Category: Economic development
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This Is What a Fiscal Meltdown Looks Like, III: Eating the Seed Corn
Poor Petersburg. Financial consultants are advising City Council to save $300,000 this year and $400,000 next year by shutting down three museums and two tourism centers as part of a draconian plan to slash a projected $12 million budget deficit and work down a $19 million backlog in unpaid bills. (Read the details in the Richmond…
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In Hampton Roads, Life Is Not a Gas
Hampton Roads and other Tidewater communities see proposed natural gas pipelines in Virginia as a boon to economic development. by James A. Bacon While debate rages in western Virginia over the economic impact of natural gas pipelines on property values and local economies, we hardly hear a peep from the low country areas of Virginia and North…
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Heart of Appalachia
If you want to see how the communities of far Southwest Virginia are trying to reinvent their economies as their mainstay coal industry swirls down the drain, check out the website produced by the Heart of Appalachian Tourism Authority. The two-person authority is promoting regional music, culture, crafts and, most of all, outdoor activities like…
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Rocky Mountain High Real Estate Values
by James A. Bacon According to a 2011 Wall Street Journal article, Aspen, Colo., could boast of having the most expensive real estate in the country. I don’t know if that’s still true, but I wouldn’t be surprised. As I sit here blogging at Ink! Coffee, looking upon a patio filled with Pellegrino umbrellas and…
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In Praise of Carytown
by James A. Bacon One of the Bacon family’s favorite places to go in Richmond is Carytown, an eight-block retail strip embedded in Richmond’s Museum District. Some of our favorite restaurants are there — Can Can Brasserie if we’re in the mood for French, Amici’s if for Italian, Cappola’s if for subs. For soon-to-be empty nesters like…
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Questions about Bidding War for FBI HQ
There’s a bidding war between Virginia and Maryland to snag a planned, 2.1 million-square-foot Federal Bureau of Investigation headquarters campus. Maryland Governor Larry Hogan is in for $317 million in state and local funds, according to the Washington Business Journal. Governor Terry McAuliffe is in for $120 million. In both cases most of the money would…
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Bikes, Bees, Beauty
by James A. Bacon New York City has its High Line park built upon an abandoned, elevated freight rail line. The City of Richmond has its Low Line park, built underneath CSX Corp. railroad trestles. In the seven years since opening to great fanfare, Manhattan’s High Line has attracted millions of visitors and inspired the construction of nearly…
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A Once-in-a-Century Opportunity to Get Transportation Right
by James A. Bacon Take the Uber revolution of summoning rides with a smart phone. Then add driverless cars, which eliminate the expense of paying someone to drive the car. Then overlay the emerging business model of Transportation As a Service, in which people pay for rides when they need them rather than buy cars that…
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Amazon-Dominion Renewable Energy Deal a “Game Changer”
An energy-services deal between Dominion Virginia Power (DVP) and Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a “first-of-its-kind agreement” that could accelerate the integration of renewable energy into the electric grid, according to a recent analysis by the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), an organization dedicated to unlocking market-based solutions to combat climate change. “This is a turning point in the…
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Who Should Pay for Haymarket Transmission Project, Amazon or Ratepayers?
by James A. Bacon Dominion Virginia Power wants to upgrade its electric grid to serve a new data center campus in the Haymarket area of Prince William County. Residents are up in arms about the potential loss to property values, and the cost of the project could range between $51 million for the least expensive alternative…
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New Gas-Fired Power Station Brings Hope to Brunswick County
by James A. Bacon To Joan Moore, executive director of the Brunswick County Industrial Development Authority (IDA), the opening of the $1.2 billion Brunswick County Power Station means more than the thousand construction jobs that pumped money into the local economy for a year, more than the 40 permanent operating jobs, and even more than…
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Could Virginia Beach Become the Next Mecca for Data Centers?
by James A. Bacon Virginia Beach is finally getting its Tide — not the Tide light rail system, but MAREA, the Spanish word for tide, which happens to be the name of a transatlantic cable project recently announced by Facebook, Microsoft and Telefonica, the Spanish telecommunications giant, according to the Virginian-Pilot. The 4,000-mile cable will…
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Are Smaller Metros Becoming Competitive with Big Metros?
by James A. Bacon The flight of promising startup companies from smaller cities to big ones “is beginning to change,” AOL co-founder Steve Case said yesterday during an entrepreneurship event in downtown Richmond yesterday. Regions such as Richmond can avoid losing startups to bigger metros, he told the Richmond Times-Dispatch, “if you build up the…
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The New Map of Economic Growth
by James A. Bacon Not only has job creation and new business formation been weak in the current business cycle, it has been more concentrated geographically than in the past. Unfortunately for the Old Dominion, between 2010 and 2014 that concentration did not occur here. This analysis points to very different futures for American communities, suggesting…
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Virginia Manufacturing Output Up, Jobs Down
by James A. Bacon Manufacturing output in Virginia increased 3 percent between the 4th quarter of 2007 and the third quarter of 2015, yet manufacturing employment decreased more than 14% during the same period. Put another way, Virginia added $1 billion in manufacturing output, even after adjusting for inflation, but lost more than 40,000 manufacturing jobs,…