Tag: smart growth
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Will Broad Street BRT Pay Its Own Way?
by James A. Bacon A proposed rapid transit bus line between Willow Lawn and Rocketts Landing would serve as a catalyst for development along the Broad Street corridor and boost property values by 11%, according to an impact study just released by the GRTC Transit System, the Richmond regional transit enterprise. The 7.6-mile route would…
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Transportation Tumult
by James A. Bacon There is an extraordinary level of hubris in the world of transportation and land use planning. Planners in state transportation departments, including Virginia’s, advance mega-highway projects based upon forecasts of what transportation demand will be two or three decades from now. My friends in the Smart Growth camp rightly reject many…
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The Folly of Mandated Yards
Jim Dalrymple, a Salt Lake City journalist, publishes the About Town blog, where he opines about urban land use in the Provo-Salt Lake City region of Utah. I’ve begun following the blog because he asks many of the same kinds of questions I do, informed by similar free-market sensibilities. In a recent missive, he asked…
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The Stroadification of the South Atlantic Coast
by James A. Bacon Litchfield Beach, S.C., is blessed by natural beauty. It has long, wide beaches with sand as soft as talcum powder. It has fecund marshlands bursting with wildlife. It has thick, semi-tropical foliage: palmetto palms, crepe myrtle and southern live oak draped in Spanish moss. Too bad the humans did such a…
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Finding the Right Formula for Libbie & Grove
by James A. Bacon When last we visited the re-development of the Libbie & Grove neighborhood of Richmond (“The Densification of Richmond“), public opposition had stymied the conversion of a BP gas station into a four-story luxury apartment complex. The proposed facility was just too big — it would have been out of place in…
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Walkable Urbanism Takes Root in Virginia Beach
by James A. Bacon Back in the pre-PowerPoint days when people used slide projectors, New Urbanist evangelist Andres Duany traveled around the country with a carousel of slides to illustrate the horrors that poor planning had inflicted upon the urban landscape. One of those slides, I recall, was an aerial shot of the intersection of…
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Prairie Populism Meets Boomergeddon
Over on the Strong Towns blog, Andrew Burleson describes the reaction that he and his compatriots get when they tour the country preaching their Minnesota brand of Boomergeddon, to wit: that human settlement patterns in many cities and towns are fiscally unsustainable; local elected officials need to re-think everything about growth and development; and communities…
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A Logical Approach to Reforming Parking Policy
by James A. Bacon The United States has hundreds of millions more parking spaces than it needs. As a result of this excessive supply, mandated by local government regulations across the country, acreage worth billions of dollars is tied up in unproductive land use. So-called “free” parking really isn’t free. It drives up the cost…
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Charlottesvillians Pay Premium for Walkable Urbanism
by James A. Bacon Residential real estate assessments in the City of Charlottesville increased far more rapidly during the 2000s-era real estate bubble than assessments in next-door Albemarle County, and then held up better during the housing bust that followed, according to research conducted by Jeff Werner, Albemarle County land use officer for the Piedmont…
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Low Truck Volume on Rt. 234? Really?
by James A. Bacon Transportation Secretary Sean Connaughton returned yesterday to his old stomping grounds in Prince William County to make the case to the Board of Supervisors, a body he once chaired, to back the Bi-County Parkway. The board took no action but, Connaughton certainly got a first-hand taste of the controversy the project…
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What’s the Story with Innovation Center?
by James A. Bacon At long last, Northern Virginia leaders have a source of regional tax dollars that they can divvy up according to local priorities, not dictated by Richmond. When they deliberated last week on how to divvy up the first dollop of money — $209 million, including a $94 million bond package —…
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How to Help Renters, First-time Home Buyers and the Budget Deficit
by James A. Bacon Between loan guarantees, tax breaks and outright subsidies, the federal government exerts a $450 billion-a-year influence over American real estate markets. Smart Growth America proposes eliminating about $40 billion in federal largesse, reinvesting $7 billion a year in targeted programs to help renters, first-time home buyers and infrastructure investment, and… get…
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Yup, Cities Are Safer than Suburbs and Countryside
Another study has come out suggesting that life in the city is safer than life in the suburbs and countryside. In “Safety in Numbers: Are Major Cities the Safest Places in the United States,” Sage R. Myers and several co-authors run the numbers on fatal injuries from a wide range of causes, ranging from murders,…
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You’ve Built It. Will They Come?
by James A. Bacon The Washington Metro system is bracing for its toughest challenge since opening 37 years ago — persuading people to ride the Silver Line to Tysons. So argued Dana Hedgpeth and Scott Clement in the Washington Post yesterday. Drawing upon the results of a WaPo poll, they suggest that Northern Virginians rely…
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Should Dulles Co-opt NoVa Economic Development?
by James A. Bacon Last week, Reed Fawell III noted in his article on this blog, “A Mortgage on Northern Virginia’s Future,” that few Northern Virginians or Washingtonians had paused to ask whether the massive road investments proposed to advance Washington Dulles International Airport as an air-cargo hub made sense. But clearly people are beginning to…