I accepted this challenge not fully understanding the time that is required to read (or at least attempt to read) all of the offerings of the Charlottesville blogging community. If anyone feels left out, I apologize.This week was punctuated by the Charlottesville City elections and the opening of the Downtown Mall to even more traffic.Lucretius reflects on the election, as does Rick.DocMultimedia, the most ornery resident of the “village” reflects on the opening of the Mall while Jeannine wonders whether “pedestrian mall” means something else.Waldo launched Virginia Political Blogs – an aggregator of perhaps the most active political blogosphere in the nation.Anoop reveals that the Waffle House takes credit cards. Is the apocalypse really that close?CvilleTomorrow notes the conflicts in installing a town within a town.The end of this chapter in the Living Wage campaign. I have a feeling that it will be back.Sean Tubbs with CPN is podcasting some of Charlottesville – Right Now. If only WINA would stream and podcast the entire shows …Dave comments on immigration.Joe continues his finding of some of the best stuff on the web. Bet on the price of gas!Duane laments the continuing lack of geographic knowledge of America youth.Private college counselors for the application-challenged.Lexi is tired.We have a broad and wide-ranging blogging community here in the Greater Charlottesville area. Any omissions were purely my fault.
Date Archives May 2006
Ha. Ha. Ha.
Just noticed this in my search statistics. A visitor recently came to my site after searching for this:how to deal with your bitchy realtorMy advice: get a new one.
Links of interest 05-05-06
It’s a busy week; these are a few of thing items worth paying attention to.Thus, even with both the price increases and the recent the upward creep in interest rates, homes are still more affordable than they were before 1992.After much debate, Albemarle BoS decides that encouraging 1,000 high-paying jobs to move here is a good thing.The green home trend continuesAlbemarle County BoS progressively adopts podcasting its meetings!
Charlottesville Blog Carnival
I will be hosting the Charlottesville Blog Carnival this Friday. If you have seen any posts that are particularly resonant, pithy or intriguing, please email me. Submission deadline is Thursday at 9pm.
Locked Out
Tying into the Jane Jacobs story is the Free Enterprise Forum’s “Locked Out” report, released yesterday. From their press release: The “Locked Out†report finds that just 16% of Albemarle homes are available to families earning median income. The report also finds Albemarle County has the largest planning department staff, the largest comprehensive plan and the longest approval time for subdivisions … the “Locked Out†report seeks to identify existing regulatory barriers and encourage an open cost/benefit analysis between regulation and affordability. The report includes an analysis of new urbanist design regulations, growth boundaries and their impact on land use patterns. So much to read … CvilleTomorrow reports as well.
Urban Planning … gone wrong?
On the heels of Jane Jacobs’, author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, comes this excellent commentary from Leonard Gilroy who says simply that we have it all wrong when it comes to urban planning. But if they go back and reread “Death and Life,” they’ll find Jacobs rightly asking, “How is bigger administration, with labyrinths nobody can comprehend or navigate, an improvement over crazy-quilt township and suburban governments?”She went on to ridicule the idea of regionalism as “escapism from intellectual helplessness” predicated on the delusion that the problems planners are unable to solve at the local level will somehow be more easily addressed on a larger-scale, concluding that “no other expertise can substitute for locality knowledge in planning.”Politicians and planners would do well to commemorate Jacobs by revisiting her work. Despite the best efforts of well-intentioned planners, you can’t “create” a vibrant city or neighborhood. The best cities and neighborhoods just happen, and the best thing we can do is to step out of the way of innovators and entrepreneurs.Is the Neighborhood Model really where we want to go?
CharlAlbemarle’s not number one!
We’re not even in the top 500!