As lunch with county council member Valerie Ervin (D) continued, the subject turned to the cost of living in Silver Spring.
Q. Homeowners make a lot of noise in this community, but 40 percent of Silver Spring residents rent their homes. What’s your take on the proletariat?
A. There’s a lot wrong with the way we do things with renters. You can’t ignore renters. A lot of the stuff that’s happening is about the renters.
Q. Tell me about it!
A. But people [renters] just aren’t coming out to these meetings. Why should homeowners make all the decisions? [Renters are] still citizens.
Q. Freakin’ renters!
So what’s the county to do about affordable housing? MoCo exec Ike Leggett says, “Preserve what we have.”
A. I think saying “preserve the existing rental stock” is a cop-out. We should do that, but that’s not gonna solve it.
Q. What will?
A. We should build it.
Q. But developers won’t build affordable housing if there’s no payoff.
A. There’s gonna have to be some sort of subsidy, or some sort of a partnership between the county and the development community. They won’t want to build affordable housing if we don’t incentivize it.
Q. Freakin’ developers!
A. The cost of purchasing land [in Silver Spring] is extremely expensive. The cost of steel and building materials have tripled in price. So what ends up happening is they build a building, and transfer the cost to the people who will live in the building.
Q. What is wrong with those developers?!? Can the county help a Penguin out?
A. We haven’t explored it deeply enough. We really have to work in conjunction with the builders, not against them. They don’t have to do any of this.
Q. What about the county’s housing initiative fund?
A. That money is for maintaining the current rental stock. It goes to financing, and allows the county to buy buildings and rehab them. There’s a lot of money for affordable housing in the county.
Q. Score one for the proletariat!
A. There’s just not enough [housing].
Q. DAMNIT!
A. There are 15,000 people [countywide] on a waiting list to get into HOC [Housing Opportunities Commission] housing. These are people who qualify for assistance.
But we’re driving people underground. We’re seeing more and more people living in one unit.
Q. What, like seven adults in a two-bedroom?
A. We don’t even have a good number of how many people we’re dealing with. You think Bethesda and Chevy Chase council members have to deal with these issues?
Q. Freakin’ Bethesda and Chevy Chase!
Updated Aug 15, 2007, at 8:22 a.m.
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I’m sure Bethesda and Chevy Chase DO have to deal with these issues. Absolutely there is an extreme lack of affordable housing in those districts as well as Silver Spring. If anything, it’s worse there, but those council members probably try to push the affordable housing issue onto places that have less of a homogenous population (hint hint).
Also, Jen, “incentivize” is a proper word, so you can take out the [sic].
Editor’s note: Fixed the “sic”. Thanks! — JD (Aug 15)