by James C. Sherlock
Crime, especially violent crime, is a constant topic in private conversations and in public politics, and thus here on Bacon’s Rebellion.
Comments on BR crime-related articles turn quickly to race, often without basis in fact.
I will offer below the actual crime statistics by race from 2021, the latest available year, in an attempt to cure that.
Then I will write about the causes.
I will almost certainly be called a racist. Continue reading
Posted in Budgets, Children and families, Civil Rights, Crime , corrections and law enforcement, Culture wars, Democracy and Western Civilization, Demographics, Education (K-12), Efficiency in government, General Assembly, Governance, Government Oversight, Health Care, Housing, Land use & development, Law enforcement, Mental illness and substance abuse, Parental Rights, Politics, Public corruption, Public safety & health, Race and race relations
Tagged James Sherlock
by Jon Baliles
Housing has become a vital issue all across our region; it is a pressing need, but not simple to resolve. It will be with us for some time to come and we have to seek out a multi-prong strategy to address it. But there are some steps that can be taken to set the conditions of success, one parcel at a time. Joseph Maltby in the Henrico Citizen had an interesting story with wider implications about one of those solutions.
He writes about a development along Chamberlayne Road just north of Azalea Avenue in Henrico County that will see a new, 186-unit, affordable housing development with density (three and four story buildings) along with other amenities. The interesting part of the story is that the eight-acre property was “declared derelict in 2019 and put on the county’s list of properties designated for redevelopment,” and the former Days Inn motel was demolished.
Continue reading
by Jon Baliles
One of Richmond’s favorite architectural wonders and spooky places is the Pump House along the Kanawha Canal and adjacent to the Boulevard Bridge. It has been the target and talk of renovations and adaptive reuses for almost a century since it closed in 1924 (the city wanted to tear it down in the 1950s, go figure), and now some federal funding is coming to help jump start the conversation yet again, according to Hunter Reardon at Richmond Magazine.
The nonprofit Friends of Pump House took an interest in preserving the property in 2017 and now $1 million in renovation funds will be used, half of which was secured by Virginia Sens. Mark Warner and Tim Kaine as part of a federal spending bill signed in December.
The City of Richmond will use $500,000 to “stabilize the Byrd Park Pump House, expand its capacity beyond the current limit of 25 and to preserve it for future generations,” according to a joint statement. The money is expected to be matched by private donations from Historic Richmond.
“It’s sort of a Sisyphean task to preserve an old building like this, but you’d be surprised how good of a shape some parts of the building are in,” says Penn Markham, president of Friends of Pump House. “We’re working on a study with Quinn Evans architects to figure out what needs to be done to spend the money wisely. For example, there’s no point fixing the floor if you haven’t fixed the roof first.”
Fully restored, the site could became a super-popular destination for weddings, retreats, fundraisers, and other cool events with the canal and the James River right outside. And there have long been discussions of varying degree about restoring the canal from the Pump House to Tredegar downtown — it may come in phases, but that would be just about one of the coolest experiences anywhere.
Markham hopes this infusion of cash is the beginning of a full revitalization. “This is the most serious renovation effort in the last 100 years,” he says. “A lot of people have talked about it, but nobody’s ponied up the money until now. It just might work — there are a lot of people in the community that want it to happen.”
Jon Baliles is a former Richmond City Councilman. This is an excerpt from the original article posted on his blog, RVA 5×5. It is posted here with permission.
by Joe Fitzgerald
The Bluestone Town Center (BTC), according to council members who voted 3-2 to approve it, was decided in secret meetings between those council members and the applicants. At Tuesday’s open meeting in which they voted to approve BTC, those council members rather shamelessly admitted to those sessions.
City staff and the city manager effectively sat on their hands during the discussion, which brought questionable numbers and questionable rhetoric from rookie council members Dany Fleming and Monica Robinson, respectively. It was left to Councilman Chris Jones and Mayor Deanna Reed to present the arguments against the development with an assist from City Attorney Chris Brown.
The city manager was mostly silent throughout the conversation.
Also mostly silent was Councilwoman Laura Dent. She made the motion to grant the rezoning BTC sought, and followed the motion with a rambling explanation of what she seemed to say was one of the best things about the project for her, the promise of solar energy panels. Her motion effectively released the developers from their legally binding proffer to provide the panels, but she said she believed they would be installed anyway based on her private discussions with the developers. Continue reading
by Jon Baliles
There are not many other cities in the country that would debate plans for multiple baseball stadiums in multiple locations over multiple decades and then, after seemingly signing off on a new stadium, roll over after being told by Major League Baseball that public monies must be spent for a batting cage in a stadium that has two years of life left in it.
But hey, this is Richmond, and that is apparently what will happen in the coming months. According to Jonathan Spiers at Richmond BizSense, “For the Richmond Flying Squirrels to be able to play this spring, Major League Baseball is requiring that the city-owned Diamond be upgraded — at a cost of $3.5 million – to meet certain standards for pro baseball facilities. In addition to repairs to the concrete structure’s roof and supports, MLB is requiring construction of a second batting and hitting tunnel as well as renovations to both team locker rooms.”
The City has clearly been sitting on this news and has already filed the permits; the work will begin ASAP, as the season starts in just over one month. The concrete supports most definitely need looking after and refurbishment; they are old and dangerous; there was a close call when a chunk fell off of one support about 15 years ago and could have seriously injured someone. I try never to sit under one of them when I go to a game; you just never know.
Continue reading
by Joe Fitzgerald
Take our word but not our numbers, Bluestone Town Center (BTC) backers seem to say
The moral of this story is: what the City Council doesn’t know won’t hurt the HRHA.
When I first heard about the scope of the BTC, I did some quick arithmetic and came up with an astronomical estimate of how many new K-12 students it would generate. I was wrong; the total was merely stratospheric.
Perhaps unwilling to accept the blog post of an ex-mayor, HCPS created its own model and discovered my revised numbers were pretty close. (For the record, proving me right is not why they created it.) They came up with a model that said 322 new students.
Worth noting, HCPS provided two sets of numbers. One was if they applied their model to 900 new housing units in Harrisonburg, and the second if they applied it to 900 in the southwest corner of town. The difference wasn’t significant. What was significant was the effort to share all relevant information.
In October, HRHA pointed out to HCPS that 60 of its units were for seniors, so HCPS reconfigured the estimate. (Because there’s a hell of a lot of H’s in this history, let me help: HRHA is Harrisonburg Redevelopment Housing Authority, and HCPS is still Harrisonburg City Public Schools. HRHA is partnered with EquityPlus, or EP, to apply for a rezoning to build BTC.)
The new estimate from HCPS was down to 273. A little more than half an elementary school.
Continue reading
by Joe Fitzgerald
Those aren’t wood chips or bark in the cow pasture.
David Foster Wallace tells the story of two young fish swimming along when an older, wiser fish swims past and asks, “How’s the water?” One of the young fish looks at the other and asks, “What’s water?”
Absurdity is the water that proponents of the Bluestone Town Center (BTC) are swimming in. Like the young fish, they’ve been in it long enough and deeply enough that they don’t know that’s what it is.
Consider this scenario. A city council member who serves as the council’s representative to the planning commission listens to a long recommendation from the planning staff. She then makes a motion to more or less accept the recommendation. Four weeks later, she asks the planning staff what their recommendation meant.
Yes, this really happened. So did the argument that building apartments in a cow pasture would preserve farmland.
Continue reading
The benefits of 60 years of headlong federal government expansion, Northern Virginia edition.
By James C. Sherlock
The federal government has for nearly three years been paying very expensive leases for D.C area office buildings that are virtually empty.
COVID emergency. Or was.
Now it is a battle between the comfort of federal employees with working from wherever they can get a good network connection vs. actually showing up at the office.
The feds report that as of the beginning of this calendar year, 47% of federal employees were still working remotely.
Since civilian federal employees thankfully still include people who work in other than an office as their normal place of work, we can assume that more than 47% of Northern Virginia federal workers are working remotely.
And we can assume they like it. Would you like to try to get to D.C. every day from, say, western Fairfax County, much less the exurbs, if you didn’t have to?
Republicans in the House of Representatives and the Democratic mayor of Washington D.C have formed an unusual coalition to get them back to the office.
Beltway Democrats in the House fought it there and have lost so far . Senate Democrats and President Biden, mindful that federal employees are one of their most dependable voting blocs, are unlikely to follow the House’s lead.
But it is secretly kind of fun to consider that Northern Virginia would sort of explode if they all tried to return in the same week.
Perhaps the experience would prompt efforts to return some of NOVA to a semblance of livability by distributing the headquarters of most of the agencies across the country.
Continue reading
by Joe Fitzgerald
The only thing I remember from Howard Fast’s Lavette family saga is from the fourth book, The Legacy. A pragmatic leftist organizer is registering Black voters in Mississippi with two dewy-eyed liberals, and an older couple invites the three into their home. They drink coffee and the two liberals talk about the high-flown principles behind what they’re doing and what great things they hope to do for the Black community in the South.
The pragmatic leftist sees two things wrong. First, the couple is already registered; the organizers should move on to someone who’s not. Second, they’re drinking a week’s worth of coffee from a couple too proud to say anything.
Fast could be heavy-handed in his writing — but he made a good point. The people who thought they were doing the couple a favor just didn’t get it. The dew is in the eyes of proponents of the Bluestone Town Center (BTC) today.
Continue reading
by James Wyatt Whitehead, V
Conflict rages yet again on the site of two major Civil War Battles, Manassas National Battlefield Park, in Prince William County, Virginia. This is nothing new to Northern Virginia residents who can recall the rally cry of “Save the Battlefield.” In 1988, developers fought and lost the battle to build a 1.2 million square-foot mall on property essential to the core of Manassas Battlefield. In 1993, the Walt Disney Company proposed building a 3,000-acre history theme park in nearby Haymarket, Virginia. Preservationists effectively stonewalled the idea and Disney retreated in fear of losing a coveted positive public image.
The Battle of Manassas rages yet again in 2023. This time the antagonist is the Prince William County Board of Supervisors. In November 2022, the board approved on a 5-2 vote a change in zoning rules that would permit the construction of data centers. The property in question is adjacent to the western border of the battlefield. The current plan for the Prince William Digital Gateway encompasses 2,139 acres of land.
Continue reading
by Joe Fitzgerald
There’s a box, and there’s a snowball.
The box is the support of the Bluestone Town Center. It is a well-constructed but beautifully decorated box, built on strong buzzwords. Affordable Housing, and Climate Change, and Dense Development are the shiny wrapping on this gift. The snowball of opposition rolling toward City Hall grows each time a post on social media begins, “I didn’t realize ….” Didn’t realize how big it is, how much traffic, how much impact on the schools, how far from the center of town it is.
The box is being built purposefully. Proponents on the Planning Commission and City Council who have not yet heard the presentation of pros and cons are publicly and privately adding items to the box. Their box is a container for their support of the project, and they will only add those things that bolster their case.
The snowball is built on surprise. With local journalism struggling, people find out in bits and pieces how large the thing is, how many cars and students it will add, how badly proponents have considered flooding, runoff, and blasting.
The box includes support that’s at best half-hearted from city staff. The recommendation from the Community Development staff reads less like approval and more like, “Well, we guess it’s OK.” The City Attorney outlines why the offers to mitigate school impact are illegal under current law and an administrative nightmare if the city changes the law to accommodate them.
The Harrisonburg Redevelopment and Housing Authority (HRHA) and the tax specialists will open their box at the Planning Commission meeting Tuesday, where they will explain how this is the greatest thing since the golf course. The snowball of citizens will attempt to deliver death by a thousand cuts. They don’t have the staff, they don’t have the legal help, and they don’t have elected and appointed officials who’ve already made up their minds. They only have the spirit of those who have throughout our history stood up and told their government it’s wrong.
Opponents have already been described in whispers as NIMBYs, or “not in my back yard.” I live two miles away, so it’s hardly in my back yard. But what if it were? Rezoning requests like this one are required to inform neighbors. The whole idea of zoning is to regulate what is built next to what. Homeowners’ defense of their surroundings should not be subordinate to what a planning commission or HRHA chair thinks is best for them and their neighbors.
As this proposal goes forward, I hope elected and appointed officials will remember that they serve the entire city and not just the preferences of a vocal political minority. For the people we elect and the people they appoint, the whole city is supposed to be their back yard.
Joe Fitzgerald is a former mayor of Harrisonburg. This column is republished with permission from his blog, Still Not Sleeping.
by James C. Sherlock
With all of the public policy discussion of housing in Virginia, it is useful to examine how burdened Virginians are by the costs of their housing.
Based on brand new data from the Bureau of the Census, the average Virginia homeowner is in pretty good shape compared to others in America.
But still over a third of them carry a cost burden for that housing that exceeds the recommended 30% of household income. Those burdens in turn challenge the futures of the very industries that build and finance housing.
In the case of renters, it is difficult to see how half of them can pay the rest of their bills and save to buy a house.
Just like the rest of American renters.
We’ll take a look. Especially at the outlier case of Virginia Beach. Continue reading
Courtesy californiahumandevelopment.org
by James C. Sherlock
The Richmond Times-Dispatch, on cue, wrote in an editorial the other day that more state money was needed to fund local housing.
Maybe.
But that is not the first place to look.
The governor wants to condition development aid to local communities on their reforming land-use policies to permit more construction.
I have a few ideas along that line.
Proffers, also known as conditional zoning, are a recognition that real estate developments have impacts on other properties and on services provided by the local jurisdiction. Fair enough.
The money for roads, sewers and schools has to come from somewhere. Proffers make the developers and their customers pay for a share of capital improvements deemed necessary by city/county planners.
Wielded unpredictably, and sometimes unethically, they are also part of the problem. See the excellent article Politics and Proffers by Matt Ahern for the games played with proffers and their cost to the housing economy.
Then there is low-cost housing.
The Commonwealth by law permits but does not require localities to waive fees for low-cost housing. That law, originally and curiously restricted to only non-profit developers, was updated in 2019 to permit the same waivers to for-profit builders.
Send state housing funds only to jurisdictions that do so. Require in law a limit to the costs of proffers for low-cost housing.
Finally, tax Virginia’s astonishingly profitable non-profit hospitals to help them with their mission of caring for the disadvantaged — in this case in low-cost housing. Continue reading
Older houses in the Lyon Park neighborhood in Arlington. When these houses come on the market, they will likely be replaced with a much larger house like the one below. Whether other types of housing should be allowed is being hotly contested in Arlington. Photo credits: top: Advon Group; bottom: DC Metro Neighborhoods
by Dick Hall-Sizemore
Three years ago, in one of his periodic pleas for more flexibility in zoning laws to enable more affordable housing, Jim Bacon discussed “missing middle” housing and noted that Arlington County was beginning to consider how to address that idea. Arlington released its study late last year and the concept and recommendations have been a major source of controversy this year.
I ran across the term “missing middle” and the controversy in Arlington recently in an article in the Washington Monthly. The author, Gabby Birenbaum, is a native of Arlington. She describes her childhood growing up in the Lyon Park neighborhood in the early 2000’s with great fondness. “I absolutely loved the place.” It was a place “that everything I could desire was a walk or a short bike ride away.” She then describes significant changes in the last few years in which “growth has gone completely gangbusters.” The result has been, as the title of the article laments, “I can’t afford to live where I grew up.” Continue reading
The James River in downtown Richmond
by Jon Baliles
The James River is often (rightfully) cited as the region’s crown jewel. It is the one thing just about everyone can agree on, rally behind, enjoy in their free time, and show off to out-of-town friends. If you recall the Richmond Riverfront Plan that was developed by the City at considerable expense in 2012, the first page notes:
The Plan identifies opportunities for new and expanded connections and open spaces, incorporating a broad range of landscape experiences and programmatic opportunities; it also highlights preferred private development sites that will both gain from and contribute to the long-term stewardship of the Riverfront. The Riverfront Plan establishes the James River as a shared amenity for Richmond’s broader community, a dynamic year-round attraction for the surrounding counties and region, as well as an international destination. Strengthening and re-forging physical connections and continuities with the river will significantly enhance adjacent neighborhoods, reverberating benefits well beyond the project boundary.
Some of the goals/projects of the plan were small and attainable, others large and complex, which would take planning and patience to achieve. But goals they were, and they are still worth pursuing. Ahhh, those big and grand plans that would do so much to make our river and riverfront more awesome by the year.
So, what happened to the Riverfront Plan? Continue reading
