Bacon's Rebellion

In his column “Missing the Point” (30 April 2007) and in his Blog post “Conservatives Should Embrace, Not Trample, Journey Through Hallowed Ground” (30 April 2007) Jim Bacon appropriately challenges the unfounded spins that has been placed on the Journey Through Hallowed Ground (JTHG) project. These attempts to discredit JTHG are driven by hyper-ideological fantasy unrelated to the facts.

There are potential negative impacts from Journey Through Hallowed Ground, especially if the project is very successful. These issues need to be carefully examined and addressed. Jim notes most of the important ones at the end of “Missing the Point.” There are however, no grounds for attacks on the project based on the political, ideological and personal scarlet herrings tossed up to date.

While Jim takes on the ideologues, we would like to go back to the prior assaults on JTHG that were posted on Bacon’s Rebellion Blog in response to Jim Bacon’s earlier column “Honoring Hallowed Ground” (16 April 2007) and the Blog post “Saving the Countryside” of the same date. These unfounded attacks were launched by an individual blogger. The comments were perhaps well-intended but badly misinformed on both facts and context.

The blogger vituperated in several posts concerning supposed disingenuous actions of the president of JTHG. There are no substantive grounds for these attacks on Cate Magennis Wyatt. While those familiar with the situation know there is not basis for the comments and while Ms. Wyatt is fully capable of defending herself, there is a larger point that impacts all discussion of human settlement patterns.

We have known Ms. Wyatt for nearly three decades and have a first hand experience based understanding of her role in eastern Loudoun County development projects along the VA Route 7 Corridor – Countryside, Landsdown, etc. – and her work in Governor Wilder’s administration.
There is no justification for suggesting her role in JTHG is less than an honorable endeavor or that it is inconsistent with her work in Loudoun County two decades ago. It would be just as silly to say she was responsible for Russia cutting off natural gas supplies to the Ukraine as it would be to suggest she paid for a Millennium party at Cheops with illicit gains from development in eastern Loudoun County. There is, however, the larger issue: Developers as villains.

The blogger who attacked Ms. Wyatt described the transformation of eastern Loudoun County over the past three decades in graphic terms. Many would agree with his assessment. At the multi-Beta Community scale, the VA Route 7 corridor is settlement pattern dysfunction squared.

Even if Ms. Wyatt was “the John (Til) Hazel of eastern Loudoun” – which she was not – what happened in eastern Loudoun County is not the fault any developer or of “developers” in general.

As we document in The Shape of the Future, there are no villains in the agglomeration of dysfunctional settlement patterns on the scale of eastern Loudoun County.

There is blame to be assessed and it must be widely distributed but it is collective blame. The root problem is the cumulative impact of billions of decisions by millions of individuals, households, enterprises, agencies and institutions. Almost all of these decisions are made in the mistaken belief that the actions that were taken were in the best interest of the actor.

If one set out to establish a hierarchy of culpability, elected officials egged on by political donations intended secure favored actions are perhaps first in line. Governance practitioners at the municipal, county, state and federal level are right behind them because they knew – or should have known – the negative cumulative impact of these acts.

Of course developers, builders and their corporate and institutional partners share blame for the end result. They were driven by the desire to optimize short term profit. However, they were playing the hand they were dealt given in a context established by overarching forces over which they had little control. Most importantly, they were catering to the assumed demand of an uninformed market without functional feedback systems in place. In this case the feedback system would be all the actors having to pay the full cost of their location decisions.

When all the actors are lined up, most of the blame – for the context and the results – rests with citizens and their uninformed and unintelligent actions in the market and in the voting booth. Right next to them is MainStream Media which has failed to provide the information upon which more intelligent decisions could be based. MainStream Media has also failed to attack Geographic Illiteracy / Locational Obliviousness for reasons we explore in our current column “Recent Clippings.”

By in large all the actors were doing what they thought was in their best interest – specifically their immediate, short term interest. There are bad apples in every category. Some knew, or should have known that what they were doing would hurt others but In response to Jim Bacon’s earlier column “Honoring Hallowed Ground” (16 April 2007) and the Blog post “Saving the Countryside” of the same date.

If any of the actors had paid attention to intelligent analysis of human settlement patterns that have been carried out over the past 80 years all would have known they were taking actions that would have a negative cumulative impact on every individual, household, enterprise, agency and institution. That, however, does not make any of them “villains” who are the proximate cause of existing conditions.

As we note from time to time those who profit from (or hope to profit from) the continued trajectory of Business-As-Usual especially those who call themselves “conservationists” are the closest to being villains but even they do not deserve a red “V” on their forehead.

Any attempt to single out villains rather than working to understand what drives the evolution of dysfunctional settlement patterns in places like eastern Loudoun County only generates conflict and divisiveness. This finger pointing just makes matters worse.

EMR

Below, Jim discusses the possibility that congestion pricing will be introduced in DC.

Well, that’s all fine and dandy. But for a real look at how to squeeze cars out of a city, we need look no further than our own River City. Don at Save Richmond collects some choice examples of how Richmond’s great minds are making it harder for people to park in the Bottom, for new businesses to open there (because they can’t get parking spaces) and, if they manage to overcome those two barriers, let’s not forget the “temporary” meals tax that is dedicated to funding the Lazarus-like Performing Arts Center.

Want to cut congestion? Don’t look to DC, or New York, or anywhere else. The best example is right under our very noses.

Lowell Feld over at Raising Kaine compares and contrasts the new Democratic Party of Virginia website with the new Republican Party of Virginia website. Although in Feld’s words he “bleeds Democratic blue,” he gives the RPV website much higher marks. While the Dem website looks good graphically, I agree with Feld that it amounts to an “empty shell.” The GOP website is loaded with fresh content, and it taps into the energy of the Republican blogosphere.

For all intents and purposes, the home page of the GOP website functions as a blog…. Which should come as no surprise, as the GOP communications director is Saun Kenney, who won the position largely on the basis of his reknown as a Republican blogger. One of the website’s strengths, as Feld points out, is that it links to more than 30 GOP or GOP-leaning blogs, tapping into the the party’s “netroots.”

There is dynamic new content on the Democratic Party website, but it’s buried. Other features, such as photos and videos, contain nothing new. Nobody’s interested in photographs from the 2005 gubernatorial campaign. In other respects, the website has evolved backwards. In a previous incarnation, when Laura Bland was communications director, the Dems published a feisty electronic newsletter entitled the “Demo Memo.” The GOP had nothing to compare with it. The concept was to combine the “push” of the Demo Memo to party activists with the “pull” of the website. The Demo Memo would drive traffic to the website; the website would sign up new subscribers for the newsletter. But the Demo Memo apparently has been relegated to the trash heap. The website fires on one cylinder, offering people very little reason to visit more than once.

Given the success of Raising Kaine in attracting readers, the DPV would be well advised to heed Feld’s advice.

Gov. Timothy M. Kaine has issued an executive order closing the loophole that allowed Virginia Tech gunman Seung-Hui Cho to purchase two handguns. From now on, any Virginian subjected to a court-ordered, involuntary commitment for outpatient mental treatment will be barred from purchasing a gun. The court order must be entered into a state database used for background checks and shared with federal law-enforcement agencies. (See Michael Hardy’s treatment in the Times-Dispatch.)

As far as I’m concerned, this is common sense. Mentally unstable people should not be allowed to purchase guns, any more than felons convicted of violent crimes should be. The measure was backed by Attorney General Bob McDonnell, indicating that support cuts across partisan divides.

However, I’m not under any illusion that this is the end of the story. First of all, the executive order won’t stop all mentally unstable people from buying guns, only those who have been ordered to receive mental treatment. Secondly, someone — lawmakers, perhaps; judges, more likely — will have to determine exactly how this rule applies.

Question: Does an an involuntary commitment amount to a scarlet letter, branding an individual for life — even if he has been successfully treated and no longer represents a danger?

Question: What rights of appeal does a mentally ill (or formerly mentally ill) person have to prevent the loss of civil rights granted other citizens?

Home ownership is a wonderful thing — if you can afford it. Given the lax lending standards the prevailed during the housing bubble, however, a lot of people wound up with houses they couldn’t afford. It’s not just the known expenses like principle and interest payments that kill you, it’s the unanticipated expenses — the rising tax rates, the termite infestations, the fallen branches, the broken furnace, the leaky roof, the broken furnace — that breaks the bank.

Now that housing prices are falling, and people are finding it harder to borrow against their equity to raise cash, foreclosure rates are climbing. Dennis Gartman, a Suffolk resident and author of the Gartman Letter newsletter, has been warning of the consequences of the real estate bubble for quite some time. A friend forwarded this quote from a recent commentary — with scary numbers of foreclosure rates in Hampton Roads — by e-mail:

Last year, even we began to be concerned about real estate prices that were too strong, and were more and more concerned about the over-extended nature of late home buyers who seemed intent upon buying in panic, pushing bids right past the offers on homes that were badly built. Those homes now are a burden, not a joy; they are held by buyers incapable of paying for them, with loans made under circumstances that only a decade or so ago would have been considered ludicrous and “un-bankerly” in nature. But made they were, and now collapsing they are.

We note that here in usually protected, conservative, laid-back southern Virginia the numbers of “seriously troubled loans” on homes are rising at a frightening pace. In Chesapeake, a quintessential suburb, near the Atlantic Ocean and nestled against the N. Carolina border, with quick access to the Outer Banks, foreclosures are up 46% [year over year]. In Norfolk, the navy’s home, and a place that has enjoyed inordinately strong economic growth for years, foreclosures are up 45% vs. a year ago. In Virginia Beach, hard upon the Atlantic Ocean and also facing north into the Chesapeake Bay, they are up 54%… and across Virginia generally foreclosures are up 49%. Thankfully, here in “surprising” Suffolk, foreclosures are actually down [year over year]; but that may only be because of the very small number this year and last and because Suffolk is the fastest growing city in Virginia due to the huge amount of land and the still small population.

“The point here is that even in Virginia the problem of foreclosures is now hard upon us, and that is in an environment where unemployment is at its lowest level in history. What then shall happen when unemployment begins to rise… even slightly. “

The April 30, 2007, edition of Bacon’s Rebellion has been published. You can view it in its entirety here. Don’t miss an issue — sign up for a free subscription here.

This week’s features include:

Missing the Point
A Heritage Foundation paper attacking the Journey Through Hallowed Ground as a tool of Virginia’s landed elite is unsupported by the facts. Worse, it slights the Journey’s important contributions.
by James A. Bacon

Feed the Creative Temperament
Rural areas should chase more talent, fewer jobs.
by Doug Koelemay

Recent Clippings
Overshadowed by the horror at Virginia Tech, the MainStream Media contributed some solid reporting last week about taxes and the environment. All the stories lacked was an overarching context.
by EM Risse

Liberate the Liquor Business
More money for roads, more choice for consumers, more focused enforcement of drinking laws — what’s not to like about the privatization of state ABC stores?
by Geoff Segal

Healing the Hokie Nation
The massacre at Virginia Tech was a horror, but tragedy and evil confronts us daily in lesser numbers. The answer is Christian lovingkindness.
by James Atticus Bowden

Footing the Bill
Fairfax County has promised to make good any cost overruns in the Rail-to-Dulles project. Supervisors should warn taxpayers that they could wind up footing the bill.
by Phil Rodokanakis

What’s Eating Middle America?
Illegal immigration tops the list. The United States will have illegals as long as a strong economy inspires foreigners to sneak across the border. The only “solution” — recession — is not one we really want.
by Norman Leahy