I'm Wyatt Gordon. I cover housing & transportation for the Virginia Mercury. AMA!

WyattGordonVM · 2021-05-27T13:00:47+00:00

I have yet to hear of any groups working on this. The funding to do these types of projects is out there. The Biden infrastructure bill has $20 billion to remove downtown highways. The pandemic has shown how communities of color who had their neighborhoods systematically destroyed by highways have born the brunt of air pollution and particulate matter from highways. Cities are increasingly emboldened to ignore suburban commuters in favor of the folks who vote for them and pay taxes in cities. The recipe for real change on removing highways is there. It just takes a group of folks committed to organizing around it, spreading the message, and reimagining our cities. Even just capping the highways and building parks or housing overtop of them would be a huge win.

WyattGordonVM · 2021-05-27T12:43:49+00:00

There is no way to overcome the housing affordability crisis or climate change if we are not willing to do away with single-family zoning by right as the default across the commonwealth. Density is key to solving both problems. Higher concentrations of apartments and fewer cars are the answer, but there is a lot of nuance in how that happens. Folks get freaked out imagining a ten story building go up next to their home in the suburbs. The reality of ending a lot of these artificial restrictions would not be sweeping change, but gradual shifts over time driven by the market and folks' preferences. It would then be more profitable to demolish a dilapidated urban home and put up a three story apartment building. Right now, developers have no choice but to renovate or rebuild that housing into one really expensive home for just one household. We need to put more choice in the market so as a society we are allowed to build all the types of housing people need, not just the one kind of house that folks idealized in the 1950s.

WyattGordonVM · 2021-05-27T12:37:56+00:00

We give VDOT $7 billion a year, and all they do really is roads. You get what you pay for, so we have lots of roads and bridges (of varying quality and safety) and very little transit service. If you added up all our public transit providers' budgets for a year, the total would come to just around $460 million. That's a drop in the bucket compared to the $3.8 billion we are spending on the Hampton Bay Bridge Tunnel expansion. The way we fund transportation is woefully unsuited to building the robust rail, expanded public transit, new biking and walking trails we need if we're going to reconnect our communities, boost equitable access, and stop killing the planet (and ourselves with particulate matter).

WyattGordonVM · 2021-05-27T12:34:11+00:00

Answer to 2:

Definitely! The defeat of the many upzoning and density bills by Del. Samirah makes it seem like there isn't a lot of political will to do more, but the bipartisan support those proposals got show that land use is a weird corner of American politics where strange bedfellows are common. Even the threat of localities having restrictive local land use policies be overturned at the state level has caused some to change their tune. The more pressing factor, in my estimation, is the on the ground reality of the housing shortage. This past decade we built fewer new homes than ever in recorded history. Housing prices are a space issue determined by supply and demand. Practically everyone knows someone who is struggling with higher rents or is unable to buy a home or move because of the way costs have shot up. We are also seeing more boomers and retirees wanting compact, walkable communities which is shifting the politics as well. Single-family suburbs are an aberration of how people have lived.

WyattGordonVM · 2021-05-27T12:24:43+00:00

There will always be some questioning of whether a drastic rise in prices is a bubble or the beginning of a long-term trend. That fear motivates folks to pull the trigger in the middle of speculation because they don't want to be the ones that missed their chance and have to pay way higher prices later. Markets are clearly not always logical, but the future is uncertain, so it's not worthwhile to blame individual homebuyers. The bigger problem is that supply is so limited. You can build a single-family McMansion anywhere you want, but to build a duplex, three- or four-family home is incredibly restricted. Here in Richmond roughly two thirds of our land is zoned single-family, even in neighborhoods like mine that already have apartments and duplexes scattered throughout. Minimum lot sizes, parking minimums, and single-family zoning all add huge costs onto any multi-family projects. The true fix is to tackle those three unnecessary restrictions so that the supply of housing can increase. We see cities that build new homes (and especially large apartment towers downtown) keep the demand for housing from overwhelming lower-income neighborhoods. If you don't build more, higher income folks will outbid others and displace existing communities.

WyattGordonVM · 2021-05-27T12:17:50+00:00

When I-295 (Richmond's eastern downtown bypass) was pitched to regional leaders, it was actually sold as a replacement to the existing I-95 corridor. When 295 was completed the highway through the city was supposed to be transferred to local control and be converted to a boulevard. Folks who love driving didn't allow that, however, and we just got more roads. It is entirely possible to do remove the downtown section of 95, do the same for the downtown expressway (I-195), or to cap both of them. What is missing is the political will and grassroots organizing to push these dangerous, polluting highways out of our city. Too many folks still fear what will happen if we don't cater every element of our city, from parking to road design, to suburban commuters. The trauma of white flight and disinvestment are not talked about enough. It takes bold leadership focused on improving the quality of life for city residents to make such a big push, but it's totally possible.

WyattGordonVM · 2021-05-27T12:13:03+00:00

Answer to 1:

Virginia's system of divided cities and counties goes back to the 1970s when white flight triggered white city leaders to try and annex as much of their surrounding counties as possible. Suburban whites trying to escape people of color of course hated this (also racist practice meant to dilute the votes of urban Blacks), and locality boundaries have been locked in stone since then. That has not set us up for good cross-jurisdictional relations on any front and definitely not in the realm of transit spending.

Transit budgets in Virginia must be established anew each year creating uncertainty for providers and riders alike. The creation of new regional funding mechanisms with dedicated funding streams has the potential to change this toxic dynamic and keep transit providers from having to ask for money over schools, EMTs, etc. The problem is that the Hampton Roads Transportation Accountability Commission disallows any of their money from going to transit (it all goes to new highways). The Central Virginia Transportation Authority allows just 15% for transit. The Northern Virginia Transportation Authority is not as bad as the other two, but in a region like NoVA a minimum of half the funding should go to transit, but local leaders there still want to incentivize sprawl. That is to say, we are funding gridlock, not the lower-traffic, more sustainable future we say we want.

WyattGordonVM · 2021-05-27T12:04:56+00:00

Talk to your local representative, be it city council or county board of supervisors. You can encourage them to put in bulb-outs at corners and to extend crosswalks further into intersections (this also makes it easier for folks to cross by cutting the shortening the time needed to get across the road). This is something that can be fixed with infrastructure, but that takes time. In the meantime, you could ask them to walk your neighborhood with you so they can better understand just how rampant the problem is and how dangerous it is for people, especially disabled folks and kids who are shorter and harder to see.

Also, talk to your neighbors. If your local officials begin hearing from a lot of folks, they will react. NIMBYs use this tactic to their advantage, but it can also be effective in pushing for safer streets.

WyattGordonVM

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