Local

We'll be trying out the First Night in Leesburg celebration this year... I've been there before, and it is a fun family-friendly celebration. Happy New Year everyone!

AOL and Loudoun Schools have the Christmas Countdown up again this year.  It's always nice to see.

BusinessWeek has an article on the deflation of the Loudoun County housing bubble (via SST). Best line in the article:But the article does say that Loudoun has strong fundamentals: good schools and job growth. I think that real estate, while suffering a momentary deflation, will continue to be a good investment here.

VDOT appears to be uninterested in the concerns of businesses in Belfort Park that have essentially been isolated by the Route 28-Waxpool Road interchange (Belfort Park is in the lower left side of the interchange in the photo). Personally, when I need to get to Belfort Furniture or Emilio's Pizza, two popular businesses in Belfort Park, when coming from southbound Route 28, I am confused and disoriented by the maze of streets.

This follows on a complete lack of concern about the poor planning on the side opposite Belfort Park (upper right in the photo), where the immensely popular Wegmans grocery store has only one entrance/exit, and if the road is blocked emergency vehicles are supposed to drive on the wrong side of the road - a recipe for disaster. With Wegmans on one side and AOL Headquarters on the other side, this intersection is a significant bottleneck and was designed very poorly.

While the Route 28 Corridor Improvement has made a tremendous improvement for overall traffic flow in Loudoun and western Fairfax counties, the lack of mitigation for the businesses on either side of this interchange has been atrocious. A plan, including the full completion of Atlantic and Pacific Boulevards north of Route 606, needs to be developed immediately.

The Post reports that many septic systems are failing in western Loudoun. Ew.

So why are these systems failing? Well, first off, there's the fact that these developments were intentionally hobbled by design. "Sewer lines are expensive and have generally been kept out of western Loudoun to prevent urbanization," to quot the article. But when a development is constructed that appears suburban, and has all of the normal suburban amenities, then you will have a number of ignorant people who flush like they're living in Reston. I hope the builders in the four identified developments have at least delivered notices and training materials to assist even the most naive homeowner of the limitations of their systems.

When the demand for single-family housing is so great, people will find a way to realize their piece of the American dream. Local government or builders intentionally subverting pieces of the infrastructure common to suburbia as a way of raising the total cost of ownership for land is irresponsible, and will continue to cause issues of these kinds.

Adding to the good news about job growth, Road to Ruin notes the housing shortage in Northern Virginia. While as a property owner this cheers me about house prices, I wonder about how this will affect the pro- or anti-growth balance in the region, particularly in Loudoun County.

I've always thought that job growth is a rising tide of prosperity that lifts all ships. There are so many parts of the country stagnating, crying out for job growth, and the associated "urban blight" that accompanies it. I can't wait to see the kvetching as we either can't find enough people to do the work (setting us up for the outsourcing canard) or we can and they have nowhere to live because they can't afford the regulation-mandated three acre lots.

Bacon's Rebellion has an interesting article about a George Mason professor who claims that job creation in Northern Virginia is the factor driving up real estate price s, including the interesting statistic that, "there were seven times as many new jobs created in Northern Virginia as suburban Maryland." I sure do hope that he is correct, given the direct relationship real estate prices have on us now. I can believe that the NoVa housing market is super hot because of job growth, but I do believe that in the condominium market and perhaps the high-end townhouse market (half-million and 3000 square feet or more) market there is speculation.

This is particularly important as Tysons Corners is being reengineered and costs for the Metro extension through Tysons are skyrocketing. Indexing transportation needs to job growth forecasts both allows transportation budgets to track with economic growth, but I believe it would also let transportation forecasts both reflect local patterns and mesh together across regions. Then again, I know nothing about the inner workings of such things.

The WaPo has an article on how people who live in houses that have since been surrounded by developments are unhappy about it.

Personally, I think that the ability to live unrestrained by the covenants imposed on homeowners is worth it. So these people are surrounded by developments facing the other way. That means their children have access to friends from neighboring areas, but yet they still do not have the higher taxation and odious rules imposed upon them.

I think I live in one of the more stand-up, well-intentioned HOAs. But even so, it is against the rules for me to put tasteful metal bars across the glass-paned door below our deck. Without the door the bottom floor rooms would get hardly any light; but the ridiculousness of the rule that prevents me from what is in my eyes a reasonable decision. Aesthetics is in the eye of the beholder; any attempt to codify style in de facto law is ridiculous and wrong.