Green Albemarle County?
I wish I could have gone to this.
From a Daily Progress progress article this morning.
Miles of greenway trails connecting parks, homes and schools.
A streetcar system in Charlottesville, quickly moving people and reducing car traffic.
A new emphasis on locally grown food, increasing nutrition and decreasing oil consumption.
These ideas were the focus of Albemarle County’s second Green Infrastructure Forum on Thursday. About 40 residents attended the event, which focused on the greenway trails system, downtown transportation and local food production.
There are a lot of good ideas here, and I am sure there were more that didn’t make the paper. Does anyone out there have notes they would like to share?
Radical ideas like this that seek to change not just how our community grows, but also how we live and behave on a daily basis need the right people to support them.
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Water
A little bit of conservation can go a long way.
I noted a little while ago that we should be mindful of our resources. Now apparently others are agreeing (albeit with more knowledge).
From a WCAV report -
According to The National Weather Service there is a developing drought in our area. The city and county are now asking people and businesses to voluntarily conserve water.
“We just want to encourage people to use water wisely,” said Bill Brent, Executive Director of the Albemarle County Service Authority.
Water conservation and supply is a constant topic.
ACSA reports that water levels in the reservoirs are a little bit low.
New listing in Ruckersville
Betty (my mom) has just put a property on the market in Ruckersville - 9 miles to the Target/Hollymead Town Center and 13 miles to Rio Road in the City.
You can see more information at our website and a google map here.
October Forum Watch
The Free Enterprise Forum’s October Newsletter has been released. As usual, there is a lot of pertinent information. Full text is below.
Read more
Local traffic is truly a regional issue
An interesting discussion at cvillenews.com yielded, in addition to a thoughtful and cogent debate, this link that gives direction as to where the Charlalbemarle traffic is coming from.
Who knew that an estimated 99 people commute from DC to Cville? Continuing to focus on transportation/infrastructure/growth issues on a county-by-county basis is myopic, short-sighted and frankly, silly. Regional issues need regional solutions.
Transportation and infrastructure are matters that are driven by and have a direct impact on the real estate industry and profession. More vehicular traffic on the same infrastructure will affect our quality of life. Growth will happen. Managing it properly is key.
Technorati Tags: albemarle, Central Virginia, charlottesville, transportation
Free Enterprise Forum enters the Rich Collins fray
Today the Free Enterprise Forum released an Amicus Curie brief in support of private property rights. I wrote about this case here and here.
The Amicus Curie brief fully supports the right to free speech but contends such a right does not supercede the right of a property owner to control his property. “The issue in this case is not whether the candidate has the plaintiff has a right to speak out about his candidacy, or the candidacy of others…The issue in this case is not the right to speak, but the location at which he can engage in that speech” according to the brief.
Saying that someone’s property rights (in this case, Shoppers’ Worlds’) are less valuable than others’ is simply an untenable position.
The full press release is here or below and the brief can be found at the FEF’s website (PDF).
Side note from today’s C-Ville -
All’s well that’s Orwell
Whether you agree with their politics, you’ve got to hand it to the right-wingers for one thing—branding. Today the Free Enterprise Forum released a report en-couraging the City of Charlottesville to build the Meadowcreek Parkway with a roundabout at the intersection of the U.S. 250 Bypass and McIntire Road, instead of waiting to build a federally funded grade-separated interchange there. The report, funded by the Forum, is called “Review of Reasonableness.” You say you don’t agree with the report? What are you, unreasonable? Why do you hate reason? (bolding mine)
Ha.
Update: The Daily Progress has a story today.
Technorati Tags: albemarle, charlottesville, politics
Albemarle Place
From today’s C-Ville, written by John Borgmeyer -
With the promise of 1.8 million square feet of new construction—including a hotel, restaurants, a cinema, retail outlets, a grocery store, a two-storey department store and up to 800 residential units—Albemarle Place would be the latest incarnation of Albemarle County’s “neighborhood model.” Adopted in 2001, the neighborhood model asks developers to create more “urban” landscapes by building according to 12 principles, including “pedestrian orientation,” “buildings and spaces of a human scale,” “relegated parking” and “affordability with dignity.”
It seems the developers are fairly confident they will receive approval, yet not a word about infrastructure in this article. To get an idea about how slowly the development process moves, read this article at The HooK, (in 2003) with the statement about Mr. Cox - Now in his fourth year of trying to get Albemarle Place built … but I digress. Oops, here too - Cox estimates a late summer 2005 groundbreaking, at the earliest, and construction duration of 16 months. The development process is indicted once again.
Bob Burke with Bacon’s Rebellion remarked earlier this year:
By traditional planning logic, the Albemarle Place project is in the worst possible location: The trips generated by thousands of additional residents and workers should turn U.S. 29 into a poster child for gridlock. But the Albemarle planners know what they’re doing. In fact, the rest of Virginia should watch this development closely because it may offer a way to harness economic growth into a mechanism for transforming the disconnected, traffic-plagued development of the past four decades into something far more livable.
What makes this project different is its approach to moving people between home, work and daily errands, trips that otherwise would crowd existing roads. The development follows the precepts of New Urbanism: a pedestrian- friendly mix of residential, retail and commercial that gives people a chance to live near where they work and shop.
One of the engineers stated in 2003 (again with County bureaucracy’s stagnant pace) in a Lisa Provence article in The HooK -
“To critics who say Albemarle Place will only make the Hydraulic/29 intersection worse, Cox answers, “The traffic at Albemarle Place will be inconsequential.”
Nice. No matter how you look at it, this project will be completed. The timeline is more extended that perhaps ever imagined, and the infrastructure is inadequate, but it will be built. I apologize for the tone of this post, but I will be directly impacted. My office is less than a half-mile from this development; if you’re curious, see the map below. Albemarle Place is the open space at the top, between Hydraulic Road and Greenbrier Drive (but doesn’t encompass all of that space).
To really get into the nitty gritty, spend some time here looking at proffer data on Albemarle’s site.
This is a good article from the Virginia Business Online on this subject.
I am working on another post about the public’s perception of their involvement. I think this development is a key example.
Technorati Tags: albemarle, charlottesville, growth, transportation
Get a new hobby!
In a report that is indicative of the what happens when barriers to entry are low -
A 46.1 percent increase in the number of Realtors in Massachusetts since 2001 means there is now one Realtor for every 1.6 houses sold in the state so far this year. That number is on track to fall far short of the 2.9 houses sold for every one Realtor four years ago.
This sort of number hurts everybody - including me and my business! Now I just need to find the numbers for the Virginia Association of Realtors.
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This work by Jim Duncan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. -
