Category: Land use & Development
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Asphalt City to Reform Parking Regs
The Old Town district in downtown Alexandria is the very model of Smart Growth — it was built during the golden age of urban development when city planners believed in such things as street grids, mixed uses, and urban densities. And in recent years, portions of Alexandria’s downtown have been re-developed according to the same…
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A Reminder that the James River is Richmond’s Greatest Asset
Laura and I ate lunch today at the Conch Republic at Rocketts Landing and enjoyed the perfect temperature, delightful breeze and wonderful views while seated outside on the deck. Rocketts, a residential-retail development retrofitted from old industrial acreage just south of the Richmond city line, didn’t exist when I moved to Richmond three decades ago.…
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Bacon Bits: The Latest in Government Ineptitude and Short-Sighted Thinking
It’s Hard to Teach without Teachers. With a week to go before the start of the new school year, the Richmond Public Schools still has about 90 teacher openings, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Why the shortage, which seems to be a chronic issue? Perhaps the school conditions are so terrible that no one wants…
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Richmond’s Growth Bottleneck: Building Permits
Jeremy Connell wants to build a dozen high-end townhomes in Manchester, right across the James River from downtown. The $6 million, 7west project envisions four-bedroom, three-story townhouses priced in the $700,000s, providing a nice boost to the City of Richmond’s tax base and offering a short, easy commute to the region’s central business district. He…
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Richmond’s New Growth Corridor
In 1950, the population high water mark for many American cities, about 230,000 people lived in the city of Richmond. A few years later, when the city annexed a large swath of Chesterfield County, population peaked around 250,000. Then, as suburbanization took hold and average household size shrank, the population declined steadily over the following…
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Another Useless, Irrelevant Debate
Ed Gillespie, Republican candidate for governor, has gotten himself in a political pickle. According to press reports, he has been blasting his Democratic rival Ralph Northam for backing the 2013 transportation tax package as “the largest tax increase in Virginia history.” But as Democrats have been pointing out, Gillespie was gubernatorial campaign chairman for Bob…
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Two More Signs that City of Richmond Is Kicking Donkey
The City of Richmond is on a tear. Not only is it seeing more real estate investment than it has it decades, the city is laying the groundwork for future growth and re-development. Its competitive advantage over neighboring suburban counties seems to get stronger with every passing day. Word has leaked to local media of…
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Ferguson Deal Will Help Transform Newport News
A couple of weeks ago, the City of Newport News announced an economic development coup: Ferguson Enterprises, the nation’s largest distributor of plumbing supplies and one of the city’s largest home-grown companies, will locate an $82.8 million office project in City Center at Oyster Point. The new campus will house 1,400 information-technology and administrative jobs,…
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Drip… Drip… Drip… Another Richmond Company Moves from the Burbs to Downtown
The Hilb Group, a fast-growing insurance brokerage with more than $125 million in revenue, has made the decision to move its headquarters from the suburban Stony Point office to the Riverfront Plaza in downtown Richmond. CEO Bob Hilb told Richmond BizSense that he had been looking for a new location for a year in anticipation…
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Latest Apartment Amenity: Bicycle Storage
Developers Charles Macfarlane and Sam McDonald have applied for a special use permit to build a six-story apartment building on East Main Street east of downtown. Current zoning allows for only five-story buildings. The Main 2525 proposal has many things to like, including 7,400 square feet of ground-floor commercial space, underground parking for 241 vehicles,…
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Retrofitting Alexandria: Another Office-to-Residential Conversion
Washington, D.C.-based Perseus Realty has contracted to acquire a six-acre site in Alexandria’s Hoffman Town Center with plans to convert an obsolete, 610,000-square-foot building into a residential-dominated mixed-use project. Reports the Washington Business Journal: The effort, if approved, will entail the addition of 25,000 square feet of ground-floor retail, conversion of two lower floors into…
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What Virginia Can Learn from GE’s Relocation to Boston
My apologies if I sound like a broken record, but clearly there are people who still don’t get the message. So, here I go again… Today’s Wall Street Journal interviews GE’s chief financial officer, Jeffrey Bornstein, on how the move of the conglomerate’s headquarters from suburban Connecticut to Boston is working out. I reproduce select quotes…
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Should Historic Neighborhoods Be Allowed to Evolve?
Union Hill is a run-down neighborhood adjacent to its more famous neighbor, Church Hill, in the City of Richmond. Some of its working-class houses predate the Civil War, but the years have been unkind. For decades, the population was predominantly poor and African-American. Many of the lots are vacant, and many of the houses that…
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Oyster Wars, Viewsheds and Property Rights
One might think all Virginians would be delighted by the resurgence of the oyster population in the Chesapeake Bay. But more oysters means more oystermen, and more oystermen means more strange men trudging around the shallows and dragging around ugly cages within the sight of wealthy waterfront property owners. The resurgence has led to resistance from…
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The East-West Divide in Loudoun Broadband
From an article in today’s Loudoun Times-Mirror: 70% of the world’s Internet traffic reputedly passes through eastern Loudoun County, which has emerged as a world-class hub of fiber-optic trunk lines and data centers. Yet less than 20 miles away, 30,000 inhabitants of western Loudoun have lousy Internet access. “We just can’t get high-speed Internet,” said…