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- High
tech's supper club
- Virginia
Business story misrepresents
farmers’ plight
Virginia lacks
planning to deal with “Big Boxes”
I
read with interest your article on “The Curse of
the Big Box.” I currently serve as the city manager
of Buena Vista, Virginia. Our city was a planned community
development that was actually built to spec. Its concepts
include a live, work, and play community with mixed
uses, grid pattern streets, development code designed
for the human level (front porches where people meet
their neighbors on the sidewalk) and the ability to
deliver effective public services (schools within walking
distance, alleys for garbage and utility placement).
It occurs to me that there is a relationship between
the delivery of public services and good development
that should be discussed further.
Big
Boxes and the suburban sprawl are the result of a lack
of “market driven choices” by the planners
and developers of the post WWII era. The development
community, driven by the regulatory world in which they
live and work, has not had the choice or direction given
by the local community to react to choices for the consumer,
thus, the suburbs.
The
state of Virginia lacks the planning and development
tools necessary to allow urban places to be urban and
rural places to be rural.
The
suburb is a costly issue for the delivery of public
services from the need to build roads, because we live
in one area and work in another, shop in another, etc.,
to the need for school buses, to costly fire, rescue,
police, water and sewer. Potential planning solutions
such as mixed use and density are rarely a choice for
the consumer, the development community, or the government
planners. Suburbanites live in the suburbs and shop
where and how they do because this is the only choice
they are given.
New
urbanism gives the consumer, development community,
and the local government more tools in which to define
their community and thus their future, and to further
develop their economic portfolio. While the net migration
outward from the suburban core (the urban core of the
1950s) can be seen as a sign of affluence, it can also
be seen as a deterioration of the affluence of the core
community. The neighborhood itself becomes similar to
the empty box. This is the real long-term outcome of
our current development process and codes.
Kudos on your article and may the discussion continue.
Scott
F. Dadson, City Manager
Buena Vista, Va.
Virginia
Business - January 2003
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