Category: Land use & Development
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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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Is the Urban Growth Boom Fading?
Several years ago Brookings Institution urbanist William H. Frey proclaimed the 2010s as “the decade of the city.” A constellation of forces in the knowledge economy, which puts a premium on dense, mixed-use urban environments with access to mass transit, was pulling Millennials and corporations back into central cities. It was a logic that I…
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Which is a Greater Public Safety Issue: Fires or Pedestrian Fatalities?
Municipal governance, like life, is full of trade-offs. One would think that a Class 1 fire suppression rating from the Insurance Services Office would be an unalloyed blessing. After all, a Class 1 rating ranks a fire department in the top 1% in the nation, which translates directly into lower homeowners insurance rates for residents…
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There’s No Such Thing as a Free Parking Space
Following up on thoughts in the previous post about what is to be done about the Washington Metro… Here is a basic maxim to remember: If we want more people to avail themselves of shared ridership, be it commuter rail, bus, or shared ride-hailing services, they need to pay the full cost of their transportation…
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Good Idea: Set Priorities for Land Conservation
Through tax credits for easements, land acquisitions for parks, and other means, the Commonwealth spends millions of dollars every year to conserve land. Under a new policy adopted by the Northam administration, the state will focus resources on safeguarding land with the highest conservation value. This new strategy will rely upon a “data-driven process” devised…
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Virginia’s Housing Shortfall
Between 2000 and 2015, 23 states fell 7.3 million units short of meeting the housing needs of their growing populations — equivalent to about 7.3% of the housing stock of the United States, according to a new study, “Housing Underproduction in the U.S.,” published by the Up for Growth Coalition. Although not the worst offender,…
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Tax the Country Clubs Like You’d Tax Anyone Else
As if the General Assembly didn’t have enough image problems, our august representatives are pushing legislation that would provide property tax relief for two Arlington County country clubs, reports the Associated Press. The bill has passed the House with bipartisan support and made it through the Senate Finance Committee. The combined property bills of the…
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E-Lofts and the Recycling of Old Office Properties
Fairfax County has more than 18 million square feet of vacant office space, with little hope of filling it in the foreseeable future. Having already enacted zoning changes to make it easier to convert empty buildings in industrial and mixed-use areas to other uses, the county now is considering a proposal to do the same…
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An Island of Urbanism in a Vast Suburban Sea
The re-development of Innsbrook, the largest office park in the Richmond metropolitan area, into a mixed-use urban district is getting closer to reality. Developer WAM Associates, led by Joe Marchetti Jr., has enlisted WVS Cos., a developer of walkable urban places such as Rocketts Landing, to develop two apartment buildings and a structured parking deck…
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Reinventing Roanoke
Thirty years ago when I worked for the Roanoke Times, the City of Roanoke was obsessed with revitalizing its sleepy downtown. Roanokers were fiercely loyal to their central business district and celebrated every small success. But the odds seemed stacked against them. Midsized cities lacking a major university presence have fared poorly economically in the…
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More Miscellaneous Morsels…
Luxury apartments for research park. The Virginia Tech Corporate Research Center, which has more than one million square feet of office space, is joining forces with a local real estate developer to add luxury apartments to the mix, reports the Roanoke Times. The company had previously added amenities to play soccer, lacrosse, volleyball, basketball, and…
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The Great Migration Breakdown
Historically, a source of American prosperity has been the willingness of workers to move from regions with poor economic prospects to regions with better economic prospects. Think Depression-era Okies fleeing the Dust Bowl to California. Think Jim Crow-era African-American sharecroppers migrating from the rural South to booming Northern industrial centers. Since the 2008 recession, the…
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Former Apostle of Sprawl Now Touts Walkable Urbanism
Fairly or unfairly, I’ve always thought of Stephen S. Fuller, the George Mason University professor and expert on the Washington regional economy, as a guy who made his living providing the intellectual justification for the business-as-usual pattern of real estate development in Northern Virginia. The real estate lobby hired him to conduct innumerable studies and…
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How to Build Strong, Resilient Cities and Towns
Cities and counties across the United States are experiencing chronic fiscal stress, and the reason has nothing to do with Republicans or Democrats and everything to do with what Chuck Marohn calls the “growth Ponzi scheme.” “Why are cities going broke?” he asked at a forum hosted by the Partnership for Smarter Growth, Coalition for…
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Marohn to Bring Strong Towns Insights to Virginia
I have written about Chuck Marohn, founder and chief evangelist of the Strong Towns movement, many times. Not long ago I urged elected officials and citizen activists wanting to revitalize Virginia’s small towns to read his blog. Marohn is, hands down, the leading thinker today about building more prosperous, livable, and sustainable communities” in America’s small…