Development
Status quo wastes Montgomery's Glenmont Metro investment
Recently, the Gazette discussed the future of the Glenmont Shopping Center. This site serves as a golden opportunity for a White Flint-style suburban-to-urban retrofit. Such a move towards environmental and economic sustainability would just be plain Smart.
Close-up of the Glenmont Shopping Center. Photo by pappa91 on Flickr.
As the article alludes, the shopping center is currently underutilized. It has acres of seldom-used surface parking. It's also within a five minute walk to the Glenmont Metro station.
Like most car-dependent suburban developments, the Glenmont Shopping Center was built at a time when it was at the fringe of the region. However, Glenmont was eventually overshadowed by the farther flung cluster of strip malls at the intersection of Georgia Avenue, Connecticut Avenue, and Aspen Hill Road. Glenmont has been stagnant since.
While Glenmont's story parallels thousands of other suburban retail clusters around the United States, its current potential is extremely different than over 99% of its brethren. Montgomery County chose to have the eastern Red Line run under Georgia Avenue north of Silver Spring, terminating at Glenmont, rather than following the Metropolitan Branch to Rockville via Kensington. The Glenmont Metro station opened in 1998, completing the original plans for the Red Line.
Our experiences around the Washington region have taught us that opening a Metro station has the potential to completely change the local economic systems, provided that the government and landowners take advantage of their infrastructure investment. However, the Gazette article shows that the investment in transit is not being leveraged:
With a new high-end apartment and condominium complex being built on Layhill Road, the raising of Georgia Avenue over Randolph Road and the move of the fire station to the Glenmont Metro, where a new, 12-floor parking garage is being built, residents are holding out hope that a sparkling new shopping center could be just a few years away.One can't emphasize enough that an elevated highway and a walkable neighborhood in the same space are mutually exclusive things. If you only plan for cars and traffic, you get cars and traffic. That is just as true in Glenmont as it is anywhere else.
The landowners of the Glenmont Shopping Center appear to be far less business savvy and enlightened than the coalition of landowners who cooperated to plan for the recently passed White Flint Sector Plan that envisions a new human-scale town. It appears from the article, that there is none of that kind of cooperation going on in Glenmont:
Karen Durbin, the manager of Arcade Florist, has been selling flowers to shoppers since 1969. When asked how the shopping center has evolved over the years, she laughed as a co-worker slowly dropped a thumbs-down.As more and more new projects are completed in the immediate area that leverage their proximity to the Metro, the Glenmont Shopping Center will become more and more of a weight around the neck of revitalization."The problem here is that there's a lot of different landlords, and they don't cohesively get together, Durbin said. "...Major renovations? The only thing I ever see them do is work on the parking lot."
If the shopping center gets a street grid as a result of a suburban-to-urban retrofit, there will be more connectivity with the surrounding small streets like in the White Flint Sector Plan. People living within walking distance of amenities in a new mixed-use development adjacent to the Metro will contribute to reversing the whirlpool of induced demand.
If the demand for road space could be better managed, Montgomery County wouldn't have to build the overpass for Randolph road over Georgia Avenue. (Sadly, the county DOT's Level of Service traffic metrics will always recommend building more roads.) The county would get tax revenue from redevelopment because walkable urbanism has more billable floor space per unit land area, and also a smaller road bill. I wonder why no one thought of it, despite the fact that it has already been done within Montgomery County in Bethesda, Silver Spring, and soon White Flint.
Montgomery is very lucky that the landowners in the White Flint Sector Plan area are forward-thinking enough to cooperate to improve environmental sustainability while increasing their long term profits. Clearly, the county is not as lucky in Glenmont. I have never met the landowners of the Glenmont Shopping Center. I do not know how they view their commercial rental property. However, I do know that any profit-seeking private business is motivated by improvements to their own bottom line. They stand to make a fortune in either redeveloping their property as a mixed-use town or by selling it to someone who will. The article in the Gazette demonstrates a lack of vision in the area. However, the county needs to provide zoning and planning support to make something happen.
Developers are profit-seeking businesses just like any other. It is up to the citizenry, through its elected officials in government, to set up a business environment that incentivizes developers to do the right thing. The landowners in White Flint had to jump through hoops to do the right thing. The status quo will not produce more transit-oriented, sustainable, human-scale towns. We can do better than dreaming of a more sparkly 1960's era strip mall flanked by a Metro station on one side and an overpass on the other. That's just putting lipstick on a pig. The opportunity costs are too high to waste the investment of the Glenmont Metro station.
 | Cavan Wilk became interested in the physical layout and economic systems of modern human settlements while working on his Master's in Financial Economics. His writing often focuses on the interactions between a place's form, its economic systems, and the experiences of those who live in them. He lives in downtown Silver Spring.  |
Comments
@ggwash
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With the ICC's opening, how is the Georgia Avenue corridor going to change? Will traffic reduce as people trying to get to a highway from the north divert on to the ICC? Will this reduce pressure on Georgia to be an auto arterial and create more opportunities for a pedestrian- and transit-oriented corridor?
If possible, I think the opening of the ICC should be used as a basis for a formal kind of redesignation of Georgia's transportation function to "supporter of TOD/suburban activity center corridor."
by jnb on Aug 16, 2010 11:35 am
by Mike on Aug 16, 2010 11:51 am
As for the landlord of the rotting shopping center - surprise, surprise, among them is Greenhill Property, who Dan Reed wrote about in GGW just a couple of weeks ago.
I think you're absolutely right that there is a lot of potential in Glenmont. But I'm having trouble being optimistic. A huge parking garage, a big overpass, landlords without vision (and/or financing muscle?), and a county that scares off the forward-looking developers. Currently, not exactly a recipe for success.
by Dave in Wheaton on Aug 16, 2010 12:21 pm
by Sam Arora on Aug 16, 2010 12:26 pm
by Mike on Aug 16, 2010 12:37 pm
It doesn't help matters that these businesses seem to cater to low-income types who shop there because they can't afford to shop elsewhere, and don't have the means to go anywhere else anyway. It's a wasteland of pavement with ugly, run-down stores. I walk past it literally every day, yet I don't shop there. My wife and I drive up to Aspen Hill, Rockville Pike, or downtown Silver Spring for most thing
This is truly a wasted opportunity. People will pay top dollar to live this close to the Metro, but the Metro alone won't do it. This area needs a major redevelopment. It could be done, but it needs a major restructuring. Something along the lines of White Flint would be nice, but I think it's going to require more money than the property owners have. The state or county needs to get things started here. There needs to be some immediate incentive or assistance.
As a homeowner in the area, I doubt there's much I can do except hope for the best.
by Thrillhouse on Aug 16, 2010 12:42 pm
It doesn't help matters that these businesses seem to cater to low-income types who shop there because they can't afford to shop elsewhere, and don't have the means to go anywhere else anyway. It's a wasteland of pavement with ugly, run-down stores. I walk past it literally every day, yet I don't shop there [...]
This is just about exactly what I was going to say.
I should point out that even back in the 1960s when I was growing up in the then-shiny-new Aspen Hill, Glenmont was regarded as a sketchy and dangerous place, totally low-rent at least anywhere close to that shopping center. The "Cue Club" had a reputation for drunken knife fights.
As time went on and suburbia "matured", Glenmont's reputation never improved. It's sort of sad, really; in a lot of ways, the combination of the location and the 1950s/1960s layout and style of the place and the lack of development has left it as a monument to unfulfilled potential.
Various schemes to improve the place all faltered somewhere in the first paragraph of every proposal great or small, generally in the middle of a sentence using the word "traffic". Getting in or out of that shopping center can be difficult, and access to or from has never been much improved despite numerous redesigns and rebuilds of the merge-mad stretch north along Georgia from Randolph Road to Layhill Road.
One clear and obvious solution was constantly denied due to the location of the firehouse and police station, even though a far less obviously clear alternative is scheduled which will remove those landmarks in any case.
Creating an island, as it were, of the shopping center by routing traffic around it could have worked, and worked well. Indeed, much traffic does already travel roundabout it along Glenallen Road, or parts thereof. A little bit of grade separation to let pedestrians get in and out as well as the vehicles do, and you could effectively remove Layhill Road between Georgia Avenue and Glenallen Road, or leave it as an internal connector for vehicles in search of parking or a fill-up at the gas stations. Leave Georgia Avenue in place for southbound traffic, but route the northbound traffic across the site of the firehouse and police station onto eastbound Randolph Road for the short haul to Glenallen Road where all traffic would head north and northwest to first cross Layhill Road and then join Georgia Avenue headed north. Randolph Road as well as Layhill Road traffic would likewise travel counterclockwise around the circle and exit outwards as necessary or merge left to get into the enclosed area, comprising as it would the Glenmont Shopping Center as well as the Metro station.
Of course, this would require the demolition of a significant number of residential rental units and also require widening of Glenallen Road. Yet much of that residential rental housing is already past its half-life and doubtless some sort of incentives could be worked out with the landlords.
Yet all of this is merely problem solving in a sort of moot-court; there's simply no need for much more commercial space in this area, nor for much more residential space, densely-packed or otherwise. Glenmont and nearby communities have the highest rate of foreclosure in Montgomery County and nearby Aspen Hill's eastern section is number two on that list.
This whole part of the County is rapidly falling past mere Slumburbia and into actual slumminess overall and into near ghetto in certain parts. There are needs far more pressing than making Glenmont Shopping Center from a pig's ear into a silk purse, so to speak. I realize that people around here have grown up accustomed to crappy strip malls, but outside of Langley Park, this one's Montgomery's crappiest.
Time for a total do-over.
by Thomas Hardman on Aug 16, 2010 1:41 pm
It's a shame that store access there requires walking though acres of parking lot but hey, that's no different than other major malls (Wheaton, Montgomery Mall, etc.) in the area.
The stores there provide needed services and products to folks in the area.
I hate the god-dang intersection of Randolph and Georgia though. It can be surprisngly bad on weekends as well as weekdays. Is it ranked poorly compared to others in the area? I'd say it's in the worst 5.
by B.O. on Aug 16, 2010 1:44 pm
B.O., I am guessing that you haven't actually driven around in or near Glenmont. Most of the housing stock on the western side of Georgia Avenue is little clapboard shacks, "little houses made of ticky tack". Admittedly some of those were purchased by long-term speculators who saw Metro coming, and some of those original structures are effectively buried in their add-ons and improvements. Yet the stretch of Georgia Avenue southwards from Randolph Road to Shorefield Road (which leads to Wheaton Regional Park) is pretty much scary low-rent apartments that have been regarded as "ghetto" since at least the early 1970s. Nearby Kennedy highschool is one of the County trouble spots as is nearby Einstein highschool.
Along Layhill Road to the north are a lot of increasingly nice single-family detached residential homes, many of them bought new, or barely used, by couples now in their late 60s or early 70s at the youngest. Yet a younger generation also lives there, and while many of those do indeed have good educations and professional jobs, "Layhill South" is seeing a lot more of overcrowded housing and conversion of single-family residential properties into multifamily mixed-use properties, all coming as close to violating existing county codes as is practicable. Although the properties themselves retain about the same value as before, many more people are resident there, in part because that's the only way they can afford to live there with their low incomes.
To answer your question, the intersection of Georgia Avenue and Randolph Road is considered a "failed intersection" and it has been known as such for the better part of a decade.
by Thomas Hardman on Aug 16, 2010 2:04 pm
Montgomery County should revive its use of eminent domain for economic development projects which resulted in Downtown Silver Spring, the Life Sciences Center, and Rockville Town Square, all some of the most sucessful developments in the County. By buying out the Glenmont Shopping Center and bidding the project to a larger developer with resources, the County could get exactly what it wants, and could even ground lease the property to recoup some of its costs. Sucessful retail centers would increase property values, attracting more stable demographics, thus decreasing crime and making our public schools more competitive with those on the I-270 corridor.
by Cyrus on Aug 16, 2010 2:08 pm
by andrew on Aug 16, 2010 2:10 pm
Andrew: have you looked at a map recently? Red Line of Metro does in fact have a station in Rockville. That western leg of that line has one station farther out, in Shady Grove. As to why the eastern leg of Red Line terminates at Glenmont rather than running along the surface of the Georgia Avenue median strip with some elevated sections such as crossing the Watery Branch of Rock Creek at Hewitt Avenue, to terminate in Aspen Hill or Norbeck, I don't know or understand. Extending the eastern leg of the Red Line to as near the ICC as possible would seem sensible to me.
Cyrus: I'm not sure if you even know that you just reprised the greatest hit of the famous punk-rock band, the Dead Kennedys.
I wish I could say that I'm astonished, but I'm not.
BTW that link is to youtube and probably not safe for work anyplace other than at Urban Planning offices and Developer-funded thinktanks.
by Thomas Hardman on Aug 16, 2010 2:25 pm
by Cavan on Aug 16, 2010 2:34 pm
I'd say the low-income designation mainly comes from the immigrant population. I only live about two blocks from there, but once you get away from Georgia Ave., things aren't bad. That's not to say that there aren't bad spots. On a street of decent little houses, you'll find a few that are total eyesores.
I know I'm walking a very thin line with this, but there is no shortage of homes (in Montgomery County and this area) that house multiple immigrant families in a single family dwelling. There's a place just a few doors down from me that regularly has three or four white work vans parked out front (some kind of general construction or something). I usually see a bunch of people hanging out outside when I get home from work.
While I was house hunting this spring, I visited several houses that had this exact situation. Some showed the signs, like a brick rambler with five or six bedrooms and two beds in each bedroom, and in other cases, the people were actually in the house and didn't leave when we toured it.
As a group, they can pool their money and rent or buy a decent house. But that doesn't change the fact individually, they don't really have much money. So what you end up with is a bunch of low-income people crammed into a small house. And the retail options in the area reflect this.
by Thrillhouse on Aug 16, 2010 2:51 pm
by Mike on Aug 16, 2010 2:57 pm
The false arguments of "sketchy", "low-income", and "trouble spots" are completely moot. Einstein HS is not a trouble spot, and arguing that any of our high schools are is pretty uninformed (all MoCo high schools are ranked in the top 5% nationwide and Einstein ranks in the middle of the Montgomery County pack). We're spoiled with the success of our public schools to such an extent that the mere presence of a few misguided kids is blown out of proportion. Arguing that they are riddled with crime and troubled kids is insulting. Having grown up surrounded by kids from Einstein, BCC, and Whitman, I know that all types of teens are involved with drugs and drinking--the two trouble spots. The difference is that the rich kids are better at hiding it from the cops and media (and this is not an oversimplification).
Low income is also a misnomer for the Glenmont area. The Wheaton-Glenmont area has a median household income of $73,423. $73,423!!! This is a full $21,248 over the same figure for the nation as a whole (about 41% higher). Most homes built in that area are post-war tract housing. Yet they still command relatively high prices, especially nationally. You cannot be poor and live in the area. Cheaper apartments are just that--cheaper apartments. Simply because they are of a lower quality and do not get updated at regular intervals does not make them slums. Think hard about yourself when you speak of what "poor", "slums", and "ghetto" really mean, and I think you'll see that Glenmont really means none of these. Yes, some of it is a bit rundown, but that is not for lack of regional wealth. It is for lack of planning and guidance.
I grew up in Silver Spring, and used to frequent the Glenmont Shopping Center in the late 80s through mid 90s at the duckpin bowling lanes, Hechinger's, the plant nursery that used to be there, and then Wye River when Hechinger's closed. The demographics of the area support, from an economical and demographic standpoint, a complete redevelopment. Mixed income residential as well as higher end shops and subsidized rents for mom and pops would do wonders, not only for the neighborhood physically, but also for the many, many MIDDLE income families that drive outside the Glenmont area to do their convenience shopping.
by Eric on Aug 16, 2010 4:01 pm
@Eric:
Perhaps it's just a sad fact of life that figures can lie, and liars can figure, but to pass off a total whopper and make it look appealing takes nothing less than statistics.
For ten years I've been working with the Kennedy Cluster activist community, mostly trying to get more and better funding for after-school, summer-school, and stay-in-school programs, mostly towards the end of keeping kids out of gangs by offering useful alternatives to running the streets.
We picked our targets based on statistics, and while it is true that there is no school at any post-kindergarten level which has no gang activity or members, there are ones which are far worse and Kennedy, Wheaton, and Einstein HSs are the top three for gang membership. Those statistics come right from the Governer's Office of Crime Control and Prevention' CSAFE grant studies, as of about 2005. Wheaton HS, of course, tops the list in the mid-county gang problem schools.
That being said, this isn't South Central Los Angeles or Chicago's west side, it's not even Northwest Washington DC. Yet for Montgomery, it's damned sad.
And Eric, you said:
Low income is also a misnomer for the Glenmont area. The Wheaton-Glenmont area has a median household income of $73,423. $73,423!!! This is a full $21,248 over the same figure for the nation as a whole (about 41% higher).
Yes, that is "median household income" but that IS NOT THE SAME THING as "per capita income". Take your $75K/year and divide it by two parents and 2.3 kids, and the parents each make close to $40K/year probably with benefits from their salaried jobs and their kids are probably pretty pampered. Now take your $75K/year and divide it by four nuclear families of 2 parents and their 3.7 kids and the 8 parents are all making about $10k/year and they're scraping for every last cent to spend and they're probably working in shifts so that someone's sleeping at all times and someone's playing babysitters and someone's out working at all times. It's not a happy lifestyle and the neighbors who are "normative" don't like it much.
That's when a neighborhood such as Aspen Hill (in parts) becomes a Slumburbia. Perhaps you'd like some photoessays to provide visual examples?
Now, you say also "Think hard about yourself when you speak of what "poor", "slums", and "ghetto" really mean, and I think you'll see that Glenmont really means none of these. Yes, some of it is a bit rundown, but that is not for lack of regional wealth. It is for lack of planning and guidance".
Actually it's the case that the County has utterly failed to enforce its own codes, or worse has such sloppy codes that it's easy to get around them. Want to pack people into a single-family detached residential unit? All thet need is 110 sq-ft of space per person, and as long as they make even unsupported claims of being related, you can pack in as many as can fit.
This is ghetto. I know ghetto when I see it. I live in ghetto. It's not ALL ghetto but where it is ghetto, it is indeed ghetto.
by Thomas Hardman on Aug 16, 2010 5:14 pm
All you will be doing is pushing the people to someone else's neighborhood how is that any better. Then give or take 5, 10 or 15 years and the same thing repeats itself nothing is being solved by what is suggested.
by kk on Aug 16, 2010 6:05 pm
@kk
Aspen Hill and Glenmont are in fact getting to the age where there is some gentrification happening. For example, on my block, a semi-yuppie couple moved out to Gaithersburg in search of a larger house for their growing family. Actual yuppies moved in to replace them, a young MD fresh out of internship and into a public-service practice related to the BRAC ("base realignments and closings") and his wife, and another dual-income-no-kids couple renting their basement until they can select a house to buy.
Yet on another nearby block, a fairly high-ranking young professional with the Federal government is relocating across the country, and her home seems to be under contract to a coalition of immigrants (legal or otherwise isn't known yet) who appear set to move their entire extended family from the old country. That is the opposite of gentrification, unless by a miracle their entire extended family are yuppies and/or yuppie-puppies.
So, if you're a yuppie and want to help gentrify/restore an elder core suburb that has generally fairly well-maintained infrastructure and lots of local shopping as well as many bus routes, try Aspen Hill. Or Glenmont, which has a Metro station right there.
by Thomas Hardman on Aug 16, 2010 6:57 pm
I was talking about the lower income people whom would be pushed out.
With the rate the area is there will be no low income areas unless you're going into Baltimore or past Prince William County which will result it many lesser jobs unfilled which will effect all eventually.
by kk on Aug 16, 2010 7:14 pm
You're right, of course. That would be the expected result, if we were back in the mid-2000s Housing Bubble. It might to some degree remain the expected result.
Yet look at the causes of the Housing Bubble and the way that it folded back on itself to exponentiate the inflation.
A bubble in housing prices brought workers, who over-occupied existing low-cost housing in violation of the principles of County Code, if not truly violating the letter of the Code. (see also the "relatives exception".)
Low-cost housing converted into worker barracks for imported workers means that such housing is not available for low-income renters such as Section 8 or other government assisted housing. So-called "workforce housing" effectively disappears from the market. Yet it isn't only the low-income/public-assistance "working poor" or disabled person who is affected. Even recent college graduated waiting for their "first Real Job" can't live here, unless they want to continue to live in dormitory conditions just like the imported construction workers.
This dearth of available housing inflates home prices, the construction boom is fed, more workers are needed, more are imported, less housing is available to Section VIII assisted housing, legitimate "working poor" workers, college students/recent college grads, etc etc. Prices go up.
Seriously, it's just logic. Not hard to understand.
Now, the Housing Bubble collapses, nearly taking down the global economy as it goes.
Suddenly, places like Aspen Hill or Glenmont are all full of foreclosures, mostly on houses bought for "flipping" or as slumlord properties designed to profiteer renting very small spaces at outrageous prices to "immigrant" workers. They're not working, can't pay the speculator landlord, the speculator landlord can't make the note on the house, house gets foreclosed, former construction workers swell the ranks of the woods-dwelling homeless. This is all a matter of record, search for "homeless" and "day laborer" in the Gazette sometime and much will become clear.
These foreclosures would be excellent candidates for purchase by the County as "workforce housing" and public-housing. Yet because of the sources of the County's income, it's almost as broke as the homeless foreigners living in Rock Creek Park.
An ideal solution would be for some consortium of cash-heavy corporations to speculate on these properties just as did the folks creating slumlord worker barracks for illegal alien construction day laborers. Instead of profiteering off of providing housing for construction workers, the new speculators could profiteer minimally off of providing housing for people who are right between college graduation and entering the Professional degreed workforce.
Montgomery could become a place where the average person is a young-adult college student or college grad with a "making do" job, rather than a weird demographic divide in places like Aspen Hill, where everyone over 55 is a white American and everyone between 28 and 45 is a central-american immigrant (legal or otherwise) and almost all minor children are either from Spanish-speaking families or are children of English-speaking African immigrants and there are almost no young-adults between the ages of 20 and 28.
Instead, Aspen Hill and Glenmont would be full of well-educated young adults, all prepared for their first Real Professional Job, but not having yet got it. This would turn the heart of "affordable" MoCo into a hotbed of hipsters and political fervor, volunteerism and live music, the sort of "vibrant urban life" that you can't have in a business district like Downtown Silver Spring without busloads of assholes swarming on from Landover on Metro. We could have something really going on here, and something affordable.
All they have to do is to clear out the unemployable day-laborers from the speculating slumlords' worker barracks, which in any case the economy is doing for us. Now let's fill the vacuum with new Yuppies and grads working crap jobs waiting for their Real Career to start. Make the place as popular as it is now affordable.
by Thomas Hardman on Aug 16, 2010 8:39 pm
You still never explained where those whom are displaced will go. All you are doing is pushing people to the side and it never works when that group of people in this case (lower income- low end middle income) represents most of the population of the country.
And as for a area full of 20-28 years old; hell no a place needs a mixture of different age groups to not be conceited and careless of needs other than there own. The majority of the area would basically become a party center which is never good. The area would get new residents every 4 or 5 years and no one thinking of longterm living which will means a lack of housing in different varieties (downtown DC with only 1 and 2 bedroom condos/apartments).
by kk on Aug 16, 2010 8:54 pm
If Downtown DC is a T6, Brookland is a T4 and Fort Totten would be a T4-, White Flint would be a T5 probably, and Glenmont probably a T3.
As a result, its opportunities for redevelopment are not comparable UNLESS there was a significant amount of rezoning, at least underlying zoning, comparable to how Arlington created the ability for high intensity PUD development with special approvals.
When I first came to the region in 1987, I did a project for work with a guy who lived in the Virginia Square area. Let's just say it was completely different then from what it is now. It wasn't nearly the same, but think of it as an underinvested Kensington kind of place, and compare it to what Virginia Square is today (lots of tall office and residential buildings).
Anyway, you need to get involved in a Main Street like program and then start dealing with merchants and property owners to learn how #$%^&*() difficult it can be to get either or both to do the right thing.
by Richard Layman on Aug 16, 2010 9:00 pm
The age group I suggested should target themselves -- with assistance -- to move here is an age group that is almost totally missing here.
It's the one group that can least afford to live here.
As for the swarm of illegal aliens who flooded the neighborhoods here with overcrowded worker-barracks where speculator slumlords both profiteered from, and added to, the economy-wrecking Housing Bubble, they can go back home. They came here to work, the job is done. They can't pay rent, their speculator slumlords lost their houses, they can go back to their own countries, or to any other place in the USA that has a worker shortage.
With almost 1-in-5 American citizens and Legal Immigrants either unemployed or under-employed, maybe you could tell those legal workers where to migrate to get a job.
There is no worker shortage. There is a job shortage. There is no shortage of commercial real-estate. There is a gross surplus. There is no shortage in Aspen Hill or Glenmont of affordable housing... if you qualify under strict new rules for buying a house. Frankly the people who were causing a massive distortion of our society and the global economy can get lost, I don't care where.
But as for our younger folks, the young-adults who used to have to move to Hagerstown because every place they could afford was already occupied by an illegal imported workforce? BRING THEM BACK.
I miss them. We all do.
by Thomas Hardman on Aug 16, 2010 9:09 pm
Personally, I think the Glenmont Shopping center could easily take an upscale shopping area. While Glenmont itself may have lots of low income residents, east of Georgia gets increasingly wealthier and more upscale, and these residents currently need to drive pretty far to find the stores to fill their upscale needs, and increasingly dealing with traffic in Bethesda and Downtown Silver Spring is NOT what they want.
But then, I also enjoy the international variety of the Shoppers, and never feel "at risk" visiting Staples or CVS (admittedly about the only stores I visit at the Glenmont Shopping Center) and would visit the Stained Glass pub more if Parking wasn't such a mess
by New Resident on Aug 16, 2010 9:47 pm
How do you know all are illegal why are you assuming that with no proof to actual numbers.
What about the legal immigrants and non immigrants who are poor and living there ?
If some college grads or other 20-30 year olds cant afford maybe they should go somewhere else such as the other thousands of cities throughout the country. If you can not find work and a residence that you can support you work here you can go somewhere else.
There is no need to be jealous if someone got there before you regardless of legal status you just have to deal with it.
I have lived in numerous states around the country if you cant find work in one city you should try somewhere else you have 50 states and 5 territories to pick from. The other option could be to move back in with your parents if they allow it , get a roommate etc until you can save money and be on your own in the city you want to stay in.
If younger populations have to move to Hagerstown maybe its time to move to another area of the country no is telling you to go to DC. There is no one to blame but themselves they move somewhere fully knowing the situation either accept it or go somewhere else.
Another reason could be is that the college grad took up a major which is not viable in the area or this decade some college grads can get good jobs right out of college depending on your major.
Some will not take jobs with low pay I have seen it; sometimes you might just have to take a minimum wage job to get through for a while or take a job such as a garbageman.
I have seen many people refuse jobs which they consider demeaning its better than being broke or having no job.
If some slumlords want to rent to immigrants so be it this has been going on since the 1820's. Some are willing to accept including people who are poor and have been here for generations if you choose to live like this so be it and if you are forced it is another story.
by kk on Aug 16, 2010 9:48 pm
You can definitely be poor and live in this area if you've got three or four families crammed into a single family home. I see it two houses away from my own home, and I saw it several times from inside the house when I was house hunting earlier this year.
A $73,000 household income doesn't shock me one bit when you add up all the people living in one house.
by Thrillhouse on Aug 16, 2010 9:52 pm
You don't seem to speak English very well, but that's not shock: most American-born college grads don't speak English well. Their phrasings are full of slang and most have little or no concept of the formal fallacies of rhetoric, which makes them effectively insane outside of the specialties in which most have been educated a bit beyond their native intelligence.
Then again, perhaps you are a formal rhetorician of sublime skill, who is merely testing me by launching a barrage of red herrings and comparable fallacious remarks. Be that as it may: I have not been educated beyond my intelligence; indeed, I am not well educated at all.
Therefor, although in the academic world this is entirely out of fashion -- the academic world having had its minds destroyed by posting replies at the top of their e-mail responses -- I shall Deconstruct your arguments from the Top Down.
You say: How do you know all are illegal why are you assuming that with no proof to actual numbers.
I do not claim that all are illegal, as to your first point. Secondly, such numbers are deliberately suppressed by the State of Maryland and County of Montgomery; only in the last year has the State been allowed, much less required, to collect citizenship status information even for a State ID or Driver Permit. This allows people such as yourself to make such an argument to data which cannot be discovered as a prelude to any other arguments, which in the absence of any data may be considered specious and unsupportable by any and all sides to any debate on the subject. Thus as there is no data do not make the argument, some would say, but I would say that suppression of data is the first lie behind which hides base tyranny: hide the truth to discredit the critic. I'll close by saying that when people tell you they are from Honduras and snuck into the country but were granted Temporary Protected Refugee status from the moment they entered the country and asked for it, I'll say of them that they are here under color of law, but had to sneak in to get it. I'll take them at their word, "self declaration". Most of the construction workers entered illegally but most now reside here under color of law as Temporary Protected Refugees.
You ask: What about the legal immigrants and non immigrants who are poor and living there ?
If their presence here is legal, then exactly as could any other person, they may have whatever they can afford.
You say: If some college grads or other 20-30 year olds cant afford maybe they should go somewhere else such as the other thousands of cities throughout the country. If you can not find work and a residence that you can support you work here you can go somewhere else.
The college grads can afford it, but for now those places are occupied, mostly by people in the final stages of foreclosure. And as you say, if those people in the final stages of foreclosure cannot afford to live here, they can go somewhere else. Once these places are vacated, they become available to the adult children of local persons. I endeavor to make that happen, as quickly as possible.
You say: There is no need to be jealous if someone got there before you regardless of legal status you just have to deal with it.
Actually, we DO NOT have to deal with it. It's the law. In these economic times, there's no excuse to allow an illegal worker to occupy a position which, BY LAW, is reserved for people who have legal right to work here, and have legal right to live here. Any politician who suggests otherwise must be aware that NOVEMBER IS COMING and despite the best efforts of certain elements to allow us no clear choice to elect leaders who will enforce this law, we won't elect anyone who failed to enforce it. That's all.
You do make valid observations about such options as returning home to reside with parents, and it is quite certain that this will be the pattern for the future. The era of colonialism upon a vacated land is now finished; we don't have any depopulated areas to settle. The economy of the US will now take on the character of post-Renaissance Europe or other dense populated countries such as China, Japan, or India. Increasing poverty will be normal, poverty will be greater as will the number of individuals living in poverty, and of families living in poverty. The rich will become richer and the poor will become poorer. Consolidation of resources and pooling of opportunities will become first normal, and then inescapable as options.
Now, all other arguments to be set aside: it's unfortunate if anyone will only see this as dividing into two camps, one of "immigrants" and one of "natives". Nativism is not a good thing, but neither is supporting invasion over the established citizens. Both lead inevitably to armed violence and widespread chaos. Economic crisis only intensifies probability of conflict. It's just logic, a harsh logic. See also a story by Tom Godwin called "the Cold Equations", about a lifeboat in space with a limited air-supply... and one too many passengers.
But I stray from my point: and here now is the point I want people to understand.
The health of a society may be indicated by the hopes, the potential, the realities of possibilities before them, of the youth of the society. Old people are not dead, but they won't be the people who make the society of tomorrow. The shapers of society will be the young workers who find a place and build the place, their own work, their career in their profession, and aid in the placement and relevance of their profession in this evolving world.
To allow any part of a city to be occupied by a youth of lower class which is by design intended to have no real "upward mobility", without mixing in other classes, it's not acceptable. It will create a culture of hopelessness, and that's un-American. America is to have the meaning and the inspiration of Hope. Therefor, let's have a mixture of young people, both those who live with their poor working-class parents in overcrowded poverty, and also those who have bright futures, if they can live close enough to good jobs to get those good jobs. Because, please comprehend this, if you have a good education and can't live close enough to take the job, your education is wasted; if you live right next to good jobs that require good education, but are uneducated, you don't qualify for that job. In both situations, the qualified worker is prevented from qualified work and the work requiring qualified workers can't get worthy employees. Everyone suffers because the jobs are one place and the workers for them are in another place. Why let the unqualified prevent the qualified from living near the jobs that need qualified workers?
"If your nation's capital is overrun with landscapers, and there is no room for qualified government and business leaders, either you must remove the landscapers to make room for qualified leaders, or move the nation's capital to a place not overrun with landscapers."
It's very simple logic. It's also irrefutable truth.
It's what will happen.
Fail to either remove the landscapers to enable leaders to live here, or to move the capital to a place not overrun with landscapers excluding leadership candidates, and that nation shall fall, leaderless, within one generation. It's absolutely inescapable. I defy anyone to refute me, either with pure rhetoric or logic, or with examples from history. Perhaps someone will be sure to declare that history shows that the invasion of the Goths was the sole preserver of the Roman Empire in the West.
They'd be the only person ever to do so, and possibly the only person silly enough to actually try.
by Thomas Hardman on Aug 16, 2010 11:42 pm
Not sure how this post about an underutilized shopping center turned into a back and forth about whether Glenmont is, or is not, a slum. It's not. Gotta love the comments section.
For those who've said that Glenmont is no White Flint - point taken. But, one of the things they DO have in common is that JBG invested in both. There is a reason that JBG bought Privacy World and spent money and time trying to build what they called "Glenmont Metro Center". (Their used to be a fancy website even.) And it wasn't altruism. And it certainly wasn't because JBG saw Glenmont as a slum.
by Dave in Wheaton on Aug 17, 2010 9:28 am
As is the notion that the US has no "depopulated areas" left. Anyone who thinks that must not get outside the East Coast very often.
by Phil on Aug 17, 2010 10:27 am
1) We are a nation of immigrants. Excepting a small but dwindling population of "Native Americans", a large number of which also have immigrant ancestors. My own family can be traced back to our founding colonies, and other parts got off the boat just two generations ago. I'm fine with you arguing against illegal immigrants, but you are simply scapegoating to blame everything you are seeing on "immigrants"
2) Even if you define "Natives" as residents who have lived in the neighborhood 10+ years, and immigrants as those living here less than 10 years, its joke that anyone is blaming the "slumming" of the neighborhood on the immigrants. I bought my house 3 years ago (so I'm an immigrant) from a guy who was running his electrical contracting business from his house. I can clearly see photos in Google maps of the collection of Trucks, etc, he had scattered around the property, and neighbors have told me of the toilets that used to decorate the yard. This isn't a lone example, in Alexandria the house I knew of that had a collection of "classic cars" sinking into the yard belonged to a family that had lived there for 60 years, when it was a distant outpost for pentagon workers. In one of the most upscale towns in South Jersey, beer bottles were left by the teenaged children of some of the wealthiest residents who were insulated from the repercussions of their actions by their indulgent parents (yes, it was the son sand daughters of the wealthy selling the drugs in high school and hosting alcohol fueled parties that destroyed houses, not the poor kids). Blaming neighborhood entropy on new residents, who have just invested a significant portion of their wealth to come here is foolish. Which brings us to...
3) "Natives" (as defined in 2), thanks to the housing boom, often can no longer afford their homes. A house they bought 30 years ago in now worth many times that (even in today's depressed market), and if they bought into the story told by too many people (TV, bankers, government policy, etc.) that their home was a giant credit card, they may be just as upside down as someone who bought in 2005, during the peak, and is now desperately trying to save their home by renting rooms to anyone who can pay a few dollars. Or they decided to "upgrade" during the boom, and broke their old 3 bedroom into 7 or 8 bedrooms to maximize their income, no longer worried about the impact on the neighborhood they no longer live in.
4) As for your "Point"
The health of a society may be indicated by the hopes, the potential, the realities of possibilities before them, of the youth of the society.
Yes.
To allow any part of a city to be occupied by a youth of lower class which is by design intended to have no real "upward mobility",
No.
American is defined by opportunity, we celebrate the "rags to riches" story. Nobody cares that Paris Hilton will survive being cut off by grandpa thanks to her TV deals, handbag line, etc. But we're surrounded by tales of janitors that now own large cleaning companies, dishwashers that are now celebrated chefs, etc. Read Tom Monahan, founder of Domino's Pizza autobiography, who grew up in an orphanage to become one of the nations richest men. Your tale of landscapers devoid of leaders is foolish, in the absence of leadership a leader will rise from the landscapers; we don't have a caste society that would prevent such a leap; that is the strength of our society. History is full of leaders rising from "the people". Our VP, Joe Biden leaps to mind.
by New Resident on Aug 17, 2010 10:33 am
Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the winner of the "2010 Oswald Bates Prize for Elocutionism".
Congratulations to all who participated!
by oboe on Aug 17, 2010 10:39 am
First of all English that is spoken in the Americas, Africa, India or Oceania is all slang.
Do you speak the Queens English yes or no; if your response is no than you are speaking slang which was developed hundreds of years ago and has become a new dialect.
I take it that your not American.
by kk on Aug 17, 2010 11:11 am
by Phil on Aug 17, 2010 11:23 am
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
Maybe Glenmont wasn't a stop for Allen Ginsberg but there's no doubt it (or someplace like it) was for Douglas Coupland.
by Bianchi on Aug 17, 2010 11:37 am
Wow - quite a screed. So illegal landscapers will lead to the fall of this great Nation and no one can refute that. Got it.
I did not say that.
You, however, appear to have provided by first direct example of how people who either do not understand -- or who think it's acceptable to use -- fallacious rhetoric are the bane of modern polity.
I did say that if the future leadership of this great Nation can't get a place to stay near enough to the specific jobs that need specifically them, then we'll be suffering a leadership vacuum.
The ones getting foreclosed out of those exact residences are largely landscapers/construction workers from abroad, and as they are getting foreclosed upon and won't thus be a problem, your summary is -- like your logic -- defective.
by Thomas Hardman on Aug 17, 2010 6:39 pm
New Resident wrote:
2) Even if you define "Natives" as residents who have lived in the neighborhood 10+ years, and immigrants as those living here less than 10 years, its joke that anyone is blaming the "slumming" of the neighborhood on the immigrants. I bought my house 3 years ago (so I'm an immigrant) from a guy who was running his electrical contracting business from his house. I can clearly see photos in Google maps of the collection of Trucks, etc, he had scattered around the property, and neighbors have told me of the toilets that used to decorate the yard. This isn't a lone example, [...]
Then you are part of the solution, quite the opposite to the problem. You are exactly representative of the sort of person we'd like to see taking up residence in the foreclosed former "problem" properties.
Please invite all of your friends to move into comparable properties nearby!
And thanks for your attention to logic and detail. You clearly have not been educated above your intelligence.
So, who's better qualified to fill that mid-level program manager job with the Bethesda Naval Medical Center, you or the guy woh lived there before you with the yard full of used toilets? May we consider my case rested, as to this issue?
Now, as to your point (3), people who used their home equity as a giant ATM, we, I have to admit we're unusual. As a frugal old-school German-American, my mother paid off our house as of 1977 and promptly plowed most of her savings into a large cash downpayment on a townhome in Gaithersburg which she rents to government workers. It has paid for itself and for a lot of things, but with income, not with "leveraged" borrowing. However, we may be extremely unusual as well as extremely traditional. Many of my neighbors did exactly as you said. They tended to be the ones selling out to slumlord speculators and "flippers".
Oboe wrote:
[Quoting of me, snipped] Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the winner of the "2010 Oswald Bates Prize for Elocutionism".
Congratulations to all who participated!
Nice and utterly content-free failure to rebut!
I did say something about "educated beyond their intelligence" and "effectively insane", right?
Thanks for providing proof.
@kk:
kk wrote: First of all English that is spoken in the Americas, Africa, India or Oceania is all slang.
Do you speak the Queens English yes or no; if your response is no than you are speaking slang which was developed hundreds of years ago and has become a new dialect.
I take it that your not American.
I speak several varieties of English, one of which is Network Television Standard, the so-called "boarding school English" quite comprehensible to anyone from the UK who didn't grow up speaking Gaelic or Cockney rhyming slang at home. I also am conversant in Southernisms of either Texan or Virginian provenance and quite a lot of my formative years were immersed in poor rural black culture. I'm working on picking up Bollywood Standard and Zouth Afrikan. ;)
Yet I mostly refuse to end my sentences with adverbs or with a dangled participle, rarely confuse "who" with "whom", and don't mistake "ought", "should", "will", and "shall", etc. I profoundly enjoy tormenting ESOL students by asking them which is more proper usage, "with whom was which witch" and "with which witch was whom". (Astute Readers should be tittering inanely at this point.)
Yet I like to have lots of respect for ESOL people who take it seriously, they find it rather confusing, in many cases, to find themselves speaking a Creole with the world's largest vocabulary and effectively no case or declension. But for what it's worth, my grandparents spoke German at home in Kansas, in the early 1900s. And not only did they have no sense of humor, they also had no slang, and when they learned English, they wanted to be respected for learning it completely and well.
So, if you're trying really hard to learn a very weird language, thank you, some day you may speak it well. If on the other hand, you are someone who was born here who can't be bothered to learn American Standard English, go back to trying rather than claiming that because other people can't speak it well, that you should not try.
Hmm, I seem to be getting far too conciliatory in tone here. Must drink more beer.
by Thomas Hardman on Aug 17, 2010 7:09 pm
I should point out that smart people such as Cavan could point out -- not that I wish to put words in his mouth or in anyone else's mouth -- that this is one of the few good reasons, in the present economy, for building high-density mixed-use transit-centric development units... so that the Emerging Leadership of Young Professionals can have housing close to work (and shopping etc).
Yet, since he hasn't said it in this context (or maybe I missed it), I could say that this is totally correct... but such new development is once again likely to exclude that class of people who have graduated college but haven't yet got a job paying enough for them to afford new Yuppie Convenience Towers residences. So where are they to live?
Did I mention "affordable Glenmont"?
Just like certain parts of the District, if you don't mind needing steel security grates on your doors and windows, it's a hip and happenin' scene for those who can stand a little grittiness with their k3w1ness.
And most of the Really Cool places in today's DC looked just about exactly like Glenmont 15 years ago.
by Thomas Hardman on Aug 17, 2010 7:17 pm
By the way, let me throw another example of the illegal alien menace into the mix: hipsters hate Columbia Heights and would never live or visit there. Way too many brown people in tenement housing.
Um, I was one of those hipsters. Lived at 15th and Belmont NW in the early 1990s. In later years, I and my fellow hipsters spent a lot of time shopping all up and down up around Park Road and 14th Street NW.
Yet I can't help noting Phil making an outrageous racist remark in which he links "brown people" to "illegal aliens".
In any case, rhetorical dissociation and racism aside., Phil misses the point. Hipsters will live wherever they can, and wherever they can afford it, regardless of the ethnic or national origins or immigration status of their neighbors. No, the point Phil attempts to paper over here is this: if no housing is available to hipsters, because it's all taken by illegally-overcrowded sublets and no rental space can be found or made available, that's where no hipsters will be moving... until someone else moves out and space become available.
Phil, why not stop being a closet racist and go track down some Canadian illegals, eh?
by Thomas Hardman on Aug 17, 2010 7:31 pm
by Cavan on Aug 17, 2010 10:04 pm
Well, you are smart. Further, you're dedicated and don't just spend the time to maintain and expand the knowledge-base of your site, but you also put up with a lot of direct critique and contradiction, not to mention a lot of trolling from persons best left un-named who I frequently see in my shaving mirror.
But of course I must qualify my remarks by suggesting that if you were to take an editorial line a bit more along the lines of the Washington Post reporter V Dion Haynes, I might think of you less as a cheerleader for the Urban Planning community.
Look, we all do "thought experiments", along the lines of "what if Wheaton actually had a genuine renaissance". Science fiction is a good vehicle for exploring possible futures, but it's good to remember that writing stories about ridiculous things (as of the time of writing) such as internet-connected cellphones each with a computing capacity approximately 20 times that of global computing capabilities at the time the USA landed men on the moon. Totally ridiculous stuff; but it could happen... just not exactly the way you or I or anyone might envision it. Yet seek the vision and express it! You might actually get a revisioning of grid alignments through downtown Wheaton, or for that matter, sleek Yuppie Convenience Towers of transit-centric mixed-use high-density development could yet rise over Beautiful Downtown Glenmont.
Yet other questions abound: How will this be powered? Where will we get the water just for sanitary needs, much less for drinking and "off plan" uses? More to the point yet outside the scope of articles such as this one, where will we grow the food for the residents, and how can we power delivery to the consumers? What economics may be in place to justify delivery of that food to those people by such means... considering that by 2040 or so when such places are built and occupied, we could be living in a world with as many as 12 billion people all trying to live at the same levels of consumption as modern Americans. Urban Planning depends on all other aspects of Futurism. You might want to follow that link and read some of the footnoted sources. The science about fishery and water resources are particularly worrisome.
Such worrisome science leads to thinking which is very cautious. If we wish to see Growth as inevitable -- and I would say that it's not -- under which modes can we make it more desirable than otherwise? -meaning, shall we grow for the sake of Growth, or shall it happen because it generates profits (and for whom, and is that desirable?), shall we Grow because it's best to bow to the inevitable rather than taking up tools to make the "inevitable" to be the "controllable"? It's easy to drink the kool-aid, to succumb to pollyanism, to see only the glorious vistas which could or may lie in the future... if everything always only ever goes right, and outside influences don't throw monkey wrenches into the best laid plans.
Bold visions are great: keep pumping them out please, we need good ideas about things we might like.
But please, in the same way most of us type with the spellchecker activated, keep the realitychecker activated. Posting drawbacks and stumbling-blocks along with the positive press, that would be good.
And it will only ever make you look better informed and as more of a genuinely thoughtful person who considers bad as well as good.
My best advice to you and such as you, before I can type no more until I learn to live with 100-percent cataracts, is to get and read as much as you can of Gibbons's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire", or at least the first 5 major chapters. He remains the best known formal stylist in the English language and is the standard to which all must rightly aspire. I also recommend study of the Formal Fallacies of Rhetoric as it formalizes the instinctual tendency towards logic and rationality, providing an established framework along which natural intelligence can easily glide without having to re-invent the wheel at every step. Additionally you might find Jared Diamond's (admittedly difficult) "Collapse" to be useful, and any readings in recent Peter Heather might provide additional food for thought.
Regards, and peace out,
by Thomas Hardman on Aug 17, 2010 10:43 pm
by William on Aug 25, 2010 6:24 pm
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