(Disclaimer: No investment advice is intended in this post.)
If you own a rental in White Oak, Bel Pre, Aspen Hill, Gaithersburg, or Montgomery Village, you might want to sell. Today.
The county government has developed a Community Equity Index that indicates what areas reflect the county’s prevailing diversity. (Actually, this index indicates what areas the Montgomery Planning Department thinks is a measure of what the Montgomery Planning Department thinks is diversity.)
I doubt our county government has invented a worse example of social engineering than this.
If you to go the Community Equity Index Explorer, you’ll see areas shaded in orange-red (more disadvantaged) and areas shaded in dark blue-light blue (less disadvantaged). There isn’t much of a surprise in where these gradations of diversity fall.
Benjamin Kraft is a research planner in Montgomery Planning’s Research and Strategic Projects Division. His description of the CEIP gives us a fascinating overview of how he thinks people should behave and his criteria for how people should feel happy. “[Proximity to diversity] also allows more advantaged residents to benefit from cultural richness to which they might not be exposed in a more exclusive neighborhood.” True, not everyone living in isolated Potomac mansions are happy, and I’m sure some of them are actually rather miserable, but I would be cautious about determining for them what would make them happy.
Aside from his very judgmental view of the world, here is his bombshell:
New investment in these [orange and red] areas along with careful anti-displacement measures can also attract new residents to improve socioeconomic diversity.
Anti-displacement measures improve socioeconomic diversity?
Our County Council has already enacted rent control, which is giving housing providers incentive to sell and thereby displace residents that would have been perfectly satisfied otherwise (as has already happened in Takoma Park). Presumably Mr. Kraft is hinting that additional anti-displacement measures are necessary to improve diversity, such as prohibiting a housing provider from moving into a unit s/he owns, prohibiting eviction (regardless of cause) of certain favored demographics, forcing housing providers to pay relocation fees, and forbidding evictions when tenants violate no-pet policies.
Los Angeles has already enacted many of these anti-displacement measures over the years, and you can see the result.
In 2011, income for the top 20% of the earners was 17 times that of the bottom 20%; In 2021 it was over 19 times. We could do the same test for income inequality in San Francisco, New York, and other anti-displacement jurisdictions that in reality are nothing more than waging a war on the poor on behalf of the wealthy.
Mr. Kraft works in a county department that has a rich heritage of deception, inebriated leadership, and micro-managing planners that would rather designate a worthless commercial building as a protected historical site than rezone it for affordable housing (more on all this in future posts). The reason there are areas of disadvantaged populations in this county has as much to do with Montgomery Planning as it has to do with anybody else. We cannot expect anything out of that department that will enable the poor to reach that first rung of economic security.
Such is our county government’s mentality. In the meantime, landlords, you should sell now, particularly if you own in those red-orange areas, before the county council inflicts on you “careful anti-displacement measures” from which there is no escape—not for you, and not for your tenants.
