Tag: smart growth
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Beyond COVID-19: New Opportunities in Land Use
by James A. Bacon The stay-at-home orders prompted by the COVID-19 epidemic accelerated a trend that was already reshaping the American economy: the shift of commerce from bricks-and-mortar retail to online delivery. Traditional retailers are retrenching; malls and shopping centers are hollowing out. If current trends continue, we’ll be seeing a lot more UPS and…
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Want More Affordable Housing? Build More Luxury Apartments.
by James A. Bacon Planners in the Washington metropolitan area are worried, as they well should be, that continued population growth coupled with housing shortages could turn the region into another unaffordable hellhole like San Francisco or Los Angeles where legions of homeless people are taking over the public spaces and making life miserable for…
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More Land Use Tricks: Coconut Grove Edition
My wife and I have reached that stage in life where we’re too old to go sky diving, parasailing, rock-climbing or otherwise risking our lives, but we’re too young to spend all day sitting and watching the world go by. So when we travel, we like to walk and observe. We’re in Coconut Grove right…
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Needed: The Right Parking Policies for a Growing Richmond
by Stewart Schwartz Editor’s Note: The City of Richmond has launched a parking study focused on seven distinct areas of the city and is holding seven public meetings this week. Meeting dates and locations. Parking is perhaps the most important aspect of a city to get right if we are going to address traffic, make…
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Drip… Drip… Drip… Another Richmond Company Moves from the Burbs to Downtown
The Hilb Group, a fast-growing insurance brokerage with more than $125 million in revenue, has made the decision to move its headquarters from the suburban Stony Point office to the Riverfront Plaza in downtown Richmond. CEO Bob Hilb told Richmond BizSense that he had been looking for a new location for a year in anticipation…
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New Energy in Downtown Norfolk
Hampton Roads may be stuck in the economic doldrums, lagging the state and national economic growth rate over the past decade, but considerable change — positive change — has been taking place under the surface. Spurred by booming residential development, the city of Norfolk’s downtown is looking more vibrant than any time I remember seeing it.…
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Three Land Use Trends to Watch
Three articles today may help us divine the future of residential and commercial development in Virginia: Rebound of the exurbs? For many years, I was committed to the proposition that metropolitan development had reached a tipping point in which the forces favorable to urban re-development were stronger than the forces driving suburban sprawl. The exurbs —…
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Owens & Minor Goes for Millennials, Walkable City
Good economic news for the Richmond region: Medical supply giant Owens & Minor Inc. announced plans Thursday to open a client engagement center in downtown Richmond that will employ 500 people. Jobs will average about $53,700 in annual pay. In making the announcement Governor Terry McAuliffe made much of the fact that Richmond competed against…
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Integrating Uber with Mass Transit
by James A. Bacon Arlington County is toying with the idea of replacing under-utilized bus lines in the northern part of the county with ride-sharing services provided by Uber Technologies Inc., and Lyft Inc. The service could offer rides to and from Metro stations at Ballston, East Falls Church and Courthouse Subsidizing the ride-sharing services would be…
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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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Walkable Urbanism Is Still on a Roll
by James A. Bacon Skeptics of a sustained urban revival have pointed with some glee to the fact that most commercial and residential development in the United States continues to take place in “suburban” jurisdictions rather than central “city” jurisdictions. Yeah, they say, there’s been an urban revival in the past decade, but the broader development…
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Pulse Has a Pulse after All
by James A. Bacon When last I blogged about Richmond Pulse, the Bus Rapid Transit plan for the city’s Broad Street corridor, the projected cost had leaped $11.5 million over its original $50 million estimate. While I support mass transit in the right circumstances, I saw little good coming from this project, in which state…
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More Small Spaces
by James A. Bacon I can’t overstate how important the creative use of small spaces is to evoking the aura of authenticity and charm that people love. As with so many things, small spaces-as-works-of-art cannot be managed from the top-down; it must burble from the bottom up. Each of the small spaces highlighted here, drawn…
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Reveling in Small Spaces
by James A. Bacon One thing I look for in a city is the attention given to small spaces — the pocket parks, wide spots in the sidewalk, corridors between buildings and other features that lend texture and delight to an urban landscape. The antithesis is large parking lots, long buildings and the empty detritus of…