Category: Land use & Development
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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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What We Can Learn from Naples: Covered Sidewalks Edition
Here is a photo of a storefront on Naples, Fla.’s 3rd Street that extends over the sidewalk to the edge of the street — reminiscent of many buildings in New Orleans’ French Quarter. The addition of columns, archways and covered sidewalk creates visual interest, provides a variable experience for pedestrians along 3rd Street, and allows…
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Diabetes, Trees, and Land Use in the Bayou State
So, here we are in the heartland of obesity and diabetes. The adult obesity rate in Louisiana is 36.2%, sixth worst in the country, and the diabetes rate is 13.9%, also one of the worst in the U.S. I have seen many speculations as to why Louisianans are so unhealthy, but the one that struck…
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Amazon Deal Highlights Virginia’s Competitive Advantage Over Maryland
Many Virginians have qualms about the $550 million in job-creation incentives plus more than $1 billion in promised transportation and higher-ed investments it took to recruit a $2.5 billion Amazon facility to Northern Virginia. But things could be worse. Maryland offered an $8.5 billion package — and didn’t land the deal. The Washington Postย is asking…
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How Walkable Urbanism and the Talent Pipeline Won the Amazon Deal
More information is coming out about the wheeling and dealing behind Virginia’s incentive package that coaxed Amazon, Inc., to locate a $2.5 billion campus in Northern Virginia. It turns out that many of the key pieces in Virginia’s incentive package were initiatives that had been in the works for years. Virginia is putting resources into…
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Local Governments’ Alarming Capital Spending Ratios
I’ve been strenuously making the point over the past several months that there are many ways for state and local governments to run hidden deficits. One of those is deferred maintenance — an issue that has played out most prominently in the debate over aging, run-down school buildings. What I never realized is that there…
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Shoreline Resiliency Funds for Hampton Roads?
In 2016 former Governor Terry McAuliffe signed a bill that set up a revolving loan fund to help homeowners and businesses elevate their properties to safeguard against sea level rise. Just one problem, says the Virginian-Pilot. The fund has no dedicated revenue source. Two years later, “the well is dry.” Now the Virginia Conservation Network…
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Has City Population Growth Leveled Off?
After a decade of strong growth, the population of Virginia’s cities may be leveling off, says Hamilton Lombard with the University of Virginia’s Demographics Research Group. The rising cost of housing in Virginia cities is pushing households into neighboring counties, he says. The major swing group is households with young children. For decades, families with…
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Shocker: Positive Signs from Washington Metro
I have relentlessly criticized the Washington Metro system for years, but I have to give credit to management under General Manager Paul J. Wiedefeld for trying to steer the dysfunctional mass transit system in a fiscally sustainable direction. Today’s media reports highlight two straws in the wind. First, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (MWATA)…
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Bacon Bits: In with the New, Out with the Old
In with the new… Data Center Alley too hot to handle. The Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority (MWAA) has sold 424 acres west of Dulles International Airport to data-center developer Digital Realty Trust for an eye-popping $236.5 million — $558,000 per acre. MWAA will place $207 million in a segregated account used to reduce costs that…
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Looks like a Taking, Feels like a Taking
The parallel struck me early in the meeting โ this is like the pipeline process.ย The people who want this bike lane are not deterred by what it does to the people and businesses directly on the route and disregard all concerns as unfounded. Of course, the property owners along Richmondโs Brook Road do not…
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The Berkeley of the East Coast
๏ปฟ Has the City of Charlottesville become the Berkeley of the East Coast, a college-dominated town populated with enough leftists to enforce their destructive brand of politics? Maybe not quite yet, but when anarchists are referring to the liberal Democrats on City Council as “fascists” (view the video above), it could be getting close. “While…
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Solar Power and the Gentrification of the Countryside
Consider two mega-trends: (1) the push to renewable solar power and, (2) the changing economics of rural land that places an increasing value on pristine “viewsheds.” Both are powerful forces, and the two are coming into conflict here in Virginia. How the story ends, nobody yet knows. Hopefully, the two can be reconciled. The American…
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State to Support Shipyard Hiring of 7,000
Governor Ralph Northam announced this morning a partnership with Newport News Shipbuilding to support the hiring of almost 7,000 people, including the creation of 2,000 new jobs, over the next five years. These new hires will support shipyard contracts to build components for new Columbia-class submarines in addition to existing work such as construction of…
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Another Warning of Sea-Level Rise
By 2030, $838 million worth of residential property in Virginia is at risk of being chronically inundated by high tides caused by rising sea levels, directly affecting more than 6,000 people and $8 million in property taxes, according to a new report by the Union for Concerned Scientists. The definition of “chronic” inundation is 26…