Tag: smart growth
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The Electoral Implications of Smart Growth
by James A. Bacon Marc Tracy conducts an interesting thought experiment in the New Republic: Would increasing the height restrictions on Washington, D.C.’s buildings turn Virginia back into a red state? His logic runs like this: The District of Columbia is running out of developable land under current height restrictions, which is driving up real…
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An Updated Metric for Housing-Transportation Affordability
by James A. Bacon One of the most important insights of the Smart Growth movement is that the household costs of housing and transportation are intertwined. You can buy a less expensive house if you are willing to live far from the urban core with its more desirable location and higher property values. But you…
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An Electrifying Plan for Shockoe Bottom
by James A. Bacon Mayor Dwight C. Jones unveiled this morning a $200 million public-private project to build a new baseball stadium and spark revitalization of a neglected corner of Richmond’s Shockoe Bottom district. The project includes 750 apartments, a Kroger grocery store, a 200-room Hyatt Hotel, a parking deck and a slavery memorial. The…
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A Savior for the Suburbs?
by James A. Bacon The conventional suburban cul-de-sac is a planning and architectural dead end, maintains Rick Harrison, a Minnesota designer of residential communities. But rather than abandon the traditional suburban development model, as New Urbanists and smart growthers advocate, he proposes to reinvent it. Grid streets, the solution proffered by the New Urbanist movement is not…
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Why Conservatives Hate Smart Growth
by James A. Bacon Last week I attended the annual meeting of the American Dream Coalition in Washington, D.C., which hosted some of the leading conservative and free-market thinkers in the fields of transportation, land use and urbanism. These are people with whom I normally feel a philosophical affinity. But there was one thing I…
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More Awesomeness in Richmond
Another reason I love my home town: Richmond has 40 miles of world-class single-track bicycle trails. I’ve been on a few of them, although, I do confess, I don’t ride nearly as fast as the two guys in this short video! (Nor can I do the neat wheelie tricks up and down stairs.) What I…
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The Road to Wealth Destruction Revisited
There’s an interesting new wrinkle in the never-ending debate over the Charlottesville Bypass, a project that has been stalled for a year or more while the Federal Highway Administration figures out whether to approve the project or send the Virginia Department of Transportation back to the drawing board, effectively nixing it. A real estate agent…
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Fiscal and Economic Benefits of Smart Growth
This “Meet the Experts” interview, filmed by Smart Growth America, dates back to the New Partners for Smart Growth conference early this year. But the themes are enduring. I make the case for smart growth as a strategy for lower-cost growth and economic development. — JAB
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Subsidies As Usual for Mass Transit?
by James A. Bacon Glen Bottoms, executive director of the American Conservative Center for Public Transportation (ACCPT), takes exception to my recent post, “Eviscerating Rail Transit.” Although he doesn’t budge me from my main conclusion — that we need to stop building rail transit projects that cannot pay for themselves — he raises a number…
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Eviscerating Rail Transit
by James A. Bacon Art Guzzetti, public policy director for the American Public Transportation Association, gamely walked into the lion’s den Sunday evening when participating in a debate at the American Dream Coalition annual conference attended by fiscal conservatives and free marketeers from around the country. He was the consummate gentleman, he never lost his…
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The Quest for Smarter Parking
City Hall is trying to bring order and reason to the administration of downtown Richmond’s 24,000 parking spaces. The job could take years.
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The Walkability Premium
The scholars over at New Geography just won’t give up trying to make the case that most Americans prefer to live in single-family detached houses in the suburbs. Citing data from the 2010 American Community Survey, Wendell Cox wrote that 79.2% of the new households in 51 major metro areas moved into precisely such housing…
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Let’s Get Creative with Bus Stops!
Discussion continues in the comments section of this blog on the subject of Arlington County’s $1 million bus stops. I have not inquired into the precise reasons for this travesty, but I would suggest what part of the solution is — more competition. Designing and erecting a bus shelter is not like raising the Burj…
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Mayor Jones’ Ambitious Plan to Bust up Poverty
by James A. Bacon The City of Richmond is embarking upon the boldest experiment in a generation to tackle entrenched, multi-generational poverty in the Richmond region. With the hoped-for assistance of $30 million in Housing and Urban Development (HUD) funds, city officials are planning to blaze a path of mixed-income re-development through the city’s east…
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The Ladies of Pageland Lane
In Prince William County populist conservatives and liberal smart-growthers have found common ground in fighting Northern Virginia’s proposed Bi-County Parkway.