Maryland Nearly Mortgage Fraud Capital!

An interesting article in the Los Angeles Times (AP) tells us that "[r]eported incidents of mortgage fraud in the United States jumped 42% in the first quarter of 2008 from a year earlier" and that Florida had nearly one-quarter of all cases. California was in second place, and Maryland was in a 3-way tie with Illinois and Michigan.

Apparently, in the first quarter of the year, Maryland had an astonishing 69% of its cases involving tax return and financial disclosure misrepresentation.

I wonder what sort of results would come out if every last one of those particular fraudulent cases were examined for linkages to Identity Theft? And keep in mind, it wasn't until the second quarter that things started to get really grim in the subprime mortgage business. Can you say Ponzi Scheme Collapse? Of course you can.

In any case, we have recent information that Silver Spring's 20906 zipcode has the highest rate of foreclosures and pre-foreclosure actions of any part of Montgomery County, with 20853 ("east Rockville", including much of Aspen Hill and Maryvale) coming in close behind. Indeed, you'd have to go to certain parts of downtown Baltimore to find rates that were glaringly higher.

Small wonder that we've got homeless camps in the woods here (and the map pointer is placed with accuracy):




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More Retirement Communities, Please?

A plea for more retirement communities may seem a bit out of character to those who know me.

I'm better known for proposing revisions of housing code to allow for more and better "aging in place", including revisions which would both tighten and ease getting zoning exceptions for "accessory apartments" and "accessory buildings".

How would I ease the process? I'd make it effectively a "shall issue" process, provided certain conditions were met. And how would I tighten the process? I'd make those "certain conditions" include that accessory apartments and accessory buildings could be used to house only members of immediate family, and only for purposes of housing children, or housing elders.

Montgomery County has, in some neighborhoods such as Aspen Hill, suffered significantly as newcomers applied for permits for single-family homes on properties where already there stood a single-family home. This has led to doubling -- or more than doubling, in some cases -- of home sizes. Also, in many cases the occupants of the new space were members of extended families, in many cases with only the most tenuous degrees of relatedness, such as "second cousin twice removed of my daughter-in-law's sister-in-law". Yet by making any claim of relatedness whatsoever, the County code allows occupancy of over seven adults in a single-family detached residential domicile. This lack of definition of "relatedness" has allowed single-family detached houses in established neighborhoods to become worker barracks with paved yards on which are illegally parked the work fleets and incidental trailers full of equipment.

This is what MBAs might call a "horizontal" scheme of residential densification, though it is also illegally a conversion of exclusively single-family residential properties to multi-family mixed residential/light-industrial.

Many such schemes try -- after the fact and after long-term hounding by overworked code-enforcement authorities -- to legitimize themselves by applying for zoning exceptions as "accessory apartments" or "accessory buildings".

The zoning law should be clarified to prohibit such "horizontal" schemes, and instead should legitimize and speed "vertical" establishment of accessory residential zoning exceptions.

In this way, instead of having single-family homes occupied by one broad "family" all of working-age adults of about the same age, and all of their equipment as well, you would have single family homes which actually have only a single family in them. However, that single family might have separate domiciles all on the same property, with one residence for the parent generation, one residence for the child generation, and one residence for the grandchild generation.

Failure to adapt the County Code to allow for this will simply force the creation of even more retirement communities, rather than allowing people in the community to retire in the community.

An article from the Washington Post provides us with an analysis of population trends issued by the US Census.

Due to massive immigration, legal and otherwise, the population of the US is expected to increase from the present 302 millions to about 440 millions by the year 2050. By roughly 2040 "non-hispanic whites" will no longer be the majority. As the "hispanic" birth rate is very high among US-born citizens, and as the massive flows of immigration (legal or otherwise) from Spanish-speaking countries continues, by mid-century the population classified as "hispanic" is expected to at least triple. Non-hispanic "whites" will increase their population by less than 2 percent until about 2030 or 2040 and is expected to show significant declines in population after that time.

The vast majority of US citizens born during the so-called "Baby Boom" elected to reproduce at a rate which would have stabilized US population at about 290 millions around 2020 to 2030 or so, with significant population declines thereafter eventually stabilizing the population at around 150-200 millions, which is widely regarded as "sustainable" with renewable lifestyles and agricultural practices.

From the article:

Hispanics, including immigrants and their descendants as well as U.S.-born residents whose American roots stretch back generations, are expected to account for the most growth among minorities. That population is expected to nearly triple by 2050, growing from about one in six residents to one in three.

The black and Asian populations are each expected to increase about 60 percent, with the black share rising from 14 to 15 percent by 2050 and the Asian share jumping from 5 to 9 percent.

The number of people who identify themselves as being from two or more races is also expected to grow, more than tripling to 16.2 million, or 4 percent of the population.

By contrast, the non-Hispanic, single-race white population is expected to grow by less than 2 percent, reducing its share of the overall population from 66 to 46 percent. That group is projected to decline in the 2030s and 2040s, as more members die than are born in or move to the United States.

However, the 65-and-older population is expected to remain mostly white because of the number of whites born during the post-World War II baby boom. By 2030, all boomers will be 65 or older; by 2050, that age group will have more than doubled and will account for more than one in five residents, compared with one in eight today.

Similarly, the 85-and-older population is expected to more than triple, accounting for about 4 percent of U.S. residents in 2050, compared with fewer than 2 percent today.

The percentage of the population that is of working age will drop from 63 to 57 percent. As is the case with children, the working-age population is projected to become majority-minority before 2050. By mid-century, it is expected to be 30 percent Hispanic, 15 percent black and nearly 10 percent Asian.

With 1 in 5 people projected to be retired people, we need to either revise County code so that these folks can age in place, or we had better build an awful lot of retirement communities so that they can have someplace to live, or perhaps we could just drive them right out of the county.

Roads Should Come Before Development

The intersection of Cashell Road and Bowie Mill Road is the intersection of two small two-lane roads, with only a four-way stop sign to control traffic.

Yet there's an astonishing amount of traffic, even at 1:30 in the afternoon!

Here's why:



It's not just one McMansion, it's not just a small development of McMansions, it is



a couple of hundred McMansions, or McTownhomes, or McSprawl. Whatever you want to call this sort of thing,



there is about to be a lot more of it:



This is one of the last remaining stretches of undeveloped land to the southwest of Olney:



But it's not going to be undeveloped for much longer:



As you can see from the image above, MD Route 108 westbound towards Laytonsville is only two lanes wide. Built atop the roadbed of an extremely old farm-to-market road, and not significantly improved since about the 1960s (if that recently), it is still a very strong and high quality road suited for heavy traffic from tractor-trailers right up to large military vehicles.

As for the part of the development already completed, it -- along with the new development -- will have only four ways in and out, with two of them opening onto MD-108 and with two of them opening onto Bowie Mill Road. Bowie Mill Road itself ends at MD-108, if you are headed north. One of the exits from the community, at Cashell Road, offers a route almost directly south, but that is a two-lane road through an established community, and it will not easily be widened or improved. It has a 30 mile-per-hour speed limit along most of its length.

Like MD-108, Bowie Mill Road is also a rather old road which hasn't been significantly improved in about a half century.

One reasonably might presume that most of the residents work, and commute to those jobs, which one might reasonably presume are in Rockville, Gaithersburg, or points south such as Bethesda, Chevy Chase, or even Wheaton or the District of Columbia.

There is Ride-On bus service to the community, and I would imagine that those buses are packed at rush-hour. Yet how much Ride-On traffic can old Bowie Mill Road handle?

Bowie Mill Road is the only route out of this community which leads toward the I-270 Corridor, connecting with Muncaster Mill Road -- also very old and only two lanes -- and that road connects with Redland Road, also only two lanes wide and another old road.

If much more development is to occur here, very significant upgrades to existing roads will be necessary, unless you want to propose the currently unthinkable: a freeway spur into the community, running from the ICC up along the upper branch of Rock Creek Park.

The present County Council, in approving the long-planned Montrose Parkway East, might in fact be very likely to propose the unthinkable, and without any opposition, approve the proposal. This is why it's important to elect someone who will oppose the unthinkable.

As it is, by allowing all of this development, the Council and the planners are effectively forcing the issue.

By grossly overpopulating a hard-to-reach area, they create a captive audience who will scream for relief to the congestion. With all of the constant complaining -- that they themselves would have effectively created -- it will be easy for them to demand, and get, a freeway right up the length of the headwaters of Upper Rock Creek.

I will oppose overdevelopment of this area, and will oppose any freeway running up Rock Creek into Olney.

Live Where They Work for Our Civil Servants!

Looking at the RealtyTrac website, at This Page. it seems that there are 109 Bank Owned Properties right here near Aspen Hill, in the "East Rockville" zipcode 20853 which includes Aspen Hill.

Just a quick glance finds at least a dozen right here within the membership bounds of the Aspen Hill Civic Association, Inc.

That means that there are a dozen empty houses right here in Aspen Hill!

Aspen Hill has a crime problem. Also, about 50 percent of Montgomery County Department of Police's fine officers can't afford to live in Montgomery County.

Let's move those police officers' families into this dozen bank-owned homes. Problem Solved!

I'm good at that, solving problems, I mean.

"But," you ask, "how can we afford to do this when you yourself admit that we have to cut wasteful programs and be more efficient so that we can balance the County budget without raising taxes?"

Like I said, I am good at solving problems.

Simply stated, this will cost the county less than it costs the county to have police officers commute from Frederick, show up at work already tired from the commute, and be less than perfectly fresh and rested when they start their busy day.

Furthermore, abandoned or foreclosed empty properties attract squatters and breed crime. This is well and widely known as it's one of the "official causes" of Detroit's inner city neighborhood meltdowns.

Moving public servants into abandoned properties has been known to work locally, and government subsidy of exactly such process is credited with turning around parts of the District's formerly scary Petworth neighborhood.

Just the savings in "calls for service" or investigations of major crimes is widely believed to have covered the city's initial investment.

And in solving this particular problem in my unerringly elegant and intellectually rigorous way, I have solved another problem. Most of the Community Services budget could conceivably be drastically reduced, simply because there's no possible better Community Service officer than one that lives where they work, and is seen each and every day setting a fine example in the community they need to impress. Rather than having officers drive in from Frederick to deliver community-service messages for 8 hours a day in a place that's just another job site for a commuter, this will be their community. And rather than being some guy that drives in from out of town, the Citizen On Patrol will be a neighbor, someone you can depend on "24/7" unless they take a well-deserved vacation that they can finally afford because they aren't wasting all of their money on a two-hour commute to work among strangers.

Two problems solved in under a dozen paragraphs!

This is why a vote for me is a vote for safer streets: I won't just put more officers on patrol, I'll put more officers in houses in your neighborhood.