Category: Housing
-
Unaffordable Housing, Redux
by Joe Fitzgerald Proposed housing construction in the city of Harrisonburg could add about 1,200 students to the Harrisonburg City Public Schools, with housing already under construction in Rockingham County possibly adding 400 more. A quarter of the 1,600 potential students could be absorbed by the opening of Rocktown High School, leaving the city to…
-
Virginia Very Low Income Housing Voucher Waiting Lists are Closed
by James C. Sherlock Some things don’t change that should. Or don’t change fast enough to keep up with markets. Which means they will fail. From Virginia Housing’s discussion of the Housing Choice Voucher Program The Housing Choice Voucher Program is the federal government’s major program for assisting very low-income families, low-income families, the elderly,…
-
Crime in Virginia — the Statistics of Race and their Causes
—
by
in Children and Families, Civil Rights, Individual Liberties, Corruption and Scandals, Crime, Corrections, Law Enforcement, Culture wars, Democracy and Western Civilization, Demographics, Education (K-12), Efficiency in Government, General Assembly, Governance, Government Finance, Health Care, Housing, Land use & Development, Mental illness and substance abuse, Politics, Public safety & health, Race and Race Relations, Regulations, Gov’t Oversightby James C. Sherlock Crime, especially violent crime, is a constant topic in private conversations and in public politics, and thus here on Bacon’s Rebellion. Comments on BR crime-related articles turn quickly to race, often without basis in fact. I will offer below the actual crime statistics by race from 2021, the latest available year,…
-
RVA 5×5: Incentivizing Derelicts
by Jon Baliles Housing has become a vital issue all across our region; it is a pressing need, but not simple to resolve. It will be with us for some time to come and we have to seek out a multi-prong strategy to address it. But there are some steps that can be taken to…
-
Public Hearing, Private Decision
by Joe Fitzgerald The Bluestone Town Center (BTC), according to council members who voted 3-2 to approve it, was decided in secret meetings between those council members and the applicants. At Tuesday’s open meeting in which they voted to approve BTC, those council members rather shamelessly admitted to those sessions. City staff and the city…
-
362 is more than 273
by Joe Fitzgerald Take our word but not our numbers, Bluestone Town Center (BTC) backers seem to say The moral of this story is: what the City Council doesn’t know won’t hurt the HRHA. When I first heard about the scope of the BTC, I did some quick arithmetic and came up with an astronomical…
-
Something Is in the Water
by Joe Fitzgerald Those aren’t wood chips or bark in the cow pasture. David Foster Wallace tells the story of two young fish swimming along when an older, wiser fish swims past and asks, “How’s the water?” One of the young fish looks at the other and asks, “What’s water?” Absurdity is the water that…
-
Affordable Housing For Some
by Dick Hall-Sizemore In the discussion over the shortage of “affordable” housing, one could point to one company that could be considered the cause of the disappearance of a lot of the affordable housing stock in the Richmond area: Gumenick Properties. The company has redeveloped an 80-acre tract it owned near Broad St. on the…
-
Drink Their Coffee, Then the Kool-Aid
by Joe Fitzgerald The only thing I remember from Howard Fast’s Lavette family saga is from the fourth book, The Legacy. A pragmatic leftist organizer is registering Black voters in Mississippi with two dewy-eyed liberals, and an older couple invites the three into their home. They drink coffee and the two liberals talk about the…
-
The Box and the Snowball
by Joe Fitzgerald There’s a box, and there’s a snowball. The box is the support of the Bluestone Town Center. It is a well-constructed but beautifully decorated box, built on strong buzzwords. Affordable Housing, and Climate Change, and Dense Development are the shiny wrapping on this gift. The snowball of opposition rolling toward City Hall…
-
Virginia Democrats’ Rent Control Bills Would Make Housing Scarcer
by Hans Bader In Virginia’s legislature, rent-control legislation has been introduced by five Democratic delegates and a Democratic state senator. Economists oppose rent control because it makes it more difficult for people to find decent housing in the long run. In a 1992 poll, 93% of those surveyed said rent control reduces the quantity and…
-
Richmond Cold Weather Shelter Finally Finalized
by Jon Baliles The inability of the City to open warm weather shelters for the homeless during the big freeze on Christmas weekend was enough to draw the ire of most of City Council and many others. The recent thawing of temperatures has made it less of a pressing issue, but the cold is coming…
-
Thawing the Brain Freeze at City Hall
by Jon Baliles We can be thankful for a weather warm-up this week after last week’s bitter cold. Maybe it will help thaw the brain freeze at City Hall and enable them to fix the shelter situation before the next bitter cold arrives (hint, it’s coming back). Last week, after Tyler Lane at CBS6 filed…
-
RVA 5×5 – New Year’s Nuggets
by Jon Baliles Left In The Cold The Richmond Free Press Editorial Page ends the year batting 1.000 and goes two for two this week. The main editorial covers the disgraceful lack of attention, urgency and concern by the mayor and the administration for those in need of shelter during last week’s arctic blast. It…
-
RVA 5×5 – Holiday Briefing
by Jon Baliles It’s Friday! Which means this newsletter would normally be filled with stories and analysis about what is happening in the RVA region (not all of it good), with an honest and insightful take (so far as that is possible). For instance, this week we could have stories about: A non-profit that presented…