Category Urban Planning

Entries 40 Total

U-Scan Till Scandal in Front Royal

Aug 6, ’04 1:38 PM

We don’t have much news here in Front Royal, which might be why we make the most of what little news we have.

I have written before about the hazards of bad user interfaces on self-service tills. Well, now it’s possibly bit someone in the ass; in the Warren Sentinel‘s words, a man’s life hangs in the balance. I don’t know whether I’d go that far: he’s likely facing a $25 fine. See what I mean about making the most of the news?

On Tuesday, a four-woman, three-man jury took just 30 minutes to return its verdict after hearing nearly seven hours of testimony and argument stemming from [Warren County Zoning Administrator Gordon] Jones’s ill-fated trip through a malfunctioning automated teller machine at Food Lion on July 18, 2003.



Jones contended he paid the machine — which was left open despite an apparent inability to take money, credit cards or coupons that day — with a combination of 12 Susan B. Anthony and Sacagawea $1 coins and some change. Jones testified he was dumping the coins he received in change from a stamp machine at the post office earlier in the day. The Front Royal Post Office is located across the street from the Warren County Government Center where Jones works.



Jones testified he was trying to keep a promise to his mother to avoid fast food after being diagnosed with diabetes by buying a rotisserie chicken and boxed baby spinach, along with a six-pack of diet soda at the grocery for his lunch that day.

Of course, the whole situtation is murky as hell; it should have been easy to determine whether or not everything had been paid for by counting the money in the machine and checking to see whether or not it was light. Apparently it didn’t even occur to anyone to do this. Jones maintains that this is all part of a vendetta against him on the part of the manager of the Food Lion.

The two front-page stories in this week’s Warren Sentinel, complete with all the intrigues, conspiracies, and even a zoning dispute of all things, are included in their entirety below the fold. If you happen to live in the Warren Sentinel‘s distribution area, I strongly urge you to buy a copy of the paper; I would hate to think that I am cutting into that fine publication’s circulation by reproducing this here, but the Sentinel doesn’t have much of a web presence.

I am beginning to think that I should establish a ‘Front Royal’ category here in order to collect all these little tales of Twin-Peaks-On-The-Shenandoah.

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In The Suburbs

May 23, ’04 11:55 AM

A new photo gallery, In The Suburbs, has been added to Tinotopia. Most of the pictures are from an area in northern Virginia that I find to be particularly horrifying. Describing the area more precisely than that — ‘an area in Northern Virginia’ — is hard; it’s so center-less that it doesn’t really have a name. You might call it ‘Sterling’, or ‘Dulles’ or, if you’re a real-estate marketeer, ‘Cascades’.

It’s what comes to my mind when I hear the word ‘sprawl’, and it’s awful. It is not entirely without charm; in particular there’s a strip mall where the developers made a real effort. Unfortunately, the result serves mainly to emphasize just how bad the whole place is.

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It's All About the Benjamins

May 18, ’04 12:36 PM

I have not been writing here because I have been too busy embracing and extending Tinotopia’s capabillities. Specifically, I have improved the photo gallery here, and it’s about ready for testing now.

To shake the thing down — I’m having trouble viewing thumbnails in some browsers myself — I have added a gallery of photos that illustrate some urban planning principles and that some of you may find interesting.

Comments on the photos can be made, but you’ll have to register with a valid e-mail address first. I generally prefer to let anyone say whatever they like, but that does tend to bring the idiots out of the woodwork; I have things configured so that, should you register and leave comments, only your username, not your real name or e-mail address, is shown.

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More Wal-Mart in Front Royal

May 10, ’04 5:22 PM

The recent election in Front Royal gets some coverage in the Washington Post.

In that election, the mayor and three town-council members who had voted in favor of an unpopular location for a Wal-Mart were turned out, and replaced with four people who specifically ran on a platform of telling Wal-Mart to put their store somewhere else.

Andrew Stokes, manager of the Alvin B. Stokes general store — which was established in 1946 by his grandfather — sells everything from cast-iron skillets to saddles.

This is an unbelievably meagre description of the Stokes general store. The best description is that it’s somewhat less indescribable than the Stokes Mart across the street. If you’re ever in Front Royal both of these are must-sees.

Stokes said that salesmen who sell him his products have told him that he can expect a Wal-Mart superstore to cut into his gross revenue as much as 20 percent the first year it is open. But he still wants the store to come to town because, well, the residents need a big outlet like that.

Get this? One of the town’s biggest retail merchants wants Wal-Mart to move in. This is an unusual situation, to say the least; the town just doesn’t want to Wal-Mart in a location that’s going to be a disaster.

But:

Keith Morris, a Wal-Mart spokesman, said last week’s election would not change the corporation’s plan to build on the site.

“We had previously been approved by the Town Council,” Morris said, “and that was the final vote that was necessary. Just because you change some faces on the local governing body does not take away the fact that we have already received our approval.”

He’s probably right. He’s definitely right as far as the composition of the council not changing the validity of the council’s previous vote. There is some question of whether the council’s previous vote was valid in the first place, though, a question which is to be discussed in court in September. (The controversy surrounds whether a council member who had recused himself from the vote due to a conflict of interest counts as a warm body for the purpose of establishing a quorum.)

But is this good business? “Notwithstanding the residents’ opposition to our building here, as expressed in the recent election, we’re going to build here anyway”? Wal-Mart’s rezoning was approved by the narrowest of margins, and even then only as a result of parliamentary shenanigans. A few months after that, the town voted out of office the people who supported Wal-Mart.

At this point, most businesses would conclude that they have a public-relations problem on their hands. Wal-Mart, on the other hand, tells the town to stick it where the sun don’t shine. So to speak.

I’ve said before and I will say again that I generally admire Wal-Mart as a business. I am not at all in Wal-Mart’s target demographic, but I still find shopping there less frustrating than I do more retail experiences. I have never — never — personally encountered a situation where Wal-Mart has broken the customer service rules.

But this statement from the Wal-Mart spokesman strongly supports a couple of the complaints the anti-Wal-Marters make: specificlly, that Wal-Mart is arrogant, and that they don’t care about the communities they inhabit. Wal-Mart has certainly shown that they don’t particularly give a damn about what the people of Front Royal want.

And Wal-Mart can do that, because their stores draw from a larger area than a single town, and because the people of Front Royal won’t cut off their nose to spite their face; even if Wal-Mart makes their contempt for the town clear, the prices are still low, and the selection still vast.

I do not think this is over, at all. Since I wrote about this topic the other day, I have come to believe that the answer must be some kind of tax-kickback scheme from the town. With a new council in place, the tax-kickback environment may have changed, and Wal-Mart might suddenly be more amenable to building on the ‘too-rocky’ site in a better location.

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Wal-Mart in Front Royal, and Town Elections

May 6, ’04 5:57 PM

So on Tuesday there was an election here in Front Royal — or, I should say, there in Front Royal, since I don’t actually live in the town.

The mayor and three town council members were voted out of office, and it’s not much of a stretch to say that Wal-Mart was voted out of office, too.

Last summer, the big kerfuffle here was about whether a zoning variance — I think it was a zoning variance, I’m not entirely certain — should be approved to allow Wal-Mart to build a new store on the north end of town.

Now, rather unusually, the residents of Front Royal were (and are) generally in favor of having Wal-Mart move into town. I’m not sure whether this will be good for the town in the long run (eventually a town with the distinction of not having a Wal-Mart will in and of itself be a tourist attraction), but in the short term, at least, it would be very nice to be able to buy things without dealing with K-Mart or driving twenty miles.

I greatly admire Wal-Mart as a business and as a company, but their stores are just awful. On balance, we’d be much better off with the thing, though.

Wal-Mart wants to build their store on an incredibly ill-suited site, though, and last summer the town council approved this. Wal-Mart prefers this terrible site to the obviously superior one about a mile away because, they say, the other site is too rocky, and the site-preparation work would cost too much. This might be plausible but for the fact that their preferred site has about a 30-degree slope, presents serious ingress and egress problems for vehicles, is not visible from the Interstate highway, and is in a floodplain.

The ‘too-rocky’ site is relatively flat, next to a highway interchange, on a four-lane divided road, etc., etc. Wal-Mart is a very strange negotiator when it comes to store-siting issues. They are very persistent in attempting to build stores in places where there’s a lot of opposition, because even in the most anti-Wal-Mart places there are enough potential customers for them to make money.

When Wal-Mart is welcomed, at least, they threaten to pull out at the drop of a hat as soon as anything doesn’t go their way. This is what they’ve been doing in Front Royal: they say that if they can’t build where they want, they’ll take their Supercenter and go home, even though there’s clearly a market for them here.

In this view, the actual suitable Wal-Mart sites are outlined in red. The site they want to build on is outlined in yellow:

(See this page for better illustrations of the sites.)

The south-easternmost red site is now going to be occupied by a strip mall anchored by Lowe’s. In today’s Warren Sentinel, there was a story about the county turning down a request from Lowe’s for a sales-tax kickback:

“It’s not our job to subsidize a retail business to possible advantage over other retailers”, [Warren County Board of Supervisors Chairman] Tony Carter later commented.

In Virginia, counties and towns are separate entities; Front Royal is completely surrounded by Warren County, and Warren County has its courthouse, offices, jail, etc. in Front Royal, but Front Royal is not part of Warren County.

The unsuitable-but-preferred-by-Wal-Mart site is in Front Royal; the other sites are in Warren County.

It occurs to me that the Front Royal officials may have been of a mind that it is their job to subsidize private businesses. I haven’t seen any hint of this anywhere, so it’s just speculation; but it certainly wouldn’t be unusual for a town to offer tax kickbacks — let’s be honest, that’s what they are — to a big company that chose to do business in its jurisdiction, and this may well have influenced Wal-Mart’s preference for the floodplain over the site next to the highway.

It is interesting that Wal-Mart, having got their zoning variance close to a year ago now, has not done any site-preparation work. Usually they break ground the day after any vote in their favor, so they can show specific harm if the town or county later changes its mind. Perhaps they were waiting for this election to see whether or not they’d be able to get tax concessions from the town.

Anyway, it will be even more interesting to see what happens now that the pro-Wal-Mart-in-the-floodplain officials are not longer in office.

Two Warren Sentinel stories about the election are reproduced ‘below the fold’, so to speak:

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The Housing Market Keeps Lurching Along

Mar 8, ’04 11:35 AM

Oh, sure, there’s nothing wrong with the housing market:

Louie Guimmule is among hundreds of people who want to buy into Chatham Square, Old Town Alexandria’s newest townhouse development, where prices start at $560,000 and reach $1.1 million. When he stopped by the construction site last Saturday, dozens of prospective buyers, sleeping bags in hand, were lined up — a full seven days before the developer was planning to accept contracts on the first, still-unbuilt units.

As the Post article observes, it’s not uncommon to see people camping out to get tickets to certain popular movies and concerts; but these people are generally either very young or are obsessive nerds; and besides, they’re not camping out to get tickets at all but to get particularly good tickets for the same price as less-good tickets. Here, though, we have relatively wealthy people waiting in line at a construction site for the opportunity to spend $500,000 to a million dollars to buy a house.

Usually, when you spend a million dollars to buy something — anything — you don’t have to camp out to do so. In the million-dollar range, there’s very few things where the demand exceeds the supply. Why is housing different? Why is it that people will not just line up but camp out on the sidewalk so they can line up for days in order to spend a million dollars on a house that they haven’t seen because it hasn’t been built yet?

The usual Libertarian response to complaints about suburban sprawl, bad urban planning, and the horrible traffic that those things generate, is to point out that people continue to buy houses in the middle of nowhere for ever-increasing prices, so the market is just supplying what people want. However, here we’re faced with the phenomenon of million-dollar townhouses in an area known for its bad traffic.

The Washington area has generally high real-estate values, but for a million dollars you can find something quite nice. In Great Falls, VA, one of the highest-buck areas in the Washington suburbs, at the moment there’s an 18-year-old house for sale for $959,000 with two acres of wooded land, a big swimming pool, a two-car garage, five bedrooms, 3.5 baths, etc., etc. You do not have to camp out to buy this house; you just need a million dollars. Yet people are willing to pay that much (and more) for much less house if it’s in the right location. The ‘right location’ almost always means a very dense location.

Why is this? Do people only want to live in dense locations? Obviously not, or we wouldn’t have tract-house subdivisions sprawling all over the country. But that people are willing to pay a hefty premium — and camp out — for the opportunity to live in dense surroundings would seem to indicate that there’s significant unmet demand for the dense-housing product.

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The Retail Experience in Columbia, MD

Nov 11, ’03 11:24 PM

One of the biggest problems of most suburbs is that marginal uses are squeezed out; in the developer’s drive to make as much money in rent, and, at least as frequently, the county’s drive to make as much money as possible in tax revenues, nothing but the very highest-yield activities are permitted.

Now, this is a problem not because small businessmen are being squeezed out, or that you can’t afford to operate the Lesbian Seagull Coffeeshop, Bookstore, and Discovery Center in the middle of the Mews At Windsor Heights. It’s a problem because communities, to function properly, need access to a number of goods and services the provision of which, while profitable, is not spectacularly so. For a place to be a convenient one to live in, there needs to be somewhere to get keys made; there needs to be a dry-cleaner; there needs to be a place to have a car repaired. You need churches and thrift stores. It’s nice to have small bookstores, hardware stores, bakeries, florists, and the like.

There are a number of reasons why most of these things don’t exist in large numbers in the suburbs, but one of the biggest is that there’s no cheap real estate. In most urban neighborhoods — even the trendiest and most expensive — there are some buildings that are not as nice as most of the others. Some of them have settled oddly and have slanty floors, others have odd obstructions that make them harder to use effectively, others that are imperfectly located, and still others have landlords who just haven’t spent enough money on maintenance over the years, and where tenancy means putting up with temperamental building systems and a lot of strange quirks. In the best space, the newer buildings on the main streets, you’ve got the stores that, in the suburbs, would be in the mall: big national chains and high-margin local operations. In the B-grade buildings, you’ve got these less-profitable businesses that make a neighborhood livable.

Suburbs, by design, don’t have any B-grade space. Any given chunk of suburb tends to be built all at once, building codes and zoning laws try to see to it that the buildings are all of a similar quality, and when things inevitably deteriorate from age, they’re often extensively renovated or torn down altogether and replaced by newer buildings.

What many suburbs — particularly those that style themselves as something more than just bedroom communities — do have is what might be called A-minus-grade space: the ‘industrial park’. And it’s into these industrial parks that some of the marginal but necessary businesses are moving, in the suburbs. This is happening in Columbia, Maryland, a planned town about thirty years old and halfway between Washington and Baltimore.

Apparently the situation with actual retail space there is pretty dire:

“All I do is retail, and I don’t try to do things in Columbia because it’s just so difficult,” said Dicky Darrell, a retail broker for Manekin LLC. “It’s gotten worse. There are more people who would like to be in the Columbia area. The combination of more people wanting [in] and the fact that nothing’s been zoned [for new retail] exacerbates that situation of trying to find something.”

[...]

And while Howard County is in the middle of a comprehensive rezoning, a process undertaken once a decade to change zoning designations and regulations, there are no plans to create more retail space in Columbia where land is primarily controlled by the Rouse Co. and Kimco Realty.

Everyone agrees that there’s not enough retail space, and the county is in the middle of a ‘comprehensive rezoning’. I don’t understand how it’s important who owns the land; it certainly doesn’t sound like zoning any more retail space would result in Rouse and Kimco’s properties suddenly emptying out.

In any case, there’s no plan to do anything about the problem — unless someone complains:

According to Steven M. Johns, a planning supervisor with the county’s Department of Planning and Zoning, the retail-style stores that are finding their way into industrial parks aren’t likely to be pursued by the county unless area businesses complain.

They aren’t likely to be pursued? Most jurisdictions pursue businesses in an attempt to get them to move in, providing tax revenue, jobs, and services. Howard county suggests that they might ‘pursue’ — i.e. chase out of town — businesses for which there’s a demand but no officially suitable space.

There’s not enough retail space, everyone admits it, and there are no plans to solve the problem. But should someone complain about people operating what are effectively retail operations out of non-retail space, then the county will do something, i.e. throw out the ‘offending’ business. That’s what zoning is all about!

That these public-facing businesses are able to survive at all in such lousy locations — the main characteristic of suburban industrial parks is that they’re almost totally invisible from the outside — would seem to indicate that there’s a strong demand for whatever it is they’re selling. And what’s the only action that the county contemplates? Further curtailing the space available to these businesses.

When these suburbs become slums, I predict that the people in charge of their local governments will stand around scratching their heads, too.

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McJobs and McMansions

Nov 9, ’03 5:32 PM

McDonald’s is upset at Mirriam-Webster’s inclusion of the word ‘McJob’, meaning poorly-paid dead-end work, in the newest edition of their dictionary. Mayor McCheeseThe CEO of McDonald’s has responded with that most deadly of ripostes, the open letter.

In an open letter to Merriam-Webster, McDonald’s CEO Jim Cantalupo said the term is “an inaccurate description of restaurant employment” and “a slap in the face to the 12 million men and women” who work in the restaurant industry.

Is cantalupo Italian for cantaloupe? If it is, it might offer an explanation: instead of brains, this guy’s head is full of orange goop and seeds. And I’ll bet he made more money last year than Tino, too.

He seems, first of all, to misunderstand that dictionaries of the English language are descriptive, not prescriptive. That is, they record the language as she is spoke, not as the lexicographers think it should be spoke. And McJob is certainly widely-used to describe lousy jobs.

(Incidentally, I think that Webster’s has it wrong; a McJob isn’t just a low-paid dead-end job. Elementary-school janitor is a low-paid, dead-end job, but it’s not a McJob. A true McJob is one where neither the employer nor the employee expects that the job is going to last long or that either of them is going to do any more than is absolutely required by the three-ring binder. A true McJob is one that would be done by a robot, were robots cheaper and more effective.)

And second, note that he seems to think that the dictionary has done some disservice to people who work at McDonald’s by describing their employment as poorly-paid and dead-end, not that McDonald’s has done some disservice to them by paying them poorly and providing few routes for advancement. It’s not as if McDonalds’ sales are likely to be hurt by this. I can’t imagine that those who currently dine at McDonald’s are under the impression that the people behind the counter are well-paid. Frankly, given the incredibly inept job that almost all fast-food workers do, I can imagine people being upset if they did think that these workers were being paid much, or being considered for advancement. You get what you pay for, and McDonald’s has determined that the cost to them of lousy service and the need for constant close supervision of most of their employees is less than the cost of paying enough to get better employees. It seems kind of silly to willingly put up with the real consequences of your policies, only to get all bent out of shape when a dictionary acknowledges that people think that your low-wage dead-end jobs are ones that are not particularly desirable.

I have not heard a peep — undoubtedly because a dictionary has not yet taken notice — of complaint out of McDonald’s about the word McMansion. McJob just makes a point about the quality of employment at McDonald’s — which even the company would have to admit is pretty low. But McMansion calls into question everything about the company.

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The War On The Poor (Housing Front)

Oct 8, ’03 4:05 PM

The War On The Poor continues apace, at least in Montgomery County, Maryland.

One of the recurring themes here at Tinotopia is the outlawing of poverty. We think that this is a Victorian issue, but a lot of what present-day governments do involves making it illegal to be poor.

None of these laws are actually called the Outlawing Poverty Act, but that’s the effect. And Montgomery County has now made it illegal to build houses without built-in sprinkler systems.

The problem with this is that it’s hard to be against it. You don’t want people to have sprinkler systems in their houses? What, do you want them to burn to death? You don’t hate children, do you? So these kinds of measures tend to pass unanimously, as this one did.

The problem is that things like putting trunk releases in cars, or sprinklers in houses, address very, very marginal risks. According to the state of Maryland, in the last five years an average of 6.2 people a year have died in fires — of any kind — in Montgomery county. That’s .7 fire deaths per 100,000 people. More people are killed each year in Montgomery county by being run over by cars than die in fires.

Statewide, 22% of Maryland’s fire deaths in 2002 (these numbers aren’t broken down by county or averaged over time) were due to vehicle accidents, arson homicide, or arson suicide, none of which would be prevented by sprinklers. If you’re trying to kill someone, or yourself, you can just disable the sprinklers. And God knows it’s possible to kill someone without setting them on fire.

If we assume that 2002 is a representative year, and that Montgomery county’s causes of fire death are the same as those for the entire state, this tells us that 5.456 people on average die in fires that might possibly be prevented by more sprinklers in Montgomery county.

So, if none of the 20%-30% of fires in Maryland that are of ‘unexplained’ origin are actually deliberately set; and if everyone in Montgomery county immediately had sprinklers in their houses tomorrow; and if all these sprinklers worked 100% of the time and never malfunctioned, as many as 5.456 lives per year could be saved, at a cost of… what?

Implementing the measure is expected to cost about $1.6 million through June 2005, when permit fees are expected to balance the costs of the requirement, Andrews said. More officials would be required to issue permits and conduct inspections, and inspection fees also will increase.

$1.6 million for administrative costs alone in the next year and three quarters — notice that they appear to believe that the money for higher-priced permits and inspections after that will come from the Money Fairy — and a rise of ‘about 1%’ of new houses’ total cost. And further note that this assumes that houses are expensive; a sprinkler system runs about $2000-$5000, depending on the size of the house.

The median price for a new single-family detached house in Montgomery County in 2001 was $289,000; so figure, using the county’s own figures, that the average sprinkler system will cost $2900. If Montgomery county continues to grow at the same rate, by 2025 the county will need over 218,000 more housing units; if the future is predicted by the past, half of these units will be single-family houses. (See here for the source of these statistics.)

109,000 houses times $2900 plus $1.5 million a year for permits and such (assuming the increases in fees predicted by the county itself will be about 50% of what they are now), equipping Montgomery county with sprinklers will cost $350 million, or about $15.8 million per year from now through 2025.

If we assume that, in a sprinkler-less Montgomery county, fire deaths would rise at the same rate as the population, this would mean that 6.366 people per year would die in fires in 2025. If every one of these deaths were eliminated by spending $350 million — which they wouldn’t be, because a lot of people would still live in older houses — this would mean an expenditure of about $3 million per life saved.

This is better than the estimated $37.5 million it costs to save someone who would otherwise die as a result of trunk entrapment, but it’s still a lot of money. It might be pointed out that sprinklers would prevent property damage as well as deaths, but sprinklers keep buildings from burning down, not from being damaged. A fire in a sprinkler-equipped house is less likely to spread and cause the house to be an entire loss, but keep in mind that once a sprinkler starts spraying, it keeps spraying until the water is shut off. And sprinkler heads can and do malfunction and spray water on rooms that are not on fire.

This additional expenditure to reduce what is already a very small risk will have the result of making Montgomery county an even less affordable place than it already is.

“It’s like having a firefighter in your home 24 hours a day,” said Phil Andrews (D-Gaithersburg), one of the bill’s sponsors.

But we don’t have firefighters in every house, 24 hours a day, despite the fact that this would almost certainly reduce fire deaths to near zero. Why is that? Because we, as individuals and as a society, have determined that the cost of keeping a firefighter in every house is greater than the value of eliminating the risk of fires. If we hadn’t, more people would install sprinklers in their houses even where they’re not required by law. If you’re very rich, spending an additional 1% for a little additional assurance that you house isn’t going to burn down isn’t a problem. I’d be surprised if Bill Gates didn’t spend an extra million dollars to install a sprinkler system in his house.

But the cost of the sprinkler system relative to the cost of the rest of the house isn’t the important part here: it’s the cost of the sprinkler system relative to the net worth of the person buying the house. Bill Gates is, as I write this, worth $34.79 billion; that’s $34,790,000,000.

For Bill Gates to spend a million dollars, then, on a sprinkler system, is analogous to someone with a mere one-million-dollar net worth spending… $30 on a sprinkler system. A $2900 sprinkler system is, to a millionaire, what a $100 million sprinkler system is to Bill Gates. Bill Gates’ entire house, the one featured in magazines and on TV, didn’t cost $100 million. My guess is that even Bill Gates thinks about it before spending $100 million.

But ordinary people in Montgomery county — most of whom aren’t even millionaires, by the way — are being forced by the county council to spend this money, rather than assume a small risk. My guess is that next, the residents of the county will be hit up with tax increases to pay for subsidized affordable housing. And nobody will bother to draw the connection.

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'Affordable' Housing and Public Servants

Sep 26, ’03 1:59 PM

So it appears that Prince William County, Virginia, may wind up building a housing project for its workers to live in.

Prince William, which has long been a middle-class suburb favored by military families and government workers, now struggles with a problem more commonly associated with wealthy resort towns or maturing, affluent suburbs. The willingness of leaders to consider teaming up with developers to build apartments or houses for county employees shows how concern about affordability has spread outward to the fringe of metropolitan Washington.

A hot real estate market in Prince William has driven costs higher in the last several years, and the county has encouraged the building of high-end housing after years of booming townhouse construction. To complicate the matter, Prince William has relatively few apartments, which would provide more options for young and lower-paid workers. There are nearly three times as many apartments per person in Arlington County and Alexandria as in Prince William.

And, of course, it is totally out of the question to just allow builders to build the kind of housing that’s, you know, actually in demand in the county.



County planners and officials are considering a range of possibilities, including more help for workers in getting low-cost loans, working with nonprofit groups to subsidize mortgages, and working with developers to build apartments or even group homes meant for younger, single workers. Those units might be clustered in a workers’ “village,” officials said.

So their options are either to subsidize people to live in places they really can’t afford, or building a worker’s village or group homes. It’s really a shame I can’t italicize that group homes further, to show the how mind-bogglingly idiotic I think this is.

Let’s step back a bit, here. In the United States, in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., representatives of the government are talking, with presumably straight faces, to the Washington Post, about building group homes for ‘younger, single workers’. Talking about building what amount to worker’s hostels, something they’re even getting away from in eastern Europe and Russia.

The apartments or houses would be built with private money, and the county would guarantee a certain number of rentals at a set price, officials said. The county would pay the rent on any units that weren’t leased.

Because it would be unheard-of for a builder to construct apartments that he then attempted to rent in a free market. This never happens.

Of course, it does happen in some places, but rarely these days in American suburbs. At the same time people are complaining about the lack of affordable housing — the cost of housing actually has increased much faster than the general rate of inflation in recent years — their elected representatives continue to allow builders to build nothing but classic high-cost suburban development.

The elected representatives do this because they don’t want to spend any more money than is absolutely necessary. If you’ve got 100 acres, you can zone it for apartments or townhouses at 5 units per acre, and wind up with 500 families living there, and possibly 1000 kids for the local school.

If you zone the same land for houses on 5-acre lots, not only do you have fewer roads to maintain, but you only have 20 families living there, which means only 40 or 50 kids to educate — or fewer, because they’re more likely to attend private schools than poorer kids. People who can afford those houses tend to burden the police less with knife-fights, too. You collect less in property taxes on the twenty five-acre lots than on the 500 1/5-acre lots, but the county’s expenditures are cut even more.

So the land gets zoned for five-acre lots in order to save money on the schools; and then what schools there are become a problem, since there’s no place for the teachers to live. The county is attempting to cherry-pick, to avoid marginal uses. The trouble is that the people making high-dollar uses of land — $500,000 houses, fancy office parks, giant malls, etc. — require some marginal uses of land to support them. The $500,000-house-dwellers need to be able to buy gas and Slurpees, and they need teachers for their kids; the office-park-workers need to be able to eat lunch and get their oil changed; and the mall needs somewhere for its workers to live. If you make all these supporting activities more or less illegal, the value of your high-value land-use goes down.

I may be making some inaccurate assumptions about my readership, but Prince William county is likely not a place you’d want to live. It is emphatically not a swank area. The traffic there is bad, and there’s nothing to do except go to the local megaplex to see Space Mutants IV, or go to a chain restaurant to get even fatter. It’s a very long way from being the worst place on earth, certainly, but there’s very little to distinguish it from any of dozens of other places nearby, or around the country.

Yet the average price of a single-family house in Prince William county is $258,000, and the average apartment there rents for $862 a month. By way of comparison, the average price of a single-family house in New York city is $203,000, and the average apartment there rents for about $750.

Now, those average New York prices span everything from the Upper East Side of Manhattan to the far reaches of the Bronx and Queens. And the average apartment in Prince William county is larger, newer, and in many respects nicer than the average apartment in New York.

But you’d expect that, because the average apartment in Prince William county costs 15% more than the one in New York. Why? Because, as distorted as the New York real-estate market is, the market in this undistinguished suburb of Washington is even more distorted, largely to save money on schools.

All of this is why I’m firmly of the opinion that the government should not be involved in the education of children. Aside from the perversity of putting the government in charge of teaching the next generation of voters, it distorts housing markets beyond recognition. Perfectly reasonable houses might be worth little because the school that you’ll be paying for if you move in stinks; lousy houses are overvalued because they happen to be within a given school district.

And this distortion is before one of the main goals of urban planning becomes minimizing government expenditures.

Eliminate the county’s obligation to educate children, and the county becomes interested in fostering the construction of the most-desirable housing possible. In some places, this will mean houses on five-acre lots; in others, high-rise apartments. The inhabitants could then send their kids to the school of their choice, paying directly — rather than through property taxes — for the privilege.

The problem of unequal school funding gets a lot of press; schools are funded through property taxes, so the people with the most-expensive houses tend to get the best schools. A lot of people get exercised about this, and it isn’t even the biggest problem that results from property-tax funding of schools.

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