Life is Sweet in Arlington
Obviously, it’s crucial that we not build anymore walkable, transit-oriented communities:
While many metropolitan markets around the country are enduring steep increases in vacancies in their office and retail sectors, the Rosslyn-Ballston corridor in the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington is an oasis of stability — and even of prosperity.
ved by five Metro subway stops within four miles, the corridor continues to attract new tenants, buyers and developers in the face of the deepest recession since the Great Depression. “It’s really an anomaly, considering the tough economy we’ve been in since December 2007,” said Sigrid G. Zialcita, managing research director for Cushman & Wakefield, a global real estate services firm. [...]
While Wilson Boulevard, a main artery, helps define the corridor, the key element in its success has been the subway. Planners had wanted to place it in the median of Interstate 66, on a more northerly alignment. But Arlington officials fought to have it run underground in the corridor to spur development.
It costs money to build a proper grade-separated heavy rail line with closely-packed stations. A lot of money. And consequently, it takes time for the benefits to be fully reaped. But the benefits are large. Nobody walks around London or Paris or New York and says “it’s too bad they wasted all this money building subways.” And nobody walks the Rosslyn-Ballston corridor and says it’s too bad they didn’t build park-and-ride stations and surface tracks in a highway median.
37 Responses to “Life is Sweet in Arlington”
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October 7th, 2009 at 2:23 pm
All we need is to make every community a community that spends 30% of our tax dollars and they will all be prosperous. Let me see, 10 major metropolitan areas, each spending 30% of our income comes to….300% of our income. Just borrow 30 trillion a year from China to fund it.
October 7th, 2009 at 2:30 pm
At the same time, though, it’s not as successful a development as it would be if Arlington would also build more parking facilities along the same corridor, as Bethesda has done on the other side of the river. I tried to find parking off Wilson Blvd. last night – had to drive to pick up my parents, who live well away from the corridor – and ended up driving out to Falls Church to eat after 20 minutes of fruitless search for parking.
October 7th, 2009 at 2:43 pm
“While many metropolitan markets around the country are enduring steep increases in vacancies in their office and retail sectors, the Rosslyn-Ballston corridor in the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington is an oasis of stability — and even of prosperity.”
Not to change the subject but isn’t the other question here: why *is* “the Rosslyn-Ballston corridor in the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington” an oasis of “stability” and “prosperity” during the deepest recession since the 1930s.
You guess that the answer has something to do with the growth of federal spending, and the federal workforce:
I wish the current president would take up Bill Clinton’s commitment to reducing the federal bureaucracy, but this time the wildly bloated defense and law enforcement payrolls.
October 7th, 2009 at 2:55 pm
So if I could find an exurban community served by highways that was doing well, would it justify snark like, “We better not build any more of thee things that people obviously like!”?
Because, you know, nobody walks around suburban communities saying, “I wish that instead of my 4,800 square-foot McMansion on two acres, they would have built 750 square-foot condos.” Rather, I think most of them walk around saying, gosh, I love having a big house and yard.
In fact, apart from people living in poverty, most people don’t walk around their neighborhoods wishing something else was there. Because if they didn’t like the neighborhood they were in, they would move to one they liked.
October 7th, 2009 at 3:10 pm
This article, and some of the commenters, make the mistake of comparing Arlington to other metropolitan areas, which isn’t quite fair.
A better comparison is between Arlington and other parts of the DC metropolitan area, which aren’t served by good, pedestrian-oriented transit.
October 7th, 2009 at 3:10 pm
Sam,
That guy in the 4,800 footer may be singing a different song when gas is $10/gallon because of those 8 million new cars sold every year in China. They are “new” in every sense of the word. While 90% to 95% of vehicle purchases in the US represent replacements for a given driver, it’s more like 5 to 10% in China. So that means a net increase of over 7 million new cars per year.
It’s extremely fortunate for us that they don’t drive as many miles per year in China as we do.
October 7th, 2009 at 3:23 pm
I call Bullshit. Americans overwhelmingly prefer the comfort, ease, and higher commuting costs of transit-free suburbs. The population of the suburbs has been exploding since the Wilson administration. Greater New York has the highest commuting times in the nation. Indeed the population of the least car friendly part of said metro area (NYC) has expanded by over a million people since the late eighties because of all the new expressways and car-friendly developments they’ve constructed in places like Brooklyn. And you get vastly more for your money — enough to free up extra cash for superwide plasma TVs and Hummers — by moving to the exurbs of Huntsville. And Pittsburgh has not seen the population growth of New York, Boston, DC, Seattle, San Francisco, Portland or Los Angeles, but has shrunk by several tens of thousands since Operation Iraqi Freedom. I rest my case.
October 7th, 2009 at 3:26 pm
When the government pays you the equivalent of thousands of dollars to move there, of course Americans will prefer living in such areas. Take away the federal subsidy, however, and preferences may change. Or not. Either way we’ll save money.
October 7th, 2009 at 3:27 pm
Supply and what-now?
Nobody wants to live in the city. It’s too crowded and expensive. LOL.
October 7th, 2009 at 3:28 pm
It’s inarguable that DoD and its attendant contractors make Arlington County probably the single most recession-proof area in the country, if not the world. But I think Matt Y’s fundamental point is that, DoD or no, the Rosslyn-Ballston subway corridor will remain an example of smart policy and upfront expense paying off handsomely over the long term.
(And please correct me if I’m wrong – I’m certainly no Fields Medal winner – but if ten metro areas each spend 30% of their total income, doesn’t that equal . . . 30% of their total income?)
October 7th, 2009 at 3:28 pm
You all remember those transit-free suburbs from the Wilson administration, right?
October 7th, 2009 at 3:31 pm
When a great deal of money was being expended on building transit out to the suburbs, but not highways, transit-oriented suburbs grew quickly.
When a great deal of money was being spent on building highways out to the suburbs, auto-oriented suburbs grew quickly.
Conclusion? People hate transit. I are smrat!
October 7th, 2009 at 3:33 pm
Arlington is rolling-out variable rate performance parking. Once this is implemented, parking will be easier to come by.
October 7th, 2009 at 3:37 pm
The bullshit that planners get away with always amazes me. I know the profession seems kind of esoteric and technical, but what other profession shapes the world we live as much as urban planners?
And yet other than maybe a few high-profile people like Robert Moses, no one ever talks about the beliefs these people hold and the assumptions they make about the world they THINK we want to live in.
October 7th, 2009 at 3:52 pm
Yglesias nails it. The only thing I like about heavy rail in the median of a major highway is the ha-ha factor when riding the train past cars stuck in traffic, like on the Eisenhower Expressway in Chicago or one day, along the Dulles access road in northern Virginia.
When I leave the lively U Street neighborhood to enter the Metro and exit at say, Vienna/Fairfax on Nutley St. to look out on an expanse of surface lots, I feel like the crying Indian stepping out of his canoe.
October 7th, 2009 at 4:14 pm
what other profession shapes the world we live as much as urban planners?
Ok I’ll play – how about “developers”? Frankly I’m kinda glad that we have planners because the developers don’t see any further than their short-term profits and could care less once they’ve made their money.
As to the second part of your criticism – there is a very robust interest in planning and planning theory. Might not be sexy enough to get the everyday attention in the same way that an exciting sounding new development somewhere gets, but it’s certainly there – and the work of planners is presented to the public for input on a regular basis, if you care so much.
October 7th, 2009 at 4:35 pm
Rosslyn to Ballston is a Crate and Barrel yuppie condo holocaust. I would love to live near a Metro line (I live by Columbia Pike and the lame streetcar they’re talking about is no substitute) but I’m pretty sure that if one came through I would be priced out and all the cool working-class stores and restaurants in my neighborhood would be too. In their place would be a South Arlington version of the Rosslyn to Ballston nightmare.
If there was some way to have interesting, diverse, affordable neighborhoods next to the Metro it would be great. But as soon as a station shows up in an interesting neighborhood, “affordable” goes out the window and “diverse” may be next. As a lifelong suburb-hater and urban planning advocate I never thought I’d say this, but some of the non-Metro-accessable, driver-centric neighborhoods in the DC suburbs are really awesome (Seven Corners, Annandale, etc.) and if Metro came through they might get ruined. I love Metro but it can be a tool of gentrification and badness (in addition to all the cool things it does). This is a problem.
October 7th, 2009 at 4:45 pm
Spokeytown,
You have a point. However, the reason this occurs is because walkable neighborhoods with transit are in great demand and the supply is extremely limited. If there were more areas that had this mix of amenities, demand could be accomodated, driving down the cost of living in these areas.
October 7th, 2009 at 4:52 pm
I don’t know where you tried to park, but there is plenty of parking at Courthouse, Rosslyn and Ballston — Virginia Square not so much, but also not much in the way of need. For Clarendon, there is a county underground parking lot that is free after hours that accommodates most of the volume. Maybe you didn’t see it?
October 7th, 2009 at 4:59 pm
“Rosslyn to Ballston is a Crate and Barrel yuppie condo holocaust. I would love to live near a Metro line (I live by Columbia Pike and the lame streetcar they’re talking about is no substitute) but I’m pretty sure that if one came through I would be priced out and all the cool working-class stores and restaurants in my neighborhood would be too. In their place would be a South Arlington version of the Rosslyn to Ballston nightmare.”
Doesn’t that prove that point? I’m one of those scumbag yuppies who moved to an inner ring Boston suburb and pushed out the poor. You find us coming to any neighborhood that gets gets this kind of transit upgrade because that’s what we want and that’s what many other people want, other people who I pushed aside when I bid on my digs. When rents and housing prices in transit rich areas go up, that should be seen for what it is: proof that we need LOTS MORE of these areas, enough to fill the yuppie demand and move further down the socioeconomic food chain.
October 7th, 2009 at 5:00 pm
For Clarendon, there is a county underground parking lot that is free after hours
No there isn’t! She’s making it up! Forget she said that!
(Last time I parked there I had to drive around and around to find a spot. Let’s use a little discretion and not blab about it.)
October 7th, 2009 at 5:47 pm
Botswana Meat Commission, you’ve been reading your Jane Jacobs, haven’t you?
Good for you!
Now, here’s the kicker: Jane Jacobs is now part of the syllabus in practically every planning program in the country!
I took entire courses dedicated to public participation strategies when I got my planning degree.
Your criticisms, correct as they are about planning from about 1890-1980, are now taught as the operative paradigm in planning school, and have been for a generation.
October 7th, 2009 at 5:52 pm
North Arlington is hugely successful and the housing prices and demographics prove it. And our tax rate is lower than other NOVA jurisdictions — much lower than those “inexpensive” 2-acre lot suburbs way out yonder.
City of Alexandria $0.903
Arlington County $0.865 + $0.01 sanitary district fee
Town of Clifton $1.04 + $0.01 stormwater fee
City of Fairfax $0.88
Fairfax County $1.04 + $0.01 stormwater fee
City of Falls Church $1.07
Town of Herndon $1.30 + $0.01 stormwater fee
Loudoun County $1.245
City of Manassas $1.35
Manassas Park $1.65
Prince William County $1.212
Town of Vienna $1.2681 + $0.01 stormwater fee
October 7th, 2009 at 7:17 pm
Nobody walks around London or Paris or New York and says “it’s too bad they wasted all this money building subways.” And nobody walks the Rosslyn-Ballston corridor and says it’s too bad they didn’t build park-and-ride stations and surface tracks in a highway median.
Irrelevant. London and Paris and New York were dense to begin with, because they are old cities. That density allowed them to support and become dependent on their subways. If the subways had not been built, the cities would have developed differently.
In case you haven’t noticed, we’re not building cities like London and Paris and New York any more. Our new cities look like Los Angeles and Houston and Phoenix. And few people think subways would make sense in the those cities. Rosslyn-Ballston is an anomaly. A very expensive anomaly, serving a small, affluent, niche housing and transportation market.
October 7th, 2009 at 7:25 pm
However, the reason this occurs is because walkable neighborhoods with transit are in great demand and the supply is extremely limited. If there were more areas that had this mix of amenities, demand could be accomodated, driving down the cost of living in these areas.
No, supply is limited because demand is low, and prices are high because land and construction costs tend to rise with density. Developers would be perfectly happy to build lots of dense walkable communities if lots of people wanted to live in them. They don’t. Cities would be perfectly happy to expand their transit systems if voters were willing to pay for them. They’re not.
October 7th, 2009 at 8:33 pm
Not to mention Moscow … say what you will about the tenets of communism, they could build the shit out of a subway.
October 7th, 2009 at 10:46 pm
Mixner, if demand was low, housing prices in Metro-served neighborhoods would not have gone up as high, nor stayed as high while prices elsewhere tanked.
Metro extensions in DC, Boston and elsewhere cause home prices to shoot into the yuppies-only range. It’s gotten so obvious that now in Boston people in Medford opposed the Green Line reaching this area specifically because they don’t want to be priced out of where they lived (a legitimate concern, but the answer is to extend Metro lines way more than just the Medford Green Line, not to hold back on this project).
There is demand. You’re just in denial.
October 7th, 2009 at 11:21 pm
Mixner, if demand was low, housing prices in Metro-served neighborhoods would not have gone up as high, nor stayed as high while prices elsewhere tanked.
Excellent point. Prices in dense, amenity-packed neighborhoods have weathered the housing slump better than the kinds of places favored by Mixner. Seems this couldn’t be the case if the higher costs of the former resulted solely from “higher land and construction” costs.
October 8th, 2009 at 12:11 am
Mixner, if demand was low, housing prices in Metro-served neighborhoods would not have gone up as high, nor stayed as high while prices elsewhere tanked.
I’m not talking about the aftermath of the housing bubble. I’m talking about demand in general, over time. The reason there are few “metro-served neighborhoods” is that few people want to live in them. That’s probably not going to change.
And yes, adding rail transit to a neighborhood tends to raise property values in the neighborhood, at least in the short-term, making housing there less affordable. It’s a massive transfer of wealth from the taxpayers who fund the new transit to the people who own property in the neighborhood when the transit is added. Fortunately, since rail transit is so expensive and produces so little general benefit, we’re not building very much of it. New subway lines are extremely rare, and new light rail lines only a little less rare.
October 8th, 2009 at 2:43 am
Spokeytown@17,
I think you’re dissing your potential tram too quickly. It is exactly the level of service that can produce those interesting neighborhoods you like, especially if the cars run in reserved right of way. It doesn’t have to be separate from streets, just separate from traffic. The old streetcar boulevards in Cleveland, Boston, and Kansas City were great models, although they were radial since there was no heavy rail in their service areas.
You don’t want to go very far on a tram; six or eight miles is about the practical limit because of the third of a mile stop spacing. But they create genuinely interesting neighborhoods, with small but useful commercial hubs around each station stop and a block or so of density on either side of the tracks with somewhat higher development around the stations. But it’s not metro-sized development so it can accommodate different levels of affluence naturally.
The housing mid-point the stations is less valuable than that closer, but it’s still an easy walk for a block either side of the ROW to one or the other station. So the potentially lower-income people there get the advantages of TOD but are not driven out.
It’s critical that they link to a trunk line, preferably somewhere near the middle of the line to minimize the time for feeder trips. If done well, they vastly expand the reach of the metro for a lot less money. The ideal configuration is to have the trams fan out at something near a right angle to the metro line, perhaps with a curve toward parallel at the end. The system then looks like the circulatory system or a tree. It’s organic and maximizes the overall cost of the transit system.
(I wrote the above stuff before I found the website. It’s disappointing).
Your line unfortunately will connect to the Metro at one end, but it does connect with two lines stopping at the same station. That increases the number of your one transfer destinations, although it doesn’t look like the Yellow Line goes very far.
Also, the brochure shows a car immediately in front of the streetcar. This is a bad sign; it means they expect them to run in mixed traffic. Since this is after all metropolitan Washington DC, I can see why you don’t like it.
Also they show the crappy Skoda cars used here in Portland. They’re noisy, jerky, not very big, and not equipped for MU-ing. Now maybe that’s an option, but for certain sure, GET IT and make the stations big enough to use it. The front page of the brochure does show MU-ed cars, so we can hope that’s the plan.
October 8th, 2009 at 2:52 am
MixedUp,
OK, you don’t like rail lines. So live in ummm (thinking here for the name of a city that doesn’t have or plan on getting one; ah, got it) TULSA!
October 8th, 2009 at 3:04 am
In general, over time, Mixner is a closeted fool.
October 8th, 2009 at 3:10 am
Our new cities look like Los Angeles and Houston and Phoenix.
And MEGACITY ONE, BITCHES!
The Phoenix McFavela represents a brief blip in history, the Akhetaten of its age. Like Mixner, it will be covered in sand and forgotten.
October 8th, 2009 at 10:22 am
Anandakos @ 30: Like Spokeytown, I live in the Columbia Pike corridor. I also have reservations about this streetcar thing, because I don’t see the need for it, given that we already have excellent 24-hour bus service.
Who would not prefer a bus, given that it can go around a stalled car, and a streetcar can’t? The only answer that I can see, based on months of blog posts on this issue, is “people who think that streetcars have some huge Coolth Factor that somehow disinfects the n*ggers and sp*cs who keep them off the buses” — in other words, racists. Why would I want to attract racists to my part of town? If I wanted to live among racists, I would have followed them when they all left Arlington for Prince William and Loudoun.
(Incidentally, our friend Mixner is on record as refusing to ride transit at any time because “smelly people” use it. I am proud of having been the one who baited him into that admission.)
October 8th, 2009 at 8:47 pm
Our friend roac is on record as refusing to ride transit at any time because “inferior races” use it.
October 8th, 2009 at 9:16 pm
Actually, you know what Omri? You’re right. I’m wrong about there being no demand for Metro-served neighborhoods. I guess I should’ve checked the data instead of being a blockhead.
October 8th, 2009 at 9:31 pm
Mixner, no, you were right the first time. I was confused. I agree that prices alone don’t tell you anything about demand. Sorry for the brainfart.