh tax revenue from the new construction, would eventually pay for relocating and rebuilding outdated facilities in Shady Grove and elsewhere. There would also be savings from exiting costly leases the county was paying to rent some of the old structures.

After nearly a decade, parts of that vision have been realized. Along Crabbs Branch Way, within walking distance of the Shady Grove Metro station, the first of a planned 400 new townhouses and 1,100 apartments — some subsidized, some market-rate — are sprouting up where a school system food distribution center, a liquor warehouse and maintenance garages for Ride On buses once stood.

Those facilities and others, including the police and fire training academy, have been successfully moved and rebuilt on other county land.

But those relocations got more expensive as the county expanded the scope of the projects and made state-of-the-art improvements.

Changes in menus and increased emphasis on fresh food, for example, added $9 million to the $35 million school center. Advances in training methods raised the police and fire academy price tag by $15 million, to $63.1 million. All told, the cost of the replacement buildings increased by $60.8 million.

At the same time, Leggett narrowed the county’s expected revenue stream by changing Montgomery’s original agreement with EYA, developer of the townhouses and apartments on the west side of Crabbs Branch. The county initially expected to collect $103.8 million from EYA in fiscal 2015, according to a 2012 fiscal summary drawn up by Leggett’s office. But Leggett decided to allow EYA to pay incrementally as portions of the 45-acre site were built, in order “to help them with their cash flow.”

To date, the county has collected slightly more than $2 million from EYA, which has completed about a quarter of the Westside at Shady Grove project. On the other side of the ledger, the county has benefited from $19 million worth of roads and other infrastructure built by the company. It also credited the company with $4.5 million in exchange for building additional affordable and workforce housing.

 

Leggett has also strategically held certain parcels of county land back from the open market, believing that waiting will result in a better deal.

Five years ago, Montgomery struck an agreement with the developer Hines to convert the old public safety training academy on Great Seneca Highway in Gaithersburg into a life-sciences complex with companies and housing. Leggett placed the $70 million project on hold in hopes of luring a major cybersecurity center to the 50-acre site. That possibility is now less likely. The project has been placed back out for rebidding.

Most vexing for Leggett has been the difficulty in finding a new location for 400 county school buses kept in a 35-acre depot opposite the new townhouses on Crabbs Branch Way. The county agreed in 2012 to sell the land for $70 million to developers LCOR and NVR.

An initial plan to put some of the buses at the Carver Educational Services Center on Hungerford Drive drew sharp neighborhood opposition. Compounding the issue is overcrowding at all five MCPS bus depots. With no obvious available option, Leggett this spring ordered a study before he decides what to do about the Shady Grove depot. It is likely to delay development by 12 to 18 months more, at least, he said.

Council member George Leventhal (D-At Large) said it was “not good planning” to jump into the development venture without knowing where the depot would be moved.

“I don’t think it’s something we can foist on a community just to transform a Metro station,” said Leventhal, also a candidate to succeed Leggett as county executive.

The Shady Grove initiative has generated an unexpected level of debt. Most big capital improvements, such as roads and schools, are financed through the sale of general obligation bonds, where principal and interest are usually paid off over 20 years. But the Leggett administration, interested in moving quickly and anticipating that land sales proceeds would soon be in hand, kept the smart-growth projects out of the capital budget, opting instead to use $200 million in short-term loans on which it paid only interest. Such interim financing is meant to be retired quickly, to avoid added expense for taxpayers. But the county is still carrying a balance of about $160 million.

“These are hard decisions,” said council member Marc Elrich (D-At Large), another county executive candidate. “It was somewhat of a gamble, and it hasn’t turned out entirely the way everybody thought it would turn out.”

Looking for funds to pay off some of the debt, Montgomery officials announced last month that they may use the $22 million netted from settlement of the county’s lawsuit against the designer and builders of the Silver Spring Transit Center.

The county could also sell more bonds to convert the debt from short-term to long-term. But that would crowd out other construction projects in the capital budget, which caps new bond debt at $340 million annually.

Stewart Schwartz, executive director of the Coalition for Smarter Growth, and the region’s leading advocate for building most densely around mass transit, said despite the financial issues, the long-term benefits to the county remain significant.

“Given the growth that’s coming to the region,” he said, “the county needs to take as many opportunities like this as possible, so we don’t choke on our traffic.”

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Almost everyone agrees WMATA needs funding

Posted on by Jacob Korn

Momentum is growing for dedicated revenue, and possibly associated reforms, for the struggling Metro system. A group of 21 business associations issued a statement last week calling for action to save Metro. So did 18 nonprofit organizations. And so have five local faith-based organizing groups and Metro’s largest union.

Will legislators follow?

The faith-based push came from the Industrial Areas Foundation, a network of local faith-based and community organizations each of which has a clever acronym: Washington Interfaith Network (WIN), Action in Montgomery (AIM), Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development (BUILD), People Acting Together in Howard (PATH), and Virginians Organized for Interfaith Community Engagements (VOICE). The five IAF affiliates teamed up with ATU Local 689 to push for $1 billion a year in new dedicated funding for Metro.

Last week, the Federal City Council, a DC-based group of business leaders, teamed up with the Greater Washington Board of Trade, five other business groups, and 14 chambers of commerce to issue a letter calling for ongoing funding and reforms. In addition to “multi-year commitments … for operating funds,” “a dedicated source for capital funding,” and “a continuing funding commitment from the federal government,” the business letter asks for reforms to WMATA’s governance, in line with what the Federal City Council has been pushing for. (Disclosure: FCC’s deputy director and leader on Metro, Emeka Moneme, is a member of the GGWash Board of Directors).

The business letter recommends shrinking the number of directors on the board, requiring expertise in a relevant field, and a rule that the “sole fiduciary duty” of board members be to WMATA. People have criticized the way members sometimes push for procurements or real estate deals which benefit their particular jurisdictions, and even create opportunities for corruption. It’s likely that elected officials, which make up some of DC’s and Virginia’s board members (but not Maryland’s, per state law) would not be able to sit on the board under such a rule.

Besides the chambers of commerce of DC, Virginia, Northern Virginia, Arlington County, Prince William, Greater Springfield, Greater Reston, Greater McLean, Maryland, Montgomery County, Prince George’s, Greater Bethesda, Greater Silver Spring, and the Greater Washington Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, other signatories to the letter include 2030 Group, the Apartment and Office Building Association, the Consortium of Universities, and the DC Building Industry Association.

Nonprofit organizations, including many that work on transportation and the environment, have teamed up as well with their own statement. Led by the Coalition for Smarter Growth, they endorsed a “fund it, fix it” statement of principles which calls for dedicated funding, frequent transit service, and bus priority with dedicated bus lanes where possible.

That group includes Maryland organizations CASA, Action Committee for Transit, the Maryland Center on Economic Policy, League of Women Voters Montgomery County, Friends of White Flint, and the Montgomery Countryside Alliance; the Virginia Conservation Network, Northern Virginia Affordable Housing Alliance, Piedmont Environmental Council, Fairfax Advocates for Better Bicycling, and the Arlington Coalition for Sensible Transportation; the Sierra Club chapters and groups in DC, Virginia, Montgomery County, and Great Falls; the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and Washington Area Bicyclist Association.

The League of Women Voters of the National Capital Area (an umbrella group of all LWVs in the area), 1000 Friends of Maryland, and Central Maryland Transportation Alliance also joined for an announcement issued Monday from the nonprofits.

In the public sector, there have been funding calls and reform plans from WMATA General Manager Paul Wiedefeld, a group of Maryland legislators, ATU Local 689, and a working group from the Council of Governments.

Who’s not here?

At this point, with advocacy, environmental, business, faith, and about every other policy organization in DC, Maryland, and Virginia agreeing about much of what WMATA needs, the question becomes, who’s not on board?

So far, some Virginia legislators still aren’t. Some in Loudoun County still want more study and feel Loudoun shouldn’t have to pay even more after just joining WMATA formally (and not even having any stations yet). It’s sort of like buying into a condo and then being hit with a big assessment to fix the roof. But is the alternative to let the roof collapse?

Loudoun may try to negotiate a different funding commitment, and that’s really up to Virginia to work out internally. One way or another, though, Metro needs funding and appropriate reform.

Virginia legislators outside Northern Virginia may be the toughest sell, as many downstate delegates don’t ride transit and have signed anti-tax pledges which include not allowing Northern Virginia to raise its own taxes, even if there’s no impact outside the region.

Maryland Governor Larry Hogan has said he won’t stand in the way of Montgomery and Prince George’s counties taxing themselves to fund Metro, but won’t help out of the state budget. This despite pulling money away from those counties to build more roads in rural parts of the state right after taking office. The Baltimore area, which was most robbed by Hogan’s cancellation of the Red Line, may want to know how it can fund needed transit as well.

But whether it’s a 1% sales tax or another method; whatever deal has to be worked out with the rest of Virginia and Maryland; the calls within all quarters of our region for some action to save Metro are getting louder and louder. The need is clear.

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