Myth that MCPS overcrowding was driven by old SFH neighborhoods shatters

The Montgomery County Council and Montgomery County Planning Board have been caught in three huge lies in the last few weeks alone. First, new plans to redevelop two public parking lots on the eastern border of Bethesda with Chevy Chase showed more housing development than the large, green parks promised when the Council and Board approved the Bethesda Downtown Plan. Second, their promise that "smart growth" and infill development would leave single-family homes untouched was exploded when Councilmember Hans Riemer proposed a Seattle-style mixed-use rezoning of all SFH neighborhoods, which would include accessory apartments, duplexes and quadplex boarding houses. Now their false claim that overcrowding in schools comes not from the massive new developments they have approved, but from old SFH housing stock, has been shattered.

The Washington Post recently reported that, in fact, townhomes have officially surpassed single-family homes in student generation. Meaning that, no, the large single-family homes in established neighborhoods are not driving overcrowding in Montgomery County Public Schools. This information was withheld from the public by the County until it was reported by the Post.

That fact joins my previous reporting that over half of Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School's student population comes from multi-family housing. Multi-family housing is the majority of all new development being approved.

I had already debunked the fantasy that existing single-family homes in areas like Bethesda were the source of overcrowding, when I noted that family sizes in Bethesda have shrunk, not increased. The Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination drama has now led to the Post confirming my own experience growing up Catholic in Bethesda.

As I've written in the past, I could point out all of the houses on streets in the neighborhood where I grew up where large Catholic (and sometimes even non-Catholic) families with 4, 5, 6 or even 10 children lived. Most of those families are now gone, and have been replaced with the typical "1.5 or 2.5 kids" of today's "don't have lots of kids anymore!" society.

Hence, there is no way there are as many kids in these neighborhoods as there were in the 1950s-1980s. There just aren't.

But don't take my word for it. The Post on Saturday referred to this cultural phenomenon in its coverage of the Kavanaugh confirmation. "Like Kavanaugh, [Mark] Judge grew up in a Catholic Washington that formed its own social world, centered in the big old houses of Chevy Chase, Bethesda and Potomac...The big houses were perfect for large Catholic families, and the lives of kids and parents revolved around a core set of institutions - parishes such as Our Lady of Mercy in Potomac and Blessed Sacrament in upper Northwest Washington, and the private Catholic high schools within easy reach, such as St. John's College, Georgetown Visitation, Stone Ridge and Georgetown Prep."

Not only have the Council and Planning Board failed to even address the existing overcrowding of schools, and haven't even provided for the capacity needed in the Westbard and Bethesda Downtown sector plans, they are now irresponsibly proposing an even more-massive MCPS population explosion with their Seattle-esque rezoning of all County residential areas as mixed-use.