Shared Air

“Worth A Thousand Words” the picture notes.
Kudos to those “who care about our city” and their efforts to build better communities.  Inspired by a similar effort in Baltimore, Richmond Slumlord Watch aims to “transform notoriety into accountability” by highlighting
blighted properties, delinquent property owners, and issues relevant to blight, slumlords, and neighborhood revitalization in the City [...]

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A very nice slide show with essay on Forest Hills Gardens via Slate. The finishing paragraph, snipped below, is so sensible, so self-evident and also deeply about long term value and community sustainability. After 100 years, despite fashion and whim, FHG works in so many layered ways that hit-and-run development does not that you wonder [...]

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Above is little hand-card I whipped up for today’s event at the Capitol with the First Lady, our Mayor and several politicos and social services orgs. The topic? Hopefully you get that from the pic, but the pdf version with details is here.  Shelli also posted earlier on the details of Zach Bonner’s Little Red [...]

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Q: WHERE IS ZACH?
A: On Monday 29 June 2009 [Day 50], he’s in RICHMOND!
In the News:   11-year old Zach Bonner of Florida is walking from His House to the White House, this year completing the last portion from Altanta GA to Washington DC (665 miles) of his 3-year journey.  And, Zach will be walking [...]

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Ryan Avent @ Atlantic Magazine points out an economic reality I think regional leaders are ill-equipped to see or seemingly lack the courage to respond to. And that’s either a shame, or poetic justice, because while only playing a land use game for 30 years (all the while resisting the idea of regionalism and its [...]

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Richmond VA:  Capital City, River City, and now the first city in Virginia, and likely the United States, to have a major urban park system preserved in perpetuity under a conservation easement.

Signed into law on 29 May 2009, the Conservation Easement places about 280 acres of parkland, including the James River Park System, Great Shiplock [...]

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Fitzgerald: The rich are different than you and me.
Hemingway: Yes, they have more money.
It seemed sadly appropriate that I thought of that quotation about rich people and then mangled it for this post’s headline about the below article. Sad and appropriate because the original, a dialogue claimed by Ernest Hemingway between him and F. [...]

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Clayton Homes is one of Buffet’s bets for the 21st century portfolio of Berkshire Hathaway-owned companies. Site is here with cool options and a pricing/design configurator and plenty green specs and purty renderings of ints/exteriors – 1 bed and 2 bed base prices of 73K and 93k. Using the interactive thingy, I came up with [...]

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“Every $1 invested in public transit generates about $6 in local economic activity.”
The lack of public transit is not so profitable.

LMR 2009 project team produced this new viral marketing campaign to promote public transportation and support for transit funding.  The program highlights transit-related issues and challenges effecting our region including, but not limited to, affordable [...]

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I’m the last person to recommend “Best Practices” fooferaw and serial info-gathering Junkets. But it is grounding and encouraging to know that Richmond is not the “dysfunction poster-child” that some often seem to find affirmation in saying loudly. Here’s Newark, New Jersey and its Mayor, in 2006, doing what our then-Mayor seemed uninterested in doing: [...]

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