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Numbers Game
Numbers GameAdd them all up, and the numbers are eye popping.
Somewhere between 600 and 1,000 new homes in Mintbrook. Another few hundred at Marsh Run. Six hundred more a few miles up Route 28 in Catlett, and now a request for 200-plus new dwellings in Marshall.
Enough home, in other words, for, oh, 10,000 to 12,000 new Fauquier County residents.
Meanwhile, 300 homes sit vacant, owned by the various banks which made poor loans or unpayable loans or no-questions-asked loans. Another several hundred homes are on the market from their private owners.
And the reassessment of real estate continues, with home values down 20 to 30 percent.
Taken together, it is apparent that hope springs eternal in the home-building industry.
With these far-reaching plans, contractors, we are told, are merely gearing up for the return of happier days, getting projects moving along in Fauquier's notoriously slow pipeline so that they will be ready to go at a moment's notice when the good times — and, theoretically, a huge pent-up demand — return.
Homeowners whose financial credentials didn't measure up to their mortgage demands were the first to feel the effects of the Great Recession. It didn't take long for increasing numbers of vacant houses to wreak havoc on home builders. They've been hurting for a long time, and are no doubt eager to get back to work.
We're not nearly as worried about the number of homes being plotted — they certainly won't all be approved — as we are anxious about what kind of homes they are going to be; McMansions, or something more affordable, people-friendly and environmentally sound?
Builders are free, we suppose, to design and build anything their hearts desire, or at least they have been heretofore.
Since the Great Recession, however, it should be clear to the powers that be in county government that it is increasingly appropriate for them to take a decidedly greater leadership role in deciding what kinds of homes should be built.
Fauquier, some critics say, is an exclusionary lawsuit waiting to happen. That suit might finally get filed if the plans in the pipeline are for nothing but 4,000-square-foot palaces with five bedrooms and three and a half baths.
If the Great Recession hasn't taught builders anything — and it remains to be seen whether it has — it opened bankers' eyes. They are unlikely, anytime soon, to be giving home mortgages to people who can't afford them, and in order to afford a palace you have to have a pretty princely pay packet.
Hoi polloi need not apply.
It is not hard to argue that, by and large, boards of supervisors shouldn't be telling free-market entrepreneurs how to operate. The argument loses a little steam if unfettered free-market entrepreneurs end up putting the county at legal risk.
In the end, deciding what role, if any, local leaders have in this situation is akin to the philosophical debate that the administration in Washington is having: Given the depth and breadth of the Great Recession, do we keep the system that brought us to such despair, or do we start searching for ways to make the system better?
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