Posts about Burtonsville
Retail
New storefronts aren't enough to revitalize Burtonsville
Local businesses in Burtonsville are sporting new storefronts, thanks to a Montgomery County revitalization program. While the improvements go beyond "putting lipstick on a pig," they don't do enough to solve the underlying problems in Burtonsville's struggling village center.
All photos by the author.
The first set of new storefronts were recently installed in a retail building on Route 198, Burtonsville's "Restaurant Row," and additional renovations will soon follow. The money came from Montgomery County's Department of Housing and Community Affairs.
Covered in fake stucco and stone veneers, the new storefronts look better than they used to, even though they have that contrived "make this building look like three" look that way too many developments do today.
Unfortunately, the improvement program neglects the importance of creating good public spaces, public or private, which is a key part of revitalizing a commercial corridor.
The same building in 2009 (left) and today (right). Renovations didn't fix the pothole.
It's unfortunate that the new façades no longer have a covered arcade in front. Suburban strip malls have long included arcades because they shield shoppers from the rain and sun, but such arcades are often narrow and cheaply detailed. They also block views into shops from passing cars.
As a result, most new shopping centers in East County, like the WesTech Village Corner and the recently-renovated Briggs Chaney Plaza, don't include arcades. Yet when done well, arcades like this one in Rockville can create a nice "outdoor room," the kind of space humans flock to like bees to nectar.
Route 198.
Despite its good intentions, DHCA's façade improvement program undermines itself by paying little attention to public space. This building has a new, arcade-less storefront, but the parking lots still have huge potholes, adjacent property owners who didn't participate in the program still have dumpy buildings, and there's absolutely no accommodation for pedestrians. Route 198, a twisty old rural road that has become a congested through route, does not even have a continuous sidewalk.
When asked, area residents say they want more from Burtonsville. Results of a planning workshop held by Montgomery County last spring revealed that residents want more things to do, a more attractive streetscape, and more alternatives to driving in the village center. Some respondents explicitly called for an "old town", "village," or "urban-lite" feel in the area, giving people more reasons to spend their time and money there.
One thing that could draw more shoppers to Burtonsville is some sort of public gathering space. For nearly 15 years, there have been plans to create a "village green" behind the shops on Route 198, despite fears from some that a village open space would bring "undesirables" to the community.
A small pocket plaza was built as part of Burtonsville Town Square, a strip mall at Route 198 and Old Columbia Pike that opened last fall. It's a very attractive space, with a ring of benches and ample landscaping. At the center of the plaza is an interactive sundial and a piece of public art that appears to be the door from a bank vault.
Burtonsville Town Square's new pocket plaza has attractive seating, landscaping, and art, but is in the middle of a parking lot.
However, the plaza isn't used. I visited on a pleasant, cloudless, 82-degree summer afternoon, and the space was empty.
Why? It's in the middle of a parking lot, placed as an afterthought in an awkward location where no more parking spaces could fit. Customers are unlikely to pass through the space on foot, because it's far from most of the shops and restaurants in the shopping center. And customers probably won't walk through a boring, empty parking lot just to sit here.
Also, as a privately-owned space, the plaza is meant only for customers of Burtonsville Town Square. Anyone visiting other businesses along Route 198 isn't welcome.
The problem with Burtonsville's village center isn't a lack of retail. Developer Chris Jones has cannibalized the community's existing businesses, leaving another nearby shopping center half-empty and in need of government assistance. Meanwhile, shoppers are already traveling two exits up Route 29 to Maple Lawn, a pedestrian-oriented, mixed-use complex with upscale stores and restaurants that directly competes with Burtonsville for customers.
What Burtonsville really lacks is a sense of place. It has great ethnic restaurants and long-standing family businesses, but they're obscured by a mess of cracked parking lots and congested highways. These assets deserve to shine. To do so, they need attractive storefronts, complete streets that slow traffic and encourage people to look around, and legitimate public gathering places.
As Montgomery County planners work to create a neighborhood plan to revitalize Burtonsville's village center, these are the goals they should seek to accomplish.
Retail
The way to Burtonsville's future is through its stomach
Simply giving buildings a facelift and adding parking won't restore Burtonsville's struggling village center, but encouraging its thriving ethnic restaurants could be the catalyst it needs.
Artist's rendering of Route 198 with the 2008 charrette proposals.
In a letter to the Gazette, Kim Bobola of Eastern Montgomery County Citizens Advisory Board says we can "restore Burtonsville as a center of community activity" by funding improvements proposed by local residents during a charrette held here in 2008. What were the suggestions? New building façades, more parking, and landscaping. That's it.
These improvements, while possibly necessary, won't make Burtonsville's center a more desirable place to visit or do business. Once a rural small town that got absorbed by DC's suburban sprawl, Burtonsville needs to distinguish itself from surrounding communities. One way it's already doing that is with food.
I used to spend a lot of time and money in Burtonsville, but this year I have been there exactly twice, and both times it was to have Ethiopian coffee and sambusas at Soretti's Ethiopian Cuisine. The coffee is excellent, as is the food, and I enjoy that the owner now recognizes my friends and I when we come.
Soretti's is located on a stretch of Route 198 I call "Restaurant Row." It's in the oldest part of Burtonsville, though little of it predates World War II. And while you mainly hear about Burtonsville's decline, Restaurant Row isn't doing too badly. In addition to Soretti's, there's Chapala, Maiwand Kabob, Old Hickory Grille, and Cuba de Ayer. All have opened within the past several years. All are locally owned and operated by people who mainly live around here. Many have been reviewed favorably by food critics.
Route 198 and "Restaurant Row" today.
As anchors for growing immigrant communities, and as one of the few interesting parts of Burtonsville, Restaurant Row is also the only place you'll actually see people here. The buildings are close enough to Route 198 you can see into dining-room windows while driving by. And even though these restaurants serve food from Ethiopia, Afghanistan, or Cuba, you'll see all kinds of people eating there, white, black, brown or whatever.
Economist and foodie Tyler Cowen points out that ethnic restaurants are a sign of economic vitality. People are investing here. They're just not the ones we expected. "These days," he writes, "the most authentic, spiciest food comes at cheap, ugly strip malls, far from the District and miles from the Metro."
Because Burtonsville may be cheap, ugly and suburban, Restaurant Row can develop a surprisingly international and almost urban feel. And this can happen even as the community as a whole continues to act quite conservatively, opposing sidewalks on Route 198, improving Metrobus service, or complaining that the proposed village center green would "attract undesirables."
Down the street from Restaurant Row, Chevy Chase Bank, Hair Cuttery and Giant will soon open at Burtonsville Town Square, the new strip mall at Route 198 and Old Columbia Pike. If those sound familiar to you, it's because they're already at the twenty-year-old Burtonsville Crossing shopping center, which will lose its major tenants this summer when they move across the street. As new construction, the mall will likely be too expensive for local businesses to open there, meaning the many remaining vacancies will be filled by chains.
That's a net gain of zero new retailers, despite over 100,000 square feet of retail space being added to Burtonsville's village center. But it's actually a negative number if you count the dozens of vendors at the Dutch Country Farmers Market, a local institution and proclaimed "town square" of Burtonsville. The goods offered at the so-called "Amish Market" were a kind of ethnic food as well, celebrating local culture while supporting local businesses and bringing people together as well.
But the market moved to Laurel last fall after being evicted by BMC Property Group, who is building the new Burtonsville Town Square. It's debatable whether the Amish Market could drawn more customers to the shopping center than the chain supermarket that will take its place, but a net loss of retail - specifically retail that can't be found in every other strip mall in Montgomery County - could still reduce sales.
With the first buildings at Burtonsville Town Square set to open May 1, it remains to be seen whether they'll bring more shoppers to the village center. If it does, Restaurant Row and other small businesses will hopefully benefit from spillover traffic. But the new development won't be able to house them, meaning it won't contribute to Burtonsville's local economy, its local culture, and its sense of place. If that happens, you'll still find me at Soretti's, sipping coffee and watching the cars go by.
Development
Burtonsville keeps settling for decline
Burtonsville's been torn over whether or not to allow a controversial self-storage center to open up in its beleaguered village center. It's a struggle between those who say we could use whatever business we can get, and those who say it'll be a blight. "Is Burtonsville settling?" asked Eric Luedtke, East Montgomery County Citizens Advisory Board member at a meeting earlier this month. Yes, Burtonsville is settling for the status quo, pushed by community activists who say they're trying to retain our "suburban" character. While they say self-storage isn't good enough for us, they've opposed any attempt to bring something better here.
Route 198 in Burtonsville. Photo by Dan Reed.
Thanks to their policies, I can't go to Burtonsville anymore for much other than gas and groceries. But I can head to Maple Lawn in Howard County Think the Burtonsville village center looks shabby? Tell that to folks who demanded "minimal changes" to the run-down Route 198 strip at a community charrette last summer. Burtonsville's shopkeepers said sidewalks in the village center weren't necessary and that a public green would "attract undesirables."
Meanwhile, local shops already ravaged by the Burtonsville Bypass lost the Amish Market, the only big draw it had. Civic activists complained that what would take its place was "massive" and "not particularly attractive." What we're getting instead is a strip mall called Burtonsville Town Square that won't even have a square and has already cannibalized the shopping center across the street. Meanwhile, our homeowners' associations fight a status quo war of their own, saying thatbuilding affordable housing will create open-air drug markets. They've lobbied to keep public buses from serving their subdivisions and said they don't want poor people walking through them, either.
And yet all this non-progress hasn't made traffic any better. Our neighbors who advised County officials on the 1997 Fairland Master Plan declared that transit-oriented development was "unworkable" here. Nevermind the success of TOD in places like Downtown Silver Spring or Rockville Town Square. In an already built-up area, no transit means no development, which means no amenities, which means more traffic as we drive to get the things we need.
"Burtonsville has had a chance to get some really nice stuff," fellow board member Tom Aylward said to Luedtke, "but it's been killed by the master plan and the ardent supporters of the master plan." East County's civic establishment has spent decades complaining that we're a "dumping ground" for poor people. They assume that if we just build enough expensive single-family houses we'll turn into Bethesda. But Bethesda has sidewalks, a clean, attractive downtown, and quite a few apartments as well, not to mention excellent bus and Metro service. I think we're missing something.
We should celebrate Burtonsville and try to hold on to the things we love. But as our NIMBY games slowly kill the business district, will we have anything left to save?
Bethesda isn't just a bunch of expensive houses. It's a community that attracts and embraces economic investment rather than turning everyone away.
Development
Burtonsville residents protest affordable housing
In eastern Montgomery County, fears of low-income housing have galvanized the community. Pushed by civic activists who were able to rewrite the local Master Plan to favor the development of single-family homes, the Planning Board approved a waiver last Thursday reducing the number of required Moderately Priced Dwelling Units (MPDUs) in a proposed 365-home Burtonsville development called Fairland Park. The project is part of the long-awaited Konterra "mini-city", which covers 2,200 acres in Montgomery and Prince George's counties west of Laurel.
The Fairland Master Plan Citizens Advisory Committee, which guided that document's revision years ago, sought to reduce the number of MPDUs at Fairland Park from 73 to 48, saying a "token amount of additional townhouses" would "neither result in community diversity or distinctiveness," according to the staff report.
Twenty years ago, planners targeted East County for what they called "transit serviceability," approving thousands of apartments and townhomes - some of which were MPDUs - adjacent to the proposed route of a light-rail line that was never even funded. Leading civic activists, who claim the area is a "dumping ground" for affordable housing that's created traffic and hurt local schools, work to ensure that those mistakes aren't repeated.
Burtonsville resident and committee chair Stuart Rochester says building the required amount of MPDUs would only exacerbate the "demographic and housing imbalances" in East County, but he fails to distinguish between attached housing and affordable housing. "Townhouses are being converted to rental units in the challenged neighborhoods east of US 29," he writes in a letter to the Board, "and elementary school transiency rates remain among the highest in the County."
Lisa Schwartz, planner from the county Department of Housing and Community Affairs, says if you want a balanced community, don't set aside all the townhouses for poor people. Unlike conventional suburban neighborhoods, which segregate homes by type and price, the proposed site plan already mixes single-family homes and townhomes, many of which will be alley-served. Schwartz e-mailed the Planning Department requesting that the developer consider including some market-rate townhouses in the project. "It is DHCA's position that such a plan would be more in keeping with the Fairland Master Plan's general recommendation to 'encourage dispersal of MPDUs in new developments,'" she writes.
The community is already sore about the Fairland Park project because an original proposal would have incorporated and privatized the public Gunpowder Golf Course. Now that the developers have dropped the golf course component, the advisory committee worries that the subdivision won't "create a distinctive community of 'move-up' housing," as prescribed by the Master Plan - and that any attached housing will further lower property values. It also strengthens the fear that Montgomery County is "playing favorites" with the more affluent communities on the west side.
Burtonsville does deserve a say in the process, but encouraging the use of a loophole that makes an already-expensive housing market even more inaccessible is disappointing use of their voice. Whether or not homes are built with government subsidies, prices go up for everyone when the supply of new units is decreased. And by offering as many as three types of housing - "move-up" single-family homes along with both market-rate and subsidized attached homes - Fairland Park will be more accessible to a broader range of East County residents, not to mention a stronger investment for its developers.
Development
Toronto's "tower renewal" could point the way for East County high rises
During the 1960s and '70s, eastern Montgomery County experienced a high-rise building boom, with apartment towers sprouting up as far north as Burtonsville. A rough count shows there are over forty apartment buildings with more than eight stories in East County outside of Downtown Silver Spring, many of which are clustered in White Oak, Leisure World and along University Boulevard.
New townhouses surround a high-rise in Briggs Chaney. Photo by Dan Reed.
Today, these buildings designed for young professionals and small families fleeing the city are showing their age at a time when everyone's moving back downtown. Not only that, but forty-year-old high-rises aren't very energy-efficient. In Toronto, Canada, which has over a thousand such buildings, Mayor David Miller has launched a project to bring them into the twenty-first century.
Dense but often surrounded by generous lawns, these "towers in the park" can be isolating for their residents. Entire neighborhoods filled with these buildings and lower-density garden-style apartments are too diffuse (and often too poorly connected) to provide easy access to shopping and transit.
The Mayor's Tower Renewal initiative has two goals. First, make the buildings "green" with extra insulation and replacing obsolete materials. And second, to find new uses for the land around the buildings, whether it's as public parkland, vegetable gardens, or for amenities like rec centers, shops and restaurants, or even offices. This is how architect Graeme Stewart, who began developing this concept as a grad student at the University of Toronto, describes it:
Right now neighborhoods offer residential density, but they're employment and service deserts. The idea that to solve it, you would add more density seems sort of strangeThis seems like a proposal ready-made for East County's apartment towers. "Filling in the gaps" between high-rises would provide extra income for landlords and developers; reduce car trips by locating amenities where people already live; offer places for kids to hang out; and provide space for small businesses to locate (not unlike my "shop-house" proposal last year), generating jobs in a community that definitely needs them.— and I think that's going to be the biggest point of contention to the neighboring areas — but at the same time, during early engagement with the communities, people are saying, "I'd like a grocery store," "I'd like to be able to open up a small business." It almost seems like a no-brainer. The fact that these neighborhoods have been ignored and stayed the same for so long is actually what's weird about them.
The above Census map depicts the average household income in White Oak by color, with darker green representing wealthier areas. It shows that residents of the Enclave and White Oak Towers, two 1960's-era high-rise buildings, are poorer than their counterparts in surrounding single-family neighborhoods. They are wealthier than people living in White Oak's more affordable garden-style buildings, but this may be because high-rise apartments are more expensive to maintain and thus charge higher rents.
Places like White Oak and Briggs Chaney have been maligned for creating congestion and "demographic shifts" in East County, while their residents are isolated from the larger community and even from people living in the next apartment complex. Tower Renewal, or whatever you'd like to call it, could transform areas like White Oak and Briggs Chaney into vibrant neighborhoods and "town centers."
We're already seeing elements of Tower Renewal in this area. Lofts 590, a new building in Crystal City, returned low-rise scale to a '60s-era complex of apartment towers in a park. And in Briggs Chaney, townhouses were built around the Waterford Tower on Castle Boulevard, giving existing residents an opportunity to "move up" into larger housing without leaving the neighborhood.
Neither of these projects go quite far as what's being proposed in Toronto. They're still isolated from the community and do nothing to address the issues of accessibility and energy use. Still, they show that developers and neighborhoods alike are open to the possibilities of recycling the "tower in the park."
Transit
Rapid bus proposal could finally fulfill broken promise to MoCo's east side
The Transportation Planning Board's proposal for a regional network of Bus Rapid Transit lines holds a lot of promise for the region as a whole. But it's most significant in Montgomery County's District 4, where voters will pick a new County Councilmember next week. While this area has very little transit, save for a Metro station at Glenmont and two of the most-ridden Metrobus routes in the region, it was developed under the pretense that rapid transit would be built there, leaving residents to grapple with infrastructure that can't handle the traffic burden.
People boarding a bus in Briggs Chaney. Photo by Dan Reed.
TPB's larger proposal includes no fewer than seven lines serving East County along Georgia Avenue, 16th Street, New Hampshire Avenue, University Boulevard and Veirs Mill Road, plus an express line on the Intercounty Connector. It also includes a line along Route 29 between Silver Spring and Briggs Chaney, which might be the closest we ever come to the light rail line once planned along the corridor several decades ago.
Under the concept of "transit serviceability" With a price tag of $350 million ($1 billion in today's dollars), the line's projected low ridership made it a non-starter for the Planning Department. "Although projected peak period ridership was in the range considered appropriate for light-rail transit, projected patronage, on a day long basis could not justify the expenditure of capital and operating costs," read the 1981 plan. The Planning Department saw that light rail could actually be viable along Route 29 were it not for a lack of mid-day ridership. When the Fairland Master Plan was revised again in 1997, the concept of "transit serviceability" was removed altogether, taking away any provisions to expand transit even for the development that had already occurred, let alone what was to come.
The result has been a major shift in development on the east side. Hundreds of acres of land were downzoned for single-family homes, reducing the supply of affordable housing. Local civic activists contend that this area was already a "dumping ground" for affordable housing, noting that the construction of apartments in Briggs Chaney and White Oak has created congestion and overcrowded the local schools. Meanwhile, the people who live in those apartments built to be served by rapid transit must to make do with far less.
As development patterns along Route 29 slowly begin to justify additional transit services, any kind of rapid transit here seems more of a possibility. A Bus Rapid Transit line between Silver Spring and Burtonsville has been on the county's Move Montgomery plan for nearly a decade. On their scorecard for the District 4 County Council election, the Action Committee for Transit found that all but one of the eleven candidates expressed some interest in a Route 29 line.
Responding to their candidate survey, Democrat Nancy Navarro noted that development on the east side has been and continues to be tied to public transit. "Without transit in District 4, there is no opportunity for transit-oriented development or smart growth," she wrote.
What would make rapid transit along Route 29 more feasible today? Here are a few reasons:
Several issues in East County still prevent it from becoming a model for transit-oriented development. Most notably, there is a huge imbalance between jobs and housing, requiring most residents to commute out of the area to begin with. On top of that, Route 29 is still basically a freeway north of New Hampshire Avenue. Routing a BRT or light-rail line down the middle would place transit stations on a freeway, like the Orange Line in Fairfax County, which is in the median of I-66. Such sites hinder walkable development immediately around them.
Nevertheless, County leaders have long promised rapid transit for this area. They should give eastern Montgomery County a shot at remaking itself with improved public transportation.
Public Spaces
Breakfast links: More pedestrians there, more cars here
Future pedestrianized Broadway in NYC. Image from Streetsblog.
Go blogs! Yesterday's Broadway announcement is also a huge win for Streetsblog, the New York City Streets Renaissance Campaign, Transportation Alternatives, and other advocates who have persuaded the NYC government to completely transform its approach to transportation. A Wednesday segment about the future of news on NPR's Marketplace mentioned the rapid rise of small, online-only news operations focused on city government, local politics, and development.
T4A launches platform: The national Transportation For America coalition officially launched their platform on Capitol Hill today. It calls for this fall's transportation bill (TEA) to fund a 21st-century network that allocates transportation dollars based on objectives, like lowering carbon emissions and ensuring economic access, rather than set amounts for highways and (much smaller amounts) for transit.
PG neighbors debate highway widening, light rail: Residents of Temple Hills, Clinton and Brandywide debated widening Route 5 south of the Beltway. Some residents are eager for the widening, while others don't want the sprawl it will bring to southern Prince George's and counties to the south; some are pleased about the county's proposed light rail corridor, while others worry about the development that could result. (Gazette)
Reject a bungalow, get a skinny box: A developer built a 12-foot-wide modernist house on a lot in Arlington after neighbors rejected a zoning variance to put two bungalows in the place of one.
Up in Montgomery-land: The new Paint Branch High School in Burtonsville will be much worse for walkers (JUTP) ... The debate over Falkland Chase continues (Gazette) ... JUTP's Dan Reed and some friends encountered a Rockville leasing agent who said they "don't look like [they] could afford to live here" (Diamondback Online)
And: The Historic Preservation Review Board approved the revised design for the Whitman-Walker redevelopment project at 14th and S (CSNA) ... Metro has started layoffs (Examiner) ... the Senate passed the voting rights bill, with an amendment repealing DC's gun laws, but which will probably come out in conference. (Post, City Paper) ... The Virginia House rejected a bill to give residents the right to dry clothes on clotheslines.
Bicycling
Breakfast links: Montgomery County extravaganza
Photo by M.V. Jantzen on Flickr.
21st Century solutions, amen: Montgomery County shouldn't be transforming intersections into huge flyovers, Anne Ambler of Wheaton (and a board member of the Montgomery County Sierra Club) argues in a letter in the Gazette. Instead, Maryland should spend its scarce resources to "reduce the traffic going through by providing alternatives that, incidentally, would help to reduce greenhouse gases as well."
Road diet Catch-22: Rockville officials want to give Darnestown Road a "road diet", reports the Gazette. DOT officials won't ban trucks because it's an arterial, and have to designate it an arterial because of truck traffic. "'I read that book, it's called "Catch-22,"' Mayor Susan R. Hoffmann joked during Monday's meeting." Planners are considering a broader "complete streets" policy for Rockville.
Disappointment and a little hope: Burtonsville's downtown revitalization plan is very modest, with few pedestrian improvements; the NOAA building planned for College Park appears entirely auto-centric; without the Army, Springfield's best hope is transforming its mall.
Meanwhile, in DC: DC will now recycle more stuff, including plastic bags, mike and juice cartons, and almost anything plastic; teens are overrunning Gallery Place; and the former Post executive editor admits that Washington isn't so bad (the good stuff about the actual city is on page 2).
Development
Breakfast links: suburban changes edition
The official word on the I-66 deck: Infosnack HQ made some calls and found out the detailed scoop on the parking garage. One of five parking decks is free to the public, and fills up with commuters on weekdays (why can't they charge, again?) while the others are used by Arlington Public Schools.
Small town character? Photo by JUTP.
BRAC = Bringing Really Awful Commutes: Get ready for major commuting headaches when jobs move to transit-free bases like Ft. Meade, Ft. Belvoir, and Andrews. Plus, says Former Army soldier Imagine DC, the bases aren't designed for walkability.
Small-town feel means strip malls to some: Burtonsville had a plan in 2005 to redevelop its central strip mall into a "town center" style development, but resident and environmentalist opposition killed it, writes Just Up the Pike. Though looking at JUTP's rendering, it looks like the proposal would have been only mildly more walkable, retaining surface parking on all sides and maintaining barriers to the main streets.
Biking not part of the framework: NCPC's National Capital Framework Plan, while it contains many great ideas, manages to completely ignore bicyclists and ways we could better accommodate them in and around the Mall, WashCycle points out. Too bad nobody asked about that on yesterday's fairly bland Kojo segment on the plan.
Development
Burtonsville residents debate mixed-use and "undesirables"
Just Up the Pike attended a recent charrette on improving the village center in Burtonsville. Located along Columbia Pike (Route 29) a little west of Laurel, Burtonsville saw its biggest draw, a farmer's market, move to Laurel. The main crossroads at Routes 29 and 198 is a collection of low-density commercial buildings.
Photo by Just Up the Pike.
At the charrette, Burtonsville engaged the community in a discussion about its future. Options included plans to build a "village green" on a plot of empty land nearby, and varying levels of development along the main roads, some mostly commercial, residential, or a mixture. JUTP supports mixed-use development with live-work buildings.
The discussion took an interesting turn when some residents criticized the "village green" idea for the potential of attracting "undesirables," aka black people and the poor. JUTP took strong exception to this characterization, having friends and relatives who lived in some of Burtonsville's townhouses and apartments. "I do not believe there are any 'undesirable' people in my community, especially not in this gathering place we are trying to create," he said to applause.
Many suburban towns took exactly this tack in the mid-twentieth century, zoning for large lots and only single-family homes in an effort to price the poor, especially minorities, out of the area. Now, with city neighborhoods rising in price, many suburban towns are finding their picket-fence communities becoming the bad side of town. Fighting crime by trying to keep people out of a community isn't a long-term solution (or even a good short-term one). Building lively areas with active downtowns, with "eyes on the street" and lively public spaces open to all ages, races and income levels, is.
@ggwash
- Successful speed cameras require fair speed limits
- Amid scandal, don't lose sight of Gray's policy achievements
- Montgomery plans 160-mile, "gold standard" BRT system
- VDOT ignores own data, pushes widening I-66
- DC's parks are 5th best in the nation, says "Park Score"
- Bethesda gets new but terrible bike racks
- DC's divide need not be black and white
Greater Washington
District of Columbia
