Category Urban Planning

Entries 40 Total

People Fleeing Maryland

Nov 15, ’07 11:15 AM

The Washington Post:

In recent years, Maryland’s economy has slowed relative to other places. It is still holding up, however, experiencing only a slight decrease compared with other states.

So:

  1. Relative to other places, the Maryland economy has slowed. But
  2. Compared with other states Maryland has experienced only a ‘slight decrease’.

If they mean by #2 that the decline has been slight when compared to the declines seen in other states, #1 is false. If they mean by #1 that the Maryland economy has slowed when compared to other places, #2 is false. Professional journalism, ladies and gentlemen! Step right up and see the journalism! Ladies and children not admitted, because of the gruesome horrors of the professional journalism all over the place.

This wonderful professional journalism is found in a curiously short article headlined ‘Housing Costs Driving Away Marylanders’, on page T1 of today’s Post. Because of the way the Post organizes their website, it’s hard to tell what the heck page T1 is; but I think it’s the weekly zoned tabloid section that varies according to where you buy the paper. If I bought it here, it would be ‘Virginia’; in Maryland, this would be titled ‘Maryland’.

In any case, it’s in the Washington Post, and they ought to be ashamed. The biggest problem isn’t even the terrible editing. The big problem is that it doesn’t connect this with a story that ran on page A1 yesterday, headlined ‘Stricter Policy On Growth Approved in Montgomery‘.

That story is about Maryland’s most populous county raising school ‘impact taxes’ on new residential construction by 125%, and transportation impact taxes 70%. The example the Post gives has the taxes rising from $15,375 for a given new single-family home to $31,105.

$10 million a year from the tax is to be used to provide rental subsidies for ‘moderate’-income residents, and new development is now banned all together in the catchment areas of three high schools.

Surely that’s unrelated, though.

Its reasonable for local governments to impose some restrictions on construction; the development depends on the roads and other services which are run by the local government. In the absence of road pricing, this means jerky command-economy tactics like occasionally banning development.

Command economies are easy to get wrong, though, because they such systems are inherently brittle. Bad decisions are hard to reverse, and the worst ones are often the hardest. When the local government persistently gets it wrong, to the point of driving people away, shouldn’t that at least merit a mention?

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Washington Post: Pro-Sprawl

Jul 24, ’06 11:00 AM

The Washington Post has, in its editorial and news writing, what you might call a generally ‘anti-sprawl’ position. The paper reflects the values of its culture, and its culture is that of downtown Washington, where it’s based.

So when it comes to urban planning, the Post favors the It’s-The-Greedy-Developers school of thought on what causes sprawl. The argument goes something like this: Housing developers, many of which are organized as limited-liability corporations, want to make as much money as possible. Therefore, it’s in their interest to build each house using as much land and as many materials as possible.

This is insane, of course: the general idea is to build things as cheaply as possible, and then sell them for what the market will bear. Specifically, you want to build condos or townhouses, because those actually produce the greatest return on investment.

The Post doesn’t see it that way, though, and they seem to willfully ignore, most of the time, the simple fact that county zoning boards more or less require developers to build sprawl. The counties like residential sprawl because it allows them to spend a hell of a lot of money per pupil on schools, which in turn makes their statistics look good. It’s a lot easier to spend a lot of money per pupil when you don’t have all that many pupils, and when those you do have all live in million-dollar houses which are generating quite a bit of property tax per family. So the counties essentially ban the construction of anything but million-dollar houses (or ‘active adult communities’, which they love because they produce tax revenue but don’t generate any kids for the schools) and then complain that the huge demand for housing for all the teachers they’ve hired isn’t being met because of… wait for it… greedy developers.

Anyway, so you would think that a developer buying up shoddily-built houses that straddle two lots each, in a neighborhood without sidewalks, and replacing each one with two houses would be something that would meet with the approval of the Washington Post, or that would at least merit a straight story without any moralizing.

But, of course, you would be wrong. The Post, like almost all of American society, utterly lacks any vision when it comes to the human habitat, and so it prefers stasis above all. That the status quo here embodies precisely that which the Post doesn’t like in other places is unimportant.

For $700,000 cash, a corporation named Hall Hollin LLC is offering to purchase Mark and Nancy Welch’s brick Cape Cod, built after World War II in one of Fairfax County’s oldest neighborhoods. No contingencies, no inspection, immediate closing. As is, because the house would be knocked right down.

In its place would rise not just one four-bedroom manse with granite countertops, ceramic tile, hardwood floors and a two-car garage, but two — towering 3 1/2 stories on the 13,000-square-foot lot and selling for $1.4 million apiece.

Four bedrooms! Ceramic tile! Wood floors! A two-car garage! What sybarites these mansion-dwellers must be! When they move in to the neighborhood, surely everyone will crowd around to see whether they’re made of gold, or rubies, or some kind of platinum-iridium alloy: because certainly people made of flesh could have no possible use for such luxuries.

The houses will tower 35 feet above grade! Such height! Perhaps God will confound the language of the builders, so the houses won’t get built.

Here’s a picture of Tino Manor (Mid)West:

Tino Manor West

Counting the porch and the terrace in the front yard, it ‘towers’ over 35 feet above the sidewalk. It ‘looms’, even, no? No? Huh. How about that.

The term ‘McMansion’ has officially been devalued. The Post applies it twice in this article, outside of quotes, to four-bedroom houses with two-car garages on 1/3-acre lots.

If we examine the article a little more, some clues emerge:

A red Hummer rumbles behind Mount Vernon Parkway, a showy hulk charging through humble rows of Cape Cods and ramblers.

Debbie Goram slides out of the driver’s seat, a real estate agent clutching a potential windfall for an unsuspecting homeowner. She crosses the modest front yard at 8036 Washington Rd. and shoves six pages under the front door.

[...] A dozen houses on double lots have sold so far, and developers are eyeing about 40 more — a bonanza for builders meeting buyers’ demands to live close in.

[...] They’re fighting the two-for-one plans every way they can: with protests, community meetings and glares at the neighbors who’ve sold. Like many residents watching old suburban values clash with new real estate values, they feel helpless.

To the Post, this is all about ‘values’, and it goes without saying that the ‘values’ of the people who live in the neighborhood and who don’t want to sell are inherently superior to the values of the people who have sold, the values of the developers, and the values of the people who will buy the new houses. The people living in the old houses are modest and humble; the real-estate agent working for the developers drives — no, charges around in — a Hummer, and a showy hulk of one at that. The Post doesn’t see fit to mention the cars that the residents drive, presumably because it’s irrelevant to the story. That didn’t keep them from using the agent’s car as the lead, though.

It’s interesting that the Post didn’t seem to illustrate this story — which appears on page B1, the front of the Metro section — with a single photograph of any of the houses in question. I found a picture of one under construction here, in a story about the redevelopment in a local newspaper:

Hollin Hall Village

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you your McMansion: a two car garage and four windows and a door across in front. Not a particularly big house these days: but, to paraphrase Jimmy Carter, it’s big in his heart. It’s uppity, in short. It puts on airs.

And the Washington Post doesn’t like that.

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Eyesore Of The Month

Dec 2, ’05 9:46 AM

I periodically like to call attention to James Howard Kunstler’s Eyesore of the Month feature: ‘Architectural blunders in monthly serial’.

He hasn’t got one up yet for December, but if you’re unfamiliar with the thing, there is already an archive of dozens of the things.

While poking in there just now, I came across this, the featured eyesore for October 2005:

Eyesore 200510

You know, I don’t entirely dislike Frank Gehry’s work: there’s definitely room for it in the world. This thing works because it incorporates such a bland building as its base; it winds up effectively making the brick cube seem more rectilinear than it would if it were all right angles, because the melting and distortion calls your attention to the things that aren’t melted. The corner nearest us in this photo is nice and crisp and proud, but it would just be boring if it weren’t for the Gehry garbage piled around and on the building.

But here’s the thing: quite a bit of Gehry’s work, particularly of late, is a one-trick pony. We get it now: it’s possible to build buildings that look like they’re falling down, or like they’re strange intersections of things from other dimensions. Bravo. Now either come up with some new ideas, or stop holding yourself out as some kind of icon of architectural creativity.

Anyway, truly great architects know how to create new, interesting, original buildings that exist in some kind of harmony with their surroundings, and that are as useful as they are good-looking (or at least striking). If they’re economical to build at the same time, so much the better. Gehry’s buildings are none of these, anymore. Why people — increasingly museums and other non-profit entities now, I note — continue to subsidize his vanity is beyond me: I suppose they’re afraid of being though to be philistines.

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Central Planning In Maryland

Oct 11, ’05 5:35 PM

“We’re suffering from our success as a great community,” Floreen said. “Our real estate prices are out of sight.”

That’s Montgomery County (MD) council member Nancy Floreen, quoted in a Washington Post story about a new proposal to do something about Montgomery County’s lack of ‘affordable housing’.

Montgomery County is a victim of its own success, Ms. Floreen says. That’s an interesting way to look at it.

To begin to understand the problem, please consider this map. Clicking on it will pop up a (much) bigger version:

Dc Area Montgomery Map

This is a map of all the properties listed in the Washington, DC multiple listing service on August 20, 2005, plotted by location and colored by price. The colors run, from least to most expensive: blue, green, light yellow, dark yellow, orange, red, purple. The exact values vary from map to map, but on this one, they are:

ColorMinimum
Price		Maximum
Price
Blue$0$341,000
Green$341,000$441,000
Light yellow $441,000$551,000
Dark yellow $551,000$649,000
Orange $649,000$748,500
Red $748,500$1,501,000
Purple$1,501,000

Montgomery County, Maryland is outlined in black. The county actually extends pretty far north, off the map; about 60% of it is shown here.

But even seeing only this part of the county, it’s clear what’s going on: Montgomery County is not so much the ‘victim of its own success’ as it is the victim of the fact that it’s illegal to build anything in half the county. Half the county is protected farmland, through which it’s impossible to build a badly-needed road. The lack of a road and bridge connecting the outlying Virginia suburbs (and Dulles Airport) to northern Montgomery County limits where you can effectively commute from if you work in the county; that demand, and the fact that nothing can be built in half the county, push up real estate prices.

If your goal is to inflate the price of your real estate, I heartily suggest that you hire Montgomery County planners as consultants. They have done a very good job.

But the constant complaining out of Montgomery County seems to suggest that their actual goal isn’t to inflate real estate prices. At the moment, the crisis seems to be that police officers, firefighters, and teachers — of which Montgomery County has many — can’t afford to live there.

The Montgomery County Council will consider a proposal today to require that 10 percent of homes built in new developments near Metro stations be set aside for middle-class families being priced out of the county’s soaring real estate market.

[...]

Such a program would be geared toward county employees — including teachers, firefighters, police officers and nurses who make too much to qualify for Montgomery’s affordable-housing program but not enough to buy a house or condominium at market rate, [Council Member Steven A.] Silverman said.

Silverman is expected to run for county executive in 2006.

One of his probable opponents in the Democratic primary, former County Council member Isiah Leggett, has called Silverman’s solution inadequate to meet middle-class housing needs. Leggett, instead, backs a more intensive approach: building entire housing developments with the majority of homes set aside for middle-class families.

Housing projects. For the middle class. This is what it’s come to, in Montgomery County.

I cannot help but notice that middle-class people (in this case, people making up to $100,000 a year, so genuinely middle-class) in the United States generally have no problems finding and buying the things they need on the open market. Cars, clothing, food, globe-trotting vacations: quite a large fraction of the world’s industrial output is dedicated to meeting the needs of middle-class Americans.

But they can’t afford to live in Montgomery County, Maryland, because the county has variously restricted where you can build; what you can build; how you can build; and who you can sell to. New residential construction in the county has to have sprinklers throughout; new developments have to have 12.5% of their units set aside for the county’s existing affordable-housing program; and at the moment, you are not allowed to start any new construction in the county thanks to a permit moratorium enacted this summer.

In Chevy Chase, there’s a separate six-month town moratorium on construction, intended to fight what they call ‘mansionization’. They don’t want mansions in Chevy Chase: they apparently want just what they already have: million-dollar three-bedroom bungalows.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is ‘success’, as in ‘being a victim of success’. Because certainly those sprinkler systems, and the costs incurred by builders when they’re hit with unannounced moratoria, and the cost of leaving half the county’s land empty are borne by someone else, and not the hapless would-be Montgomery County resident.

So the proposal, to further correct this housing shortage that arises out of the county’s interference, is, of course, more county interference. Already, if you make less than 70% of the median income, you qualify for Montgomery County’s bureaucratic affordable-housing program, where builders are required to build housing that is rented or sold at below-market rates in exchange for being allowed to build anything at all.

Now, the proposal is to force builders to subsidize another class of housing, this to be rented or sold at below-market prices to people based partly on their income but also on whether they work for the county.

This means that the county can continue to pay these people wages that do not allow them to live in the county, but that the county can nevertheless increase these people’s effective compensation by requiring builders to pay part of the teachers’, firefighters’, and cops’ salaries in the form of subsidized housing.

The beauty of this scheme is that the builders will have no choice but to raise prices on the housing that they are allowed to sell at market rates. If — to use an extreme example — the county required builders to give away 20 houses for every 80 they were allowed to sell, those 80 would have to be sold for 120% of the price they’d otherwise sell for. This would price them out of the reach of more people, who would then clamor for someone to subsidize housing for them. Essentially, the county is supporting its housing subsidies through a hidden tax on all unsubsidized housing in the county; this tax, in turn, increases the demand for subsidized housing and thus the power of the county in granting ‘relief’ from the pain that they are themselves inflicting.

Who will be next? Which group of people will be the next to be priced out of Montgomery County’s ‘open’-market housing and to petition the county for relief? My money is on retail workers.

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Cause and Effect, Part II

Jul 2, ’05 11:26 AM

In the Washington Post today:

After returning from his job as a writer for the American Civil Liberties Union one evening this spring, William Potter grabbed an iron pry bar and, with a few whacks, demolished the kitchen of his Petworth rowhouse.

I wonder whether he’s got a permit for that?

For Potter, 25, this act of destruction was just another thing he thought he would never accomplish so early in life. He certainly didn’t think so a year ago, when he was living frugally in a group house in Mount Pleasant and saving for a down payment. Now the first-time homeowner has a second job: rehabbing his house to a livable standard.

Because you can’t have people just rehabbing things to a livable standard without the proper paperwork. But rehab they will, because for some reason things that have been rehabbed are amazingly expensive. I wonder why that might be?

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Cause And Effect

Jul 1, ’05 7:06 PM

The Washington Post says:

The District’s skyrocketing real estate prices have fueled an increase in illegal construction as property owners across the city are building and renovating homes without obtaining the required permits, according to D.C. officials and a review of city records.

But it occurs to me that in fact real estate prices in D.C. may be ‘skyrocketing’ because it’s so damned hard to build anything there. They’re arresting people who are building without permits — or without the city’s bureaucracy being properly aware that permits have been obtained.

Cyrus C. Blackmon and his wife, Katarina Varani, were arrested at their Capitol Hill home in April and charged with building without a permit, removing stop-work orders and entering a property in violation of a stop-work order.

In the past 17 months, D.C. has issued over 1,400 stop-work orders, according to the Post. Fairfax and Montgomery counties — each of which is larger than D.C. — each issue fewer than fifty a year.

One report of illegal construction activity can quickly lead to other violators being cited.

Alerted by a neighbor, the agency’s inspection unit recently discovered that Oladele had been constructing a four-story, multiunit building at 723 Morton St. NW since 2003 without a building permit. Inspectors immediately posted a stop-work order.

Then they noticed that a homeowner across the street was renovating his house without permits. They halted that work, too. D.C. police officer Kevin E. Brittingham, the property owner, has received $10,000 in fines and penalties. He said he is appealing the fines because he didn’t know he needed a permit to remodel his kitchen and replace windows.

“I know now,” he said.

He knows to move out of D.C., and to a place that doesn’t see targets on all of its residents’ backs, if he has any sense.

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Arts Mumbo Jumbo and Eminent Domain

Feb 1, ’05 6:39 PM

For as long as I can remember, there’s been a push in St. Louis to develop a certain area — called ‘Grand Center’ by its boosters — as an ‘arts district’.

I call this kind of thing ‘Sim City Urban Planning’. In Sim City — and particularly in the early versions of the game — you are the god-mayor, lording it over some pathetically needy simulated citizens called ‘sims’. The sims, like real people, don’t like to pay taxes. Also like (many) real people, they expect the government to look after their every need. One of the things that raised the sims’ level of satisfaction with their city — and hence your score in the game — was a stadium. I forget how much of the game’s money a stadium cost, but it was a lot. Deployed early in the game, the stadium would (I think) increase your city’s rate of growth. Eventually, the citizens would demand one, and shortly thereafter your population wouldn’t grow unless you had a stadium.

Later versions of Sim City continued along this line, with parks, fountains, marinas, zoos, etc., etc. all offering opportunities to enhance your sims’ lives. You could always tell the cities built by people who didn’t know what the hell they were doing, because the city was going bankrupt trying to pay for all the amenities. When I first bought Sim City, I stayed up all night playing it on my XT. I gave up on it a couple of versions back, when it became clear that the simulation was failing to grow in sophistication at the same rate as the graphics.

Maxis, the makers of Sim City, focus now almost exclusively on The Sims, which I’ve never been able to get into, at all. Maybe I’m missing something obvious, but I’ve never been able to get past the fact that the sims in that game are horribly pathetic; they’re supposed to be adults, but they won’t go to the bathroom without explicit guidance from the user, and they show a marked tendency to stay up all night and sleep through work the next day. It’s very much like having a computer-simulated infant, but one who has external responsibilities and who has infintely more complex demands than those of an actual baby. Call me Jimmy Bringdown, but I have never been able to see the appeal of that. The game is popular enough that I assume that the characters must at some point start using the toilet on their own, but I have never had the patience to get to that point.

Anyway, I was talking about St. Louis, and specifically that part of St. Louis called (often ironically) Grand Center. Grand Center is an ‘arts district’, i.e. an area with a high concentration of galleries, museums, concert halls, and ‘upscale’ restaurants that tend to feature live jazz now and again. St. Louis already has a billion-dollar football dome, and a new baseball stadium is under construction. In the absence of a plausible excuse for spending money on any more sports facilities, the Sim City Urban Planning idiocy seems to have been turned up a notch lately in Grand Center.

Grand Center is a small area almost smack in the center of the city of St. Louis, stretching for a few blocks along Grand Avenue between Lindell and Delmar Boulevards, and maybe a block east and west of Grand. It’s home to Powell Symphony Hall, where the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra performs; the Fox Theatre, a restored movie palace; the St. Louis Contemporary Art Museum; a few other things, and a whole lot of parking.

In fact, there’s far more surface area devoted to public parking on the official Grand Center map than to anything else. Here’s their map, with the parking colored red:

grand_center_parking_320.jpg

Orange buildings are ‘performing arts’ spaces; purple means a restaurant; yellow is ‘education’, blue is ‘visual arts’. These categories are pretty widely-defined; ‘The Bistro At Grand Center’ is listed in purple (#25), and ‘Jazz At The Bistro’ — you will note that this is the same place, but with jazz — is orange #12.

‘Education’ is particularly broad, encompassing the local PBS station, a Catholic high school, the ‘Earthways Home, the ‘City House‘, which does God only knows what, and the Vaughn Cultural Center, which “promotes awareness of African-American history and culture through exhibits, storytelling and special programs”.

If you want to live in Grand Center — and plenty of people would, I’m betting, because St. Louis University is just off the bottom of the map — you can’t, generally. Residential space is shown in green. This is one of the reasons why there’s so much parking: so that people can drive in from the suburbs to eat overpriced food and watch (mostly) mediocre performances of this and that. The national touring company of Les Misérables opened there tonight!

Now, I haven’t lived in St. Louis for ten years, so things may have changed. Scratch that, things have changed. The Continental Life Building (#15 on map), at least, has been Recalled To Life after standing empty for decades. It gives me hope even for the Woolworths next door.

But it doesn’t give me hope for Grand Center as a whole. You may have deduced by now that I’m not particularly enthusiastic about the entire project, and you’d be right. St. Louis has a few such districts that have developed more organically, and that continue to be popular. Grand Center, on the other hand, is largely the product of eminent domain and of public money. This results in a mania for ‘inclusiveness’ that means that the place appeals to no one in particular. On January 27, there was a tsunami benefit concert at the Sheldon Concert Hall. The program:

1. YMCA Boys Choir (St. Louis Style Gospel)
2. Mark Holland (Native American Flute)
3. Farshid Etniko (Latin Jazz and World Music)
4. Los Flamencos (Flamenco Music and Dance)
5. Mitzi MacDonald and Keltic Reign (Maritime Canadian/Celtic)
6. One Kindred Soul (Americana) [i.e. countryish music]
7. Andrew O’Brien and Tommy Martin (Irish Fiddle & Pipes)

Now, I realize it’s a benefit, and that people might be expected to attend out of charity. That’s good, because I cannot imagine any other reason why any single person would be interested in this particular program. The individual acts might be fine, and might have their fan bases, but the juxtaposition of them shows the hazards of this kind of Art By Committee.

This beneift, and the ‘Red, Hot & Cool cabaret season’ (Oct 20-24) are the only things currently listed on the Grand Center ‘shows & events‘ page.

The calendar page is a little better, listing four distinct acts or shows in the month of February, and another two in March. It appears that the suburbanite’s vision of a ‘hip’ urban arts district doesn’t include a whole lot of ‘arts’, aside from touring companies of bad musicals.

Now, what would the next logical step be in developing such a glittering and bustling area? If you answered ‘seize the property of a profitable business on the periphery so you can build something that’s only a bare concept at this point’, you’re ready to be a St. Louis Urban Visionary. Read about it here, in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

An agency backed by the city is preparing to take Day’s [auto repair] business by eminent domain to make way for something called a “Media Box.”



Day can take the offer of $67,500 for his property — less than the city says it’s worth — or continue with an already drawn-out court battle. Either way, he has little chance of keeping his shop on a triangle of land at Spring Avenue and Olive Street. [...]



Grand Center’s vision has the area becoming the “cultural soul” of the city, a residential and commercial district that will rival the Delmar Loop and Central West End.

Because, of course, it’s better to use public financing and eminent domain to attempt to draw business away from already-successful districts.

The vision does not include an auto repair shop. The Post-Dispatch obtained a map of Grand Center’s “Strategic Development Master Plan” that shows the “Media Box” in the same spot as Royal Auto Repair.



So just what is a Media Box?



For weeks, officials in Grand Center and others involved refused to discuss the plan. [...]

“I can’t talk to you about the Media Box,” Eric Friedman, a real estate agent who describes himself as a principal in the project, said earlier last month.

But last week, Michelle Cohen, a public relations executive recently hired by Grand Center, said the “Media Box” is a building that will hold a design studio and apartments or condominiums.

“The ‘Media Box’ is really the working title for the design studio piece of it,” Cohen said.



Friedman is working with the city’s postmodern standard-bearer, an asbestos lawyer turned multimedia artist named Paul Guzzardo. Guzzardo has been involved in creative presentation of images, including projecting the last episode of “Seinfeld” on the side of a building on Washington Avenue. He also owned an “interactive” nightclub, Cabool, where dance moves were broadcast over the Internet.

It is worth noting here that this story is presented as a straight news piece by the Post-Dispatch.

“I have an interest and kind of obsession with information culture and urbanism,” Guzzardo said recently – although he also refused to discuss the Media Box.

Undoubtedly it’s in the pursuit of ‘urbanism’ that he’s helping to create an arts amusement-park for a demographic that doesn’t exist. And an interest in ‘information culture’ apparently doesn’t extend to letting that information out of the Petri dish.

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Suburban Addresses

Jan 28, ’05 3:12 PM

The other night, the lovely & talented Nicole and I ate at Sweetwater Tavern, one of a small chain of quasi-upscale semi-’western’ themed restaurants.

I say ‘quasi-upscale’ because there’s nothing particularly fancy about the food, the service, or the decor: it’s just that nothing is horrible. There’s adequate staff to handle the volume of business, the food is tasty and arrives hot, and there are no fluorescent lights in the place. I consider this the bare minimum for operating a restaurant: unfortunately the restaurant industry seems to consider this quite a luxurious experience.

Anyway, so we went to Sweetwater Tavern, and we encountered these strange flyers touting a favorable review of the place from the Washington Post.

Sweetwater Wp Flyer

I say that these flyers were ‘strange’ because we were already there. We’d been sold. At this point our opinion of the place would be formed largely by our own experience, not a review from the Post.

Anyway, what was particularly interesting about the flyer was the way the Post described the location of the location we were at:

Sweetwater Wp Flyer Detail

I’d never realized the address of the place before: 14250 Sweetwater Lane. And if that wasn’t helpful, it’s near Multiplex Drive. In other words, it’s in the Sweetwater parking lot, near the movie theater. This is helpful if you’re lost in the maze of strip malls that surrounds the restaurant, but utterly useless if you are looking for it from, say, anywhere else. ‘Off Route 28 just south of I-66′ would be helpful. But no, this is the suburbs, and so everything’s address reflects its position not relative to any street you might be familiar with, but rather to its own parking lot.

The other two locations aren’t on other Sweetwater Lanes — though really it wouldn’t be surprising to find a place declaring its parking lot a street and naming multiple ones the same thing in the same area — but rather on ‘Gatehouse Plaza’ and ‘Waterview Plaza‘. Waterview Plaza is just off Leesburg Pike west of Cascades Parkway (i.e. right about here), and ‘Gatehouse Plaza‘ is at the intersection of Gallows Road and Arlington Boulevard — two major thoroughfares. Anyone vaguely familiar with the area could find a place described as ‘at Gallows and Arlington’ or ‘On Route 50 just west of the Beltway’.

We don’t get this, though: instead we get parking lots named as streets, and five-digit addresses thereon.

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The Problem With Zoning, Part 735

Nov 10, ’04 5:14 PM

The Montgomery County, MD council has approved zoning restrictions — unanimously — on ‘combination retail stores’, i.e. ‘discount’ stores of more than 120,000 square feet and with with grocery stores and pharmacies inside. This is effectively a special zoning restriction on Wal-Mart, though it affects a few other companies, too.

Montgomery County yesterday joined a growing list of jurisdictions around the country that have imposed tougher zoning restrictions on big-box retailers, marking a victory for unions and Giant Food LLC, which joined forces to lobby for the restrictions.

Now, a municipality trying to regulate Wal-Mart in some way isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Wal-Mart is blamed for causing ‘sprawl’ all the time, but in fact a Wal-Mart store is denser than most U.S. retail operations. A Wal-Mart has about the same floor space as a whole strip mall, but because there’s no space wasted on separating interior walls and multiple sets of restrooms and so forth, you’ve got more net selling space than you do with the same size building split up among multiple tenants.

Because of this greater net density, Wal-Marts cause traffic problems if they’re done wrong. As long as the county is in charge of building and maintaining roads, it makes sense for them to have a hand in determining suitable locations for Wal-Marts.

But that’s not what the recent vote in Montgomery County is about, at all. We didn’t have the county traffic engineer quoted in the story, talking about how they would manage to handle the customers’ cars. We didn’t have the county’s redevelopment poobah, pimping some blighted acres that might be profitable used as a Wal-Mart site. We had unions and Giant Food. The unions don’t like Wal-Mart because they don’t pay people $17 an hour to stock shelves, and Giant Food doesn’t like Wal-Mart because Giant is incapable of competing with them.

Before the vote, a couple of council members cited Wal-Mart by name. George L. Leventhal (D-At Large) said he decided to support the bill after meeting with a local hardware store owner who begged him to keep Wal-Mart out of Montgomery County.

Ahh, land-use regulation. What fun. Home-improvement stores and ‘club membership’ stores are not covered under the law. The coalition of people who came together to protect Montgomery County from this scourge of inexpensive merchandise and entry-level jobs is impressive:

[County Executive Doug] Duncan lobbied members to vote for his proposal, his spokesman, David Weaver, said. He had help from Giant Food, which sent letters to the council supporting the proposed restrictions. Officials of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 400, meanwhile, organized labor, education and women’s rights advocates to testify with them in front of the council in October.

Got that? Unions and ‘education and women’s rights advocates’ are involved in making zoning decisions.

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Front Royal Council Comes Out Against Front Royal Council

Sep 29, ’04 5:49 PM

For those of you who are following the saga of the attempt to build a Wal-Mart store in Front Royal (more here), an interesting development was reported in last week’s Warren Sentinel:

Town changes position on Wal-Mart
Is Front Royal suing itself? New council sides with Gateway group against rezoning

By ROGER BIANCHINI
The Warren Sentinel

Front Royal Mayor James M. Eastham verified on Tuesday that the Town of Front Royal has changed its legal stance in the suit filed to challenge the previous Town Council majority’s rezoning of the proposed Riverton Wal-Mart site.

The filing of an amended plea of the town’s position in the suit filed by five citizens with ties to the Save Our Gateway grass roots organization was made on Monday, which was the final day such a filing could be made according to an opinion filed by presiding Judge James V Lane on Aug. 31.

“It is the duty of the Town Council of Front Royal to consider the health, safety and general welfare of the town and all its citizens whenever making a zoning decision,” Eastham said in a prepared statement.

“In that vein, it is the considered opinion of the Town Council of Front Royal, with one abstention (Daniel Pond III) and one dissent (Joe McDaniel), that the former Town Council acted unreasonably in rezoning of the Richards tract in Riverton from R-1 to C-2 intensive commercial for a 184,000 square foot WalMart and an additional 80,000 square feet of commercial space is not consistent with the Town’s Comprehensive Plan.

“In addition, there is grave concern that the traffic created by this intensive commercial district will create insurmountable traffic congestion at the intersection of Routes 55 and 522.

“This is why the Town Council authorized filing an Amended Answer in the case that agrees with the various allegations in the Bill of Complaint filed by Mr. Jakabicin and others that the former Council’s conduct was unreasonable, not fairly debatable, invalid and unlawful in all respects,” the mayor concludes in a bombshell indictment of the former town leadership defeated in the May election.

Mayor Eastham and councilmen Stan Brooks, Eileen Grady and Tim Darr were swept into office this spring in what was largely perceived as a public indictment of the pro-Wal-Mart rezoning incumbents running for re-election.

Defeated in that election were Mayor Robert L. Tennett Jr. and councilmen Hollis Tharpe, E.D. “Dusty” McIntosh and Eugene Tewalt. Tennett was a vocal supporter of the Wal-Mart proposal, Tharpe and McIntosh were part of the majority that approved the rezoning.

While Tewalt did not vote, his decision to remain at a meeting to allow a quorum and second vote of approval was perceived as defacto support of the rezoning.

“I don’t know who we’re suing now,” one of the plaintiffs said following the Town filing.

Wal-Mart attorneys originally filed a brief supporting the former Town Council’s position in defense of its 2003 rezoning of the Richards tract.

However, while Wal-Mart has a direct interest in the rezoning it is not clear what the company’s legal status is in a challenge of governmental actions of the former Town Council.

Wal-Mart attorneys John H. Foote and Alice G. Haase could not be reached for comment prior to press time on Wednesday.
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