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The day laborer situation in Oldetowne Gaithersburg has been dragging on now for several years. As documented in the citizen’s task force report and elsewhere, the day laborers have been congregating at the parking lot of 117 North Frederick Avenue with the support of City and County Police, as well as Grace United Methodist Church, Rev. David Rocha of Camino de Vida (a provisional congregation of Methodist Church) and the owners of the shopping center to which the parking lot belongs. It would appear that things are starting to come to head. From a Washington Times story on recent developments there,

This week, about 10 residents in the city’s historic district started a campaign to keep the laborers from gathering in the church lot. They have asked the landlords at a nearby shopping center to stop allowing the men to congregate and said they will begin a petition if the landlords do not cooperate.
The residents said they hope to have the issue resolved by Sept. 18, the one-year anniversary of the first public discussion on the matter by the city council.
[…]
The controversy began when residents in the historic district complained about some of the laborers waiting outside the church creating numerous problems, including drinking and urinating in their bushes.
Since then, nearly 30 property owners have blocked the city from renting space to open a site to help illegals find work. Earlier this month, residents and merchants rejected two other sites in the neighborhood, saying they were too close to schools, homes and businesses. They also said the sites would likely draw more laborers, which could decrease property values and increase crime.

OCR’d from the staff report,

The City has been seeking a resolution for more than a year to the informal gathering of day laborers in an unstructured, unsupervised setting. Initial efforts focused on finding a suitable site to establish a County-funded day laborer center. When the task force report was delivered in April, the Mayor and City Council directed staff to focus on identifying a site that met the spirit of the task force criteria. While site selection continues, no site has been identified for such a center and the prospects do not appear promising.

In the meantime, residents and businesses in the adjacent neighborhoods have expressed a clear desire for stricter adherence to the agreed upon time restrictions at 117 North Frederick Avenue and for greater enforcement of loitering, trespassing and other nuisance violations in the area generally.

Further, and possibly connected to the petition mentioned in the Washington Times story,

In the current situation, a private property owner has allowed workers to remain on the property until 9:30 a.m. The City has been notified that it is the intention of the private property owner to discontinue use of the parking lot as an informal gathering site in the coming weeks. If and when this occurs, the City will employ its banning authority at that site.

The banning authority allows the police to take photographs of people hanging around at the time they are given warnings; the photographs are later used to demonstrate that the person had been warned not to hang around on the property, so that they may be arrested.

Thus it appears that the City and the shopping center are at last going to take action to disperse the day laborers, even without any official place for them to go. They already have been spreading up MD 355; at times they can be found at the 7-11 and the Duron Paint store, although I believe that those properties don’t tolerate the large crowds that have been coming to the shopping center lot and Grace Church.

Obviously, the day labor advocates such as Rev. Rocha and Casa de Maryland are not going to be happy about this development, and we can probably expect some fireworks at the Council meeting tonight. But this is a private property that the laborers have chosen to use, and it would appear to me that there is little they can do to fight this change. I would think that if the advocates were, as they suggest, only interested in helping the workers, rather than, as I suspect, interested in advancing their own position as advocates, they would perhaps start looking for some other place to use for this activity. Perhaps if they started using public property — for example, the park and ride lot at the Diamond Avenue entrance to I-270 (under construction in that photo), there would not be a private property owner who could be influenced to withdraw support — the advocates could use all their powers of manipulation to stall the government from sending in the troops. Perhaps the State Highway Administration (the owner of that site) would decide that they’d rather set up porta-johns than having the laborers urinate on the asphalt — a calculation that no one involved in the current site has ever seen fit to make. If they’re good enough for highway construction crews, they ought to be good enough for the day laborers.

On the Council agenda tonight, there is an discussion item regarding a draft ordinance which calls for 120-day “deferral” of multifamily redevelopment in the City of Gaithersburg. OCR’d from the bit mapped PDF:

During the July 10, 2006 Mayor and City Council meeting, a majority of the Council Members directed staff to move forward with preparing a ordinance to implement a One Hundred and Twenty (120) day deferral on multi-family redevelopment.

The purpose of the deferral is to give the Mayor and City Council an opportunity to adopt an affordable housing ordinance and accompanying regulations prior to any redevelopment that would displace lower income residents. Additionally, the deferment period would provide the opportunity for the Mayor and City Council to review the permitted densities in existing residential zones that are ripe for redevelopment and determine if any changes are appropriate.

At issue here is that, with Gaithersburg development reaching saturation, there is increasing pressure to redevelop older properties in the City. While this would generally be considered a good thing, many people with lower and sometimes fixed incomes — especially those near or below the poverty line — are currently only able to find places to live in these older properties. In many cases, they have lived in their apartments for many years and are paying what are in effect below-market rents. When these properties get torn down, it is often difficult to find new places for them to live, as the replacement developments typically are much more expensive.

The City is now facing growing calls for the adoption of an affordable housing ordinance (which would require all new developments to include some affordable units), but many advocates are concerned that delays in the adoption of such an ordinance — the details are complex and subject to much debate — would lead to a sudden rush to get projects approved before the ordinance goes into effect. Thus, the call for a “deferral” — which had previously been referred to as a “moratorium” — on these projects until the affordable housing ordinance goes into effect.

My take on this is that this “deferral” ordinance is little more than a sideshow and a waste of time — they should instead be using this time to consider the details of the affordable housing ordinance itself. In fact, the way it is written with specific exceptions, it is more or less an affordable housing ordinance that merely requires the developer to go to the Council for an exception, which can be granted if there are compelling public interest or economic hardship issues, or if the developer agrees to meet a basic affordable unit standard. It isn’t clear that this is really going to provide much help for the people who are going to be most impacted by these redevelopment projects, and it isn’t clear to me that — should a large number of developments be approved under this temporary, hastily-considered deferral — it will ultimately be good for the communities where these new projects are being built.

I do have some concerns regarding any potential affordable housing ordinance that I may share in detail in a later post. But I will make a couple of points here:

• The incomes of people who are most at risk in these situations are frequently at or below the poverty line, or they have very uncertain economic futures, and thus MPDUs will be of very limited help to most of them. In many cases, one of the major reasons that their apartments are “affordable” is that they are in bad condition and are being maintained at a very minimal level if at all. Absent major subsidies, anything that replaces them — presuming that it will meet code and be maintained — will have to be “unaffordable” in order to be economically viable.
• Having waited this long to put such a policy in place, and then focusing the affordable housing requirements on the projects which directly replace the existing developments, will act to perpetuate the concentration of affordable housing in the older parts of town, and jeopardize the revitalization of these areas.

As I said, this is a highly complex issue which needs to be considered carefully. It would be a shame to put in place a temporary rule which could easily make matters worse in the long term. Luckily, the Council will not make a final decision on this item tonight; a public hearing on this matter is tentatively scheduled for September 18. I highly suggest that anyone with thoughts about this issue either come to the hearing or otherwise let the Council know your thoughts prior to that time. Most likely, they will “leave the record open” for some time after the hearing, but as far as I know they could decide to make a final decision at that time.

Just up the Pike has a post from a couple of days ago today about the affordable housing debate in Montgomery County.