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Part 2: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...-2004Aug8.html Title: "Washington's Road to Outward Growth" (We looked at some of the houses in Huntfield as a possible retirement location, but felt it was just stupid to live in the middle of a bunch of cow pastures in the middle of nowhere. Still, people live here for the affordability and commute to the DC region daily.)
Gist of the series is this: Fairfax County, VA (and Montgomery County in MD) deliberately issue more permits for office space for people to WORK in their county than they do permits for housing for people to LIVE in their county.
This imbalance of more jobs than housing increases the demand for housing (artificially-created housing shortage). Prices for the available in-county homes go up. Way up. As prices go up, so do assessments. Real estate taxes go up following increased assessments. You pay higher mortgages on higher-priced homes, you pay higher taxes on those homes, you pay more for homeowners insurance....
These practices impact the ability of young couples to live near where they work, so they move to counties further out, i.e., Prince William, Loudoun, Stafford, Fauqier, etc. (In MD, they go out to Frederick, Carroll, Howard, and Washington County, or WV or PA.)
Cost of building roads, schools for the kids of these young couples, and water & sewer lines falls more heavily on distant counties, so up go taxes in those counties.
With fewer young couples there are fewer new students. The other year was the first time in memory the Fairfax County school construction budget leveled off, the strategy is really taking hold - make thy neighbor pay.
Roads everywhere in the area are burdened with traffic trying to get from the more affordable outlying areas to the jobs in the business centers in Fairfax - creating the famous gridlock the area is so noted for having.
Police and fire resources are needed where people live. Eleven o'clock at night the Fairfax PD doesn't get domestic disturbance calls from empty ghost towns of office buildings, Fairfax FD gets fewer calls for kitchen or chimney fires. Police and Fire depts in the outlying counties get those calls and bear the costs of providing the emergency services, and court costs, and jail costs, and social service costs…..
Before moving to the DC area and it's nationally recognized traffic problems, understand the games going on and how it costs you a lot more. If possible, take your money and run. I did. See my post in Colorado forum, in a thread called "Why Choose Colorado Springs."
s/Mike
Last edited by Mike from back east; 11-03-2013 at 08:39 PM..
Here we are, seven years later, and some voters in Prince William County are lamenting the lack of focus on transportation problems in the upcoming VA elections. Story here.
So glad we left Chantilly in 2005; love it here in COLO SPGS, where we do NOT have serious traffic issues or outrageous housing prices.
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Here we are, seven years later, and some voters in Prince William County are lamenting the lack of focus on transportation problems in the upcoming VA elections. Story here.
So glad we left Chantilly in 2005; love it here in COLO SPGS, where we do NOT have serious traffic issues or outrageous housing prices.
Mike, haven't read the articles but know I agree with them. I've enjoyed reading your posts on the Colorado forums as our son took his family from this area and ran, at first to Colorado Springs. He paid less in rent for a single family four bedroom house there than he did in mortgages on an overpriced two bedroom condo here. It's beautiful out there. He's no longer in the Springs but up in Denver as they followed jobs and schooling up there but they still love it and would never think of moving back here. We will be eventually getting out of Dodge as we move now in retirement, maybe not that far, but hopefully far enough.
Here we are, seven years later, and some voters in Prince William County are lamenting the lack of focus on transportation problems in the upcoming VA elections. Story here.
So glad we left Chantilly in 2005; love it here in COLO SPGS, where we do NOT have serious traffic issues or outrageous housing prices.
Seven years later, and you're still thinking about this place?
Gotta agree that housing is expensive in northern VA. I'm happy for you that you liked moving to a less expensive area.
As for those articles, they were written a decade ago. How did things turn out? Can't speak for PW County since I've never lived there and don't know much about what goes on there. I lived in Loudoun until just a few months ago, and in Loudoun it's not quite the way the reporters predicted. Loudoun County benefited quite a bit from having Fairfax focus more on building commercial real estate than making the county a solid bedroom community. Building the tech corridor and having all that work space out in the western burbs shortened commutes for a lot of people. It became easier for people to live in Loudoun if they could work right in Loudoun or in Fairfax rather than having to commute to DC. Traffic is heavy, but would that have been any different if Fairfax had been built an all bedroom community? I don't think so, and I also know that some of those new roads made many commutes shorter. I know I spent significantly less time in traffic one Fairfax County Parkway was completed; before that I had to take a rather convoluted route.
Property tax for Loudoun in 2013 is $1.205 per $100. In 2004 it was $1.175. Is this a terrible tax hike? Not if you compare it with increases in other parts of the country. That's a reality of life in a recession--especially if you want to live in a county that maintains its service. And personally, I like that. Colorado Springs took a different approach, and now makes the news for having street lights turned off, roads & infrastructure in terrible shape, pools and rec facilities closed, unmowed medians, etc. due to budget cuts. To each his own. Some people like that, but I wouldn't want to live there. My personal property tax remained the same over the past ten years--I paid $0 (it's a perk you get for volunteering for the fire department, and by the way let me step off topic for a second to say if anyone is looking for a great way to get involved with a community, volunteering for the fire department is a good deal).
Speaking about the fire department, people assume having more residents stresses things like fire departments. In some ways, I suppose, but not as much as the article would have you think. IMO the more important thing is Loudoun now has a larger pool of volunteers (it's a volunteer operation, after all), and having more companies in the county means they have more companies donating. Corporate donations/development proffers pay a large chunk of those fire department expenses that the articles were so concerned about. And speaking about proffers, before assuming that roads require higher taxes, one of the advantages of living in a growing area is most of the roads and a good portion of other facilities including new schools are built by proffer.
Last edited by Caladium; 11-04-2013 at 02:14 AM..
Reason: LOL have to change "we" to "they" . Still talking as if I still lived there.
And speaking about proffers, before assuming that roads require higher taxes, one of the advantages of living in a growing area is most of the roads and a good portion of other facilities including new schools are built by proffer.
Unfortunately, though, when proffers are accepted during a boom time, and then a downturn happens, those facilities may not get built. We have large chunks of unfinished roadway (like Loudoun County Parkway through Loudoun Valley Estates and Brambleton to 606) because the proffers weren't triggered. Brambleton is in the middle of a complicated rezoning application and the active adult phase that would have triggered its part of LCP is being reworked. Moorefield Station Elementary School, which opened this fall, needed to be built to offload overcrowding from several other schools, but Moorefield Station itself isn't as far along as planned, so the county had to find the money to build Mooreview Parkway into the school site because it didn't exist yet. (Also, school proffers involve the land, not the buildings. The school board can opt not to use a land proffer and purchase a parcel instead.)
The only big example I can think of where the process was reversed is in One Loudoun. The original developer (Miller & Smith) provided the land and road infrastructure for Steuart W. Weller Elementary School years before anything else was built, then was foreclosed on and the project was on hold until a foreign investment company bought out the majority stake. So the school opened in 2008 and sat there in a field for a while, with a goofy boundary to populate it. Now, of course, One Loudoun has taken off, but Weller still has weird boundaries that involve a lot of Lansdowne, and it's still well under capacity.
Gotta love the return to NOVA forum to brag how much life is better concept.
1) If its so much better why would you want to let everyone know about it. Its like giving away a secret traffic skip route.
2) If its so much better why return to talk trash about NOVA? Go live your life in utopia
3) Each person enjoys certain things. As a home owner dating back to 2006 and before (me and my family) we are EXTREMELY happy we didnt leave this area prior to the housing collapse because if we had, and bought elsewhere in a speculative region which is very much indicative of Hot Springs, or Phoenix, or locations in Florida, we would likely have lost all of our savings in the devaluation of our homes. Instead my property still has retained its value, my family's has as well, we have all kept all of our jobs, we still have the best schools in the country, and crime is still a non-factor.
It's absolutely shocking to think that an area with over 8x as many people is going to have traffic and affordable housing issues that aren't present in Colorado Springs. Who would have thought?
Look, I'd probably move to Colorado Springs in a heart beat if I could take my current job with me. But, to compare Colorado Springs to an area like NoVA and the greater DC area really is like comparing apples and oranges - or, if you will, more like comparing a watermelon to a blueberry.
2) If its so much better why return to talk trash about NOVA? Go live your life in utopia
Could be just a coinky-dink, but Colorado Springs is a right wing stronghold. Have you noticed how many people in right wing strongholds seem to be upset about our election tomorrow? They've been calling non stop for the past several days, and the calls are coming not just from local people but also from all over the country. Wouldn't surprise me if reviving an old thread about some article written in 2004 is a related strategy. It's funny to see the phrase "games being played" in the title for this thread. Yeah, there's a game being played, all right.
Even if that's not the case, you do have to wonder why he's wasting time reviving old threads instead of spending time doing things in Colorado Springs. I know I certainly have more interesting things to do than wander over to the Colorado Springs forum and try to find an old thread to revive there. Maybe there's more things to do here?
Quote:
Originally Posted by tysonsengineer
Instead my property still has retained its value, my family's has as well, we have all kept all of our jobs, we still have the best schools in the country, and crime is still a non-factor.
You know, this is a good point. We retired in January and like many retirees, moved south. So we had the exciting adventure of putting our house on the market in October. Yup, government shutdown and all. It turned out a lot better than we would have predicted. Maybe we were lucky, but since we sold the house more quickly than we expected and for more than we thought we would, I'm interpreting our luck as meaning the house held it's value.
Last edited by Caladium; 11-04-2013 at 10:36 AM..
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