Category: Land use & Development
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Can Richmond Grow without Sprawl?
by James A. Bacon About three years ago the Virginia Chapter of the Urban Land Use Institute organized a Reality Check exercise in which dozens of government leaders and community activists hovered around maps of the Richmond region and used Lego blocks to propose where the projected growth of 200,000 residents and 200,000 new jobs over…
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Rocky Mountain High Real Estate Values
by James A. Bacon According to a 2011 Wall Street Journal article, Aspen, Colo., could boast of having the most expensive real estate in the country. I don’t know if that’s still true, but I wouldn’t be surprised. As I sit here blogging at Ink! Coffee, looking upon a patio filled with Pellegrino umbrellas and…
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In Praise of Carytown
by James A. Bacon One of the Bacon family’s favorite places to go in Richmond is Carytown, an eight-block retail strip embedded in Richmond’s Museum District. Some of our favorite restaurants are there — Can Can Brasserie if we’re in the mood for French, Amici’s if for Italian, Cappola’s if for subs. For soon-to-be empty nesters like…
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Questions about Bidding War for FBI HQ
There’s a bidding war between Virginia and Maryland to snag a planned, 2.1 million-square-foot Federal Bureau of Investigation headquarters campus. Maryland Governor Larry Hogan is in for $317 million in state and local funds, according to the Washington Business Journal. Governor Terry McAuliffe is in for $120 million. In both cases most of the money would…
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A Once-in-a-Century Opportunity to Get Transportation Right
by James A. Bacon Take the Uber revolution of summoning rides with a smart phone. Then add driverless cars, which eliminate the expense of paying someone to drive the car. Then overlay the emerging business model of Transportation As a Service, in which people pay for rides when they need them rather than buy cars that…
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Walkable Urbanism Is Still on a Roll
by James A. Bacon Skeptics of a sustained urban revival have pointed with some glee to the fact that most commercial and residential development in the United States continues to take place in “suburban” jurisdictions rather than central “city” jurisdictions. Yeah, they say, there’s been an urban revival in the past decade, but the broader development…
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Virginia Beach on Another Wild Goose Chase
by James A. Bacon Virginia Beach City Council voted yesterday to give 155 acres to build a biomedical park, reports the Virginian-Pilot. The Virginia Beach Development Authority will oversee the design and promotion of the property. Virginia Beach Mayor Will Sessoms justified the initiative to lure health care and biotech companies as a way to diversify the city’s…
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More Small Spaces
by James A. Bacon I can’t overstate how important the creative use of small spaces is to evoking the aura of authenticity and charm that people love. As with so many things, small spaces-as-works-of-art cannot be managed from the top-down; it must burble from the bottom up. Each of the small spaces highlighted here, drawn…
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Reveling in Small Spaces
by James A. Bacon One thing I look for in a city is the attention given to small spaces — the pocket parks, wide spots in the sidewalk, corridors between buildings and other features that lend texture and delight to an urban landscape. The antithesis is large parking lots, long buildings and the empty detritus of…
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Citizens Take on Crony Capitalism in VA Beach
by James A. Bacon Arlington County had its $1 million bus stop scandal. The City of Richmond had its mayoral cronyism scandal. Now Virginia Beach has its Cavalier Hotel redevelopment scandal. The FBI has undertaken a criminal investigation of a vote by Councilman John Uhrin in favor of providing $18 million in city funds to…
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The Big Bet on Roanoke’s Biotech Cluster
by James A. Bacon Just as Inova Health System and George Mason University are investing hundreds of millions to build a center of excellence around personalized medicine in Northern Virginia, Virginia Tech and Carilion Clinic are spending hundreds of millions to build a comparable center in Roanoke. While the dollars committed in Roanoke may be smaller, the…
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How Not to Think about Mass Transit
by James A. Bacon Michael Paul Williams, a feature columnist for the Richmond Times-Dispatch, takes a dim view of a decision by the Chesterfield County Board of Supervisors to discontinue a subsidized bus route between downtown Richmond and Chesterfield Plaza. “Chesterfield, despite its dramatic demographic shifts and an increasing poverty rate, continues to turn a blind…
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An Economic Development Incentive for the Knowledge Economy
As a follow-up to the Inova-driven Center for Personalized Health initiative I wrote about yesterday… The final 2017-2018 budget approved by the General Assembly includes $28 million to help get Inova’s proposed biotech research initiative get off the ground. According to a Senate Finance Committee document, state goodies include $8 million in General Fund monies and $20 million in bond…
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Gramercy District a Game Changer
by James A. Bacon Northern Virginia technologist and developer Minh Le is partnering with Microsoft Inc. to build Gramercy District, a $500 million “smart city” development adjacent to the planned Ashburn Metro station on the Silver Line, reports the Washington Business Journal. Not only will Microsoft contribute technology it will participate as an investor. (Details on Microsoft’s…
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Running Out of Options
Declaring the the global economy is “highly vulnerable” to adverse shocks, the International Monetary Fund is urging the United States and other major governments to prepare contingency plans that could be rolled out quickly to boost growth. What options does the U.S. have? Traditionally, the federal government has two main policy levers: monetary and fiscal policy.…