'Taxpayers left holding the bill'
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After years of a reckless pace of development pushed on us by speculative developers, the bill is coming due. Too many houses equals slower sales and declining property values. New houses also cost more in county services than they provide in tax revenue, and thanks to Virginia law, we the taxpayers are left holding most of the bill. Loudoun's experience brings back memories of Fairfax County in the 1970s and 80s -- rapid residential growth followed by related jumps in the tax rate.
Loudoun was the nation's fifth-fastest growing county between 2000 and 2007. The last Board of Supervisors alone approved 14,324 new houses. When added to earlier approvals, 27,000 houses are now in the pipeline to be built. While growth in the Washington region averaged 1.5 percent per year, Loudoun's annual growth rate has been around 8 percent. This has resulted in an increased demand for services, including the construction of 30 to 40 schools over the next 10 years.
Fortunately, Loudoun residents were largely successful in fighting over the last four years to prevent another 80,000 houses from being added to the existing pipeline of approved units. Voters also elected a bipartisan slate of supervisors committed to a more sustainable rate of growth.
Now our challenge is to work together as a county to address the growth that's already coming while meeting the needs of our existing communities. I hope you'll be part of the dialogue going forward.
Betsy Mayr is the treasurer of Voters for Loudoun's Future and a 26-year resident of Leesburg. VLF is a bipartisan political action committee, which supported smart growth candidates in the last election. VLF took no position on the budget or tax rate.
The term "speculative" is used improperly here. There was nothing speculative about the endless line of homebuyers waiting to sign contracts.
Most people don't understand what a developer has to pay in order to build a subdivision. Routinely, developers donate property for schools, churches, pay for road improvements, donate cash, enhance the surround area in someway. Often, the improvements, like a new traffic light for $250,000, gets placed elsewhere. That decision is the local government's, not the developer's.
Continuing to blame developers is just silly. As you walk town the street or drive through the choked streets of Loudoun County look to your left and look to your right and chances are you'll see someone who moved into the county in the last five years. Without the massive influx of new residents the developers would have had no reason to develop anything. It's called supply and demand. Developers didn't create the demand. Developers only provided the supply. The massive growth was coming anyway. The area in which we live and the the huge post 9/11 defense and security industry created the staggering growth of the county, not developers. We can't continue to blame the free market businesses for the continued, decades long failures of the state and local governments that squander every penny they get and are trying to catch up on 40 years of needed road improvements and other services.
To put it another way, if you owned a widget company and you went to work one day to discover a line of 14,000 people at your door wanting to buy a widget what would you do? You'd work very hard to sell everyone of those customers a widget. Why should builders and developers be any different?
If you live in a house or community built after the year 2000 you have only yourself and your neighbors to blame, not the developers. If you are an "old Loudoun" family you may think about moving one county over for 20 years then one more 20 years after that because our country's population is not getting any smaller and neither is the government.
Posted by SomeGuy
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