Tag: smart growth
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Silicon Valley Knows Technology, Not Land Use
by James A. Bacon Apple, Google and other collosi of Silicon Valley are re-shaping the world with their technology but you could never imagine them as masters of innovation by viewing their corporate campuses. While the office interiors may be arrayed with java bars and collaborative workplaces to stimulate creativity, the building exteriors are for…
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In Praise of Small Spaces
by James A. Bacon I am fascinated by small urban spaces that normally elude the attention of city planners, star architects and travel magazines. In low-density settings where low value is placed on land, inhabitants pay little heed to the small spaces. But in densely settled cities, residents apply loving creativity to making the most…
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Why San Franciscans Are Thinner than Other Americans
No, it’s not the bean sprouts and tofu. It’s not even the great year-round climate that encourages people to do stuff outdoors. It’s the hills. The Bacon family has hiked and biked a lot of hills over the past three days and we’ve eaten a lot of food, but the hills won. I swear I…
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Bicycling in Paradise
One of California’s greatest assets is its climate, and San Francisco, though foggier than nearby locales, is no exception. Climatically speaking, the city is as close to paradise as any location on the planet, which makes it a great place to spend outdoors and a great place to bicycle. As one would expect, San Francisco…
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The City of Great Places
So, here we are in San Francisco, in the heart of the land of fruits and nuts. We’re planning to do a lot of the usual tourista things — take the boat to Alcatraz, bike to Sausalito, visit the Exploratorium — but your roving correspondent also will be applying a keen eye to the human…
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Can Virginia Reverse the Stroadification of Rt. 1?
by James A. Bacon People living along the U.S. Route 1 corridor in Northern Virginia seemingly desire contradictory things. They want better pedestrian and bicycle safety, they want mass transit. … and they want automobile traffic to flow faster. Alas, designing the corridor to move automobiles faster makes roads less safe, and it discourages the…
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More Virginia Families Choosing Cities, City Schools
by James A. Bacon It has been the traditional pattern in Virginia, as elsewhere, for young people to move to core urban areas to live as singles and then migrate to the quieter, safer burbs with better schools when they marry and have children. That dynamic still is working but it is weaker than before.…
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Tech Insurrection
Smart cities, says Anthony Townsend, will be forged by geeks, activists and civic hackers through bottom-up technological innovation.
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Columbia Pike Streetcars: Delving Deeper into the Value-Capture Scenario
by James A. Bacon Last week, I made the case that the best way to finance construction of the proposed Columbia Pike street car line in Arlington was to set up an improvement district along the route and impose a real estate tax surcharge on property owners to pay off the bonds. (See “A Second…
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What Happened? Did All the Racists Move North?
by James A. Bacon NewYork state has the most segregated schools in the country, according to a new report published by the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, “New York State’s Extreme School Segregation.” Other states with highly segregated schools include Illinois, Michigan and California. “In the 30 years I have been researching schools, New…
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Sprawl’s Hidden Subsidies
The answer to sprawl isn’t more regulation, says Pamela Blais, it’s fixing the endemic biases embedded in taxes, utility fees, municipal services and mortgages.
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Measuring Sprawl
by James A. Bacon The Charlottesville region is the least afflicted by “sprawl” of any metropolitan statistical area in Virginia over 200,000 in population, according to data in a new report, “Measuring Sprawl 2014,” published by Smart Growth America and the Metropolitan Research Center at the University of Utah. Charlottesville’s composite score ranked it the…
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The Long, Sad, Inevitable Demise of Small Town America
by James A. Bacon In theory the past decade should have been very good for America’s small towns and rural areas: The fracking revolution has created an energy boom in places as far flung as western Pennsylvania and North Dakota. High prices for agricultural commodities have propped up incomes across the grain belt. Yet, despite…
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Map of the Day: Impact of Conservation Easements
Luke Juday is using his mapping tools over at the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Policy to project what Virginia’s population distribution could look like 25 years from now and 50 years from now. You can see those maps here. We’ve re-published many of his maps here at Bacon’s Rebellion, so you may find them…
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How to Create Healthier Communities without Breaking a Sweat
by James A. Bacon American society is buckling under the strain of health care costs. The debate, as I have often opined, is stuck on the question of who pays those costs rather than how we can bring costs down. Improving Americans’ health is not a job we can should relegate to Congress and the General…