Mandy enters the Gaithersburg My Organic Market and buys a bunch of fresh, locally sourced broccoli (crowns only). She goes to the cashier, effects payment, then walks up to the on-duty manager and snaps, “You manipulative wheeler-dealer, you should be ashamed!”
Next, Mandy drives to Wonderland Books in Bethesda where she picks up the book her best friends are reading, All About Love. When the owner asks her if she needs anything else, Mandy blurts, “You’re here just for the money, aren’t you?”
Instead of being ugly, Mandy should set an example for all of us and say, “Thank you,” and the store owner should reply with, “Have a nice day.” After all, the store owner is providing something to Mandy that Mandy could not procure herself, and in return Mandy is forking over payment to the store owner.
This protocol is reasonable, and most of us are in conformance with it. Why is it, I wonder, that everyone eagerly buys or rents a home, and then vilifies the developers who built them?
Any business, from the simple taco truck to a class A office tower, does one thing: provide goods and services to people who need or want those goods and services. Those entrepreneurs who indeed provide what people want are rewarded; those who provide something else are failures.
Is it true that developers provide something we want? Look at the crowds at Pike & Rose, Rockville Town Center, or Silver Spring Arts & Entertainment District. Look at the extremely popular redevelopment at Westbard. Clearly people want these types of mixed-use developments.
To satisfy our shelter needs, local developers take on the following risks that no other entrepreneur does:
- Buy the land.
- Buy the materials.
- Hire the labor.
- Secure financing for the above.
- Deal with licenses, permits, bureaucrats, committees, buyers, and angry nearby residents.
- Hope and pray mortgage interest rates don’t role against them.
That is an awful lot of risk. Much more risk than what the bookstore owner or the organic food manager undertake.
Mandy is absolutely correct. Every single business is there to wheel, deal, and suck up your cash. But that’s only half the situation: the other half is that the business is providing goods and services that we either can’t or won’t perform ourselves, and that includes the developers. They can and want to provide housing for the underserved: police officers who cannot live in the areas they patrol, combat veterans who cannot remain in their homes, single parents who cannot live close to their places of employment, and GS-13 employees (or whatever is left of them) who cannot live close to a Metro stop.
Clearly there is not enough affordable housing. The developers know this just as well as we do. The developers can deliver that need, that very basic need, if we would only let them.
No, whenever I see a crane plodding up and down a construction site I don’t write a thank-you note to Davis Construction. However, my first thought is, “That’s really amazing, why aren’t there more of these cranes?”
