Jim Bacon raises a lot of good points in his recent article “The Devolution Solution” but “devolution” is not a “solution” by any stretch.
It will be an important part of the “solution” only when there is Fundamental Change in governance structure. Any devolution (or assection) of power and responsibilty must go to a level of governance that matches the level of impact of its decisions, programs and actions.
Equally important, there must be enough levels of governance so that they match all the organic components of human settlement patterns.
Without this Fundamental Change, large municipal governments will continue to make the “beggar thy neighbor” decision that are making settlement patterns more dysfunctional.
These are decisions like the Occquan Life Style Five Acre Lot action in Fairfax that has had the same impact as the Montgomery County TDR program that we noted in our post “MORE ON TRANSFER OF PROPERTY RIGHTS” 10 Oct 2006.
We noted with interest that in the September 2006 New Urban News the practice of creating more than just homes associations is now back in vogue to protect the intent, uniqueness and quality of Traditional Neighborhood Developments. We did this in the 70s to provide the residents of Burke Centre (an Alpha Village scale agglomeration) and Franklin Farm (an Alpha Neighborhood scale agglomeration) against some of the unfortunate homogenizing impacts of the mega-municipality of Fairfax County which is a multi-Alpha Community scale agglomeration.
By the way if you think Jim has only recently started pointing out why we need Fundamental Change, I borrowed the phrase “beggar thy neighbor” from a cover story in Virginia Business
when Jim was editor / publisher. Too bad the current staff there only publish things that make the advertisers happy.
Back to “solutions.” The same problem exists with other “solutions” such as granting the power to create traffic special service districts on a jurisdictional basis rather than an area of impact basis.
There are no “solutions” to the Mobility and Access Crisis or the Affordable and Accessible Housing Crisis Fundamental Change in human settlement patterns and that requires Fundamental Change in governance structure.
EMR