Author: James A. Bacon
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Lean Urbanism, Better Blocks
by James A. Bacon Andres Duany, a prime force behind the New Urbanism movement, dresses impeccably, exudes Old World sophistication and speaks eloquently in a restrained and understated manner. Jason Roberts, founder of The Better Block organization, wears dorky clothes, laughs like the goofy but affable guy next door and gesticulates excitedly when he speaks.…
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Can We Rename It the Washington-Norfolk Mega-Region?
Here’s another perspective on Richmond and Hampton Roads — as the southern anchors of the Washington-Boston mega-region. Home to 56.5 million people, the mega-region has an economy the size of Germany. Technically, in the taxonomy of economic geographer Richard Florida, the southern anchor of the Washington-Boston corridor is Washington. But, then, he did publish the…
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Redistributing the Wealth: College Tuition
by James A. Bacon In the on-going sparring between left and right over inequality in the United States, the left has succeeded in framing the debate by defining the issue as income inequality, as in income reported to the Internal Revenue Service. Conservatives have countered that IRS income does not include income generated through the…
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U.S. 460 Project Implodes: State Suspends Spending
by James A. Bacon Having spent $300 million on the U.S. 460 upgrade between Petersburg and Suffolk, the state is suspending contract and permit work on the project until a critical environmental review by the Army Corps of Engineers can be completed. Secretary of Transportation Aubrey Layne made the announcement yesterday. The Corps has given…
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Uh, oh, McAuliffe Might Help Fund Light Rail for the Beach
by James A. Bacon Governor Terry McAuliffe has committed to provide state support for a proposed $1.1 billion to $1.3 billion project to extend Norfolk’s light rail line, the Tide, to the Virginia Beach ocean front, according to Virginia Beach Mayor Will Sessoms. During his state of the city address, Sessoms claimed that the McAuliffe…
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More Data Points in the Income Inequality Debate
On the New Geography blog, Joel Kotkin has published an interesting list ranking the 50 largest U.S. metropolitan regions by the percentage of income derived from interest, dividends and rent. Inhabitants of metros that rank at the top of this list earn a higher percentage of their income from their investments than from salaries, wages…
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Who You Calling British, Boy?
In 2000 the U.S. Census Bureau published a popular map showing the distribution of the most common ancestry broken down by county (and in Virginia, by independent city). Hamilton Lombard over at the Weldon Cooper Center’s Stat Chat blog has updated the map using 2010 Census data with a new ancestry classification. The Census combined…
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Smart Growth: A Good Idea even without Climate Change
by James A. Bacon To a large degree, the Smart Growth movement in the United States has hitched its wagon to catastrophic human-caused climate change as the primary justification for building walkable, mixed-use, transit-friendly human settlement patterns. Off and on, I have warned that the emphasis on global warming could be a political mistake. If…
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If Income Inequality Makes You Unhappy, Virginia Is Not a Bad Place to Live
Jed Kolko, the chief economist at Trulia Inc., by way of the Atlantic Cities blog, has published another spin on income inequality in the United States. This data set measures inequality on a regional basis (as opposed to a “city” basis, as I blogged about Virginia Beach recently.) Among the United States’ 100 largest metropolitan regions,…
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Bacon Bits: Madison… Saslaw… Embrey Mill
About darn time.Writing in City Journal, Myron Magnet writes about the restoration of James Madison’s home, Montpelier. It may be the most unsung historical restoration of the 21st century. A team led by Kat Imhoff has peeled back the 19th-century shell added by DuPont family members to reveal Madison’s original building. Many of Madison’s original pieces,…
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Map of the Day: Virginia as Two-Headed Fish
Luke Juday has a new toy, software that allows him to draw a map of Virginia that distorts cities and counties according to the relative size of their population. It’s one more way to show the demographic dominance of the urban crescent from Northern Virginia to Hampton Roads. The map creates an interesting Rohrschach test.…
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America’s (and Virginia’s) Road-Maintenance Deficit
by James A. Bacon State transportation departments across the country are spending billions of dollars to build new roads and highways even as they fail to maintain the road networks they already have, according to a new report by Smart Growth America and Taxpayers for Common Sense. Between 2009 and 2011, the most recent years…
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Reinventing the Formal Garden
Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden is branching out to stream reclamation and indigenous plants.
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Chart of the Day: Quantitative Easing and the 1%
Back to one of my favorite themes… If you want to understand the increase in income inequality over the past few years, look no further than this chart (which I have taken from Zero Hedge). For those who don’t intuitively draw the obvious conclusions, let me spell it out for you. Quantitative easing (as reflected…
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Cars, User Fees and the Intransigence of Human Nature
by James A. Bacon Bern Grush has been promoting Mileage Based User Fees (MBUFs) as a mechanism for financing roads and highways since 2002 or so. The Toronto native was one of the earliest evangelists of the concept of charging trucks and cars by the mile to raise money to build and maintain roads. The…