Author: James A. Bacon
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Virginia State/Local Tax Take: 30th in Country
One parting shot before the Bacon family departs on spring vacation to a destination very relevant to the smart growth… The Tax Foundation has published its updated ranking of states where state and local taxes took the greatest share of state income in 2011. No surprise, New York ranked at the top with a grab…
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The Political Economy of Sprawl
by James A. Bacon I spend a lot of time agonizing over questions that nobody else does. That’s largely because I’m one of the world’s few conservatives who supports the broader vision of the Smart Growth movement.* I have articulated a vision of Smart Growth that is based upon the principles of fiscal conservatism, limited…
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Blaming the Innocent and Exonerating the Guilty
by James A. Bacon In the previous post, PeterG questioned the priority of “Richmond’s elite” of building a new baseball stadium for the Flying Squirrels over patching the city’s scandalously decrepit public schools. I share his skepticism that what the city really needs right now is a new stadium. However, I disagree with a core…
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Bacon Bits: More Random Notes from a Fevered Mind
From beast to beauty. I have issues with Virginia Commonwealth University’s exploitation of its student population but I will say this: The university has done wonders for downtown Richmond. The latest case-in-point is the restoration of the old Broad Street trolley station from its hideous previous incarnation as the Richmond Glass Shop into space for…
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Can Virginia Reverse the Stroadification of Rt. 1?
by James A. Bacon People living along the U.S. Route 1 corridor in Northern Virginia seemingly desire contradictory things. They want better pedestrian and bicycle safety, they want mass transit. … and they want automobile traffic to flow faster. Alas, designing the corridor to move automobiles faster makes roads less safe, and it discourages the…
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More Virginia Families Choosing Cities, City Schools
by James A. Bacon It has been the traditional pattern in Virginia, as elsewhere, for young people to move to core urban areas to live as singles and then migrate to the quieter, safer burbs with better schools when they marry and have children. That dynamic still is working but it is weaker than before.…
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VCU Meets Supply-and-Demand
Surely Virginia Commonwealth University has an economics department. Surely, there is someone at the state’s largest institution of higher learning who is conversant with the law of supply and demand. But, then, maybe not… The VCU Board of Visitors will be asked to increase tuition 3.5% next academic year and pay a new $50 library charge,…
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Tech Insurrection
Smart cities, says Anthony Townsend, will be forged by geeks, activists and civic hackers through bottom-up technological innovation.
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Columbia Pike Streetcars: Delving Deeper into the Value-Capture Scenario
by James A. Bacon Last week, I made the case that the best way to finance construction of the proposed Columbia Pike street car line in Arlington was to set up an improvement district along the route and impose a real estate tax surcharge on property owners to pay off the bonds. (See “A Second…
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Income Inequality and Party Representation
by James A. Bacon As a follow-up to my previous post, yes, honest liberals do exist. One of them is Michael Zuckerman writing in Atlantic Cities, who squarely confronts the reality that Democratic congressional districts experience far more income inequality overall than Republican congressional districts. He compiled the chart above which shows the Gini coefficient,…
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What Happened? Did All the Racists Move North?
by James A. Bacon NewYork state has the most segregated schools in the country, according to a new report published by the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, “New York State’s Extreme School Segregation.” Other states with highly segregated schools include Illinois, Michigan and California. “In the 30 years I have been researching schools, New…
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How North Carolina Halted a Bridge Boondoggle
by James A. Bacon Many Virginians know the agony of driving to vacation in the Outer Banks at the peak of the summer season. Heading south between Chesapeake and Kitty Hawk, you follow four-lane roads jammed with as many as 50,000 cars on Saturdays. Then, if you’re staying in Duck, Whalehead or Corolla, you have…
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Sprawl’s Hidden Subsidies
The answer to sprawl isn’t more regulation, says Pamela Blais, it’s fixing the endemic biases embedded in taxes, utility fees, municipal services and mortgages.
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Measuring Sprawl
by James A. Bacon The Charlottesville region is the least afflicted by “sprawl” of any metropolitan statistical area in Virginia over 200,000 in population, according to data in a new report, “Measuring Sprawl 2014,” published by Smart Growth America and the Metropolitan Research Center at the University of Utah. Charlottesville’s composite score ranked it the…
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A Second Opinion on the Columbia Pike Streetcar
by James A. Bacon This is exactly what we need in the debate over Arlington’s proposed $284 million streetcar system for Columbia Pike: close scrutiny from local citizens. Arlingtonians for Sensible Transit (AST) has issued a paper listing 15 reasons why the streetcar would be a waste of taxpayers’ money. “The consultant has collected its $100,000…