Former Editor-in-Chief Ryan Avent writes a weekly column about neighborhood and development issues. Brookland recently got the news that Dwellings, a home furnishings store and one of our most promising main street retailers, was closing due to slow growth in sales. The announcement touched off a neighborhood discussion on what was wrong, exactly, with the shopping environment in the leafy, residential neighborhood. Many locals noted that low residential density made running a retail business a......

Former Editor-in-Chief Ryan Avent writes a weekly column about neighborhood and development issues. The Washington Highlands neighborhood of the District of Columbia is terra incognita for many Washingtonians. Tucked up against the District’s southeastern border with Maryland’s Prince George’s County, the area is walled off from the rest of the city by Oxon Run Park, the Anacostia Freeway, Bolling Air Force Base, and the Anacostia River, not to mention the yawning gap between its economic......

Former Editor-in-Chief Ryan Avent writes a weekly column about neighborhood and development issues. It was good that the lunch keynote didn’t last any longer; I was ready to hand Jim Abdo a check. Those of us on the academic side of the development industry aren’t used to such raw displays of enthusiasm. After following Abdo through his slide presentation on the history of his business and the mammoth project he’s begun on New York Avenue......

Former Editor-in-Chief Ryan Avent writes a weekly column about neighborhood and development issues. I don’t suppose it would surprise most District residents to hear that there are sharp differences in income between the city’s neighborhoods and racial and ethnic groups. We see it all around us, but especially in those parts of the city where the lives of the haves abut and intermingle with those of the have-nots. These gentrification frontiers are often a locus......

Former Editor-in-Chief Ryan Avent writes a weekly column about neighborhood and development issues. Things used to be clearer for Fairfax County. It used to be known as the epitome of upper-middle class suburbanity, even earning name-checks in popular novels and songs as such. With acres and acres of rolling hills covered in leafy suburbs and landscaped office parks, it was a quiet complement to the quirky inner suburbs of Northern Virginia and the dense chaos......

Former Editor-in-Chief Ryan Avent writes a weekly column about neighborhood and development issues. For much of the past year, this column has taken a hard look at many aspects of District life, from crime and schools, to transportation planning and development, to the uneven distribution of growth in the city, and found them wanting. It’s never difficult to be critical of the way things are done in the District, and yet there are obviously many......

Former Editor-in-Chief Ryan Avent writes a weekly column about neighborhood and development issues. He'll be on vacation for the next two weeks; this column will return on August 19th. It’s been a hard summer for many loved and local businesses, some of which have been a part of the city’s life for decades. This week, long lines trailed down New York Avenue as customers waited to get a last meal at A.V. Ristorante. In June,......

Former Editor-in-Chief Ryan Avent writes a weekly column about neighborhood and development issues. Not too long ago this site, along with the D.C. Council and much of the rest of the Washington area, was actively debating the incentive package for the new Washington Nationals stadium. At the time I was well aware of the questions about costs and benefits and was familiar with research on the subject suggesting that new stadia did not boost metropolitan......

Former Editor-in-Chief Ryan Avent writes a weekly column about neighborhood and development issues. It wasn’t easy to keep up with the business flooding through the Council as the latest session neared its end. Amid the bills dealing with Greater Southeast Community Hospital, authorizing development bonds, addressing land deals in the West End and over the Center Leg Freeway, and placing moratoria on new Adams Morgan taverns, an interesting pattern nonetheless emerged. In just this past......

Former Editor-in-Chief Ryan Avent writes a weekly column about neighborhood and development issues. Over the past few weeks, events have conspired to place race squarely at the center of the debate over public education in the District of Columbia. After appointing Michelle Rhee the first ever Chancellor of District Schools, Mayor Fenty found himself faced with a barrage of criticism and innuendo from the Washington Post drawing attention to the fact that she was not......

Former Editor-in-Chief Ryan Avent writes a weekly column about neighborhood and development issues. Summer in Washington means the return of many familiar sights, some welcomed, others not as much. It means baseball, but also sticky heat and humidity. It means evenings at barbecues and bars with outdoor seating, but also children roaming the streets with backpacks full of cherry bombs and bottle rockets. It means, for many of us, time off. For others it means......

Former Editor-in-Chief Ryan Avent writes a weekly column about neighborhood and development issues. Sometimes I imagine that the vicious territoriality residents of this or that place occasionally display when comparing their home enclave to another is a sign of something positive, a rootedness and sense of belonging, maybe, to the neighborhood or city or state one calls home. If that’s the case, then residents of the cities of Baltimore and Washington must be some rooted......

Former Editor-in-Chief Ryan Avent writes a weekly column about neighborhood and development issues. This week, I (carefully) picked up and began reading The Power Broker, the epic (and massive) Robert Caro biography of infamous New York master builder Robert Moses. Bob Moses, it turns out, was one of the best-trained civil service experts of the age when he first began working for the city. He was, as Caro describes him, a consummate idealist, passionately dedicated......

Former Editor-in-Chief Ryan Avent writes a weekly column about neighborhood and development issues. I'll admit, it isn’t easy for me to talk about crime in the District with many of my friends, particularly those who live in the suburbs or outside the metro area entirely. In the minds of those who don’t often visit, Washington is still the murder capital of the United States, still caught in crack wars, still a place into which one......

Former Editor-in-Chief Ryan Avent writes a weekly column about neighborhood and development issues. I got a kick out of New York’s reaction to a report released back in April, showing that carbon emissions in the city had increased by about 8 percent since 1997. The news stories were alarmist and the leaders angry, promising to do whatever it took to reverse the trend and reduce emissions within 25 years. Admirable sentiments, but it made me......

Former Editor-in-Chief Ryan Avent writes a weekly column about neighborhood and development issues. The news came as absolutely no surprise to most observers of the city of Washington, but it still managed to produce banner headlines and an outbreak of hand wringing. Which, I suppose, should also have been no surprise, in a city where issues of race and income lade every public policy discussion. Earlier this week, the Census Bureau released new data on......

Former Editor-in-Chief Ryan Avent writes a weekly column about neighborhood and development issues. You have to love the really idiosyncratic corners of a city. The hundred year-old oddities with rich histories and lovely faces that look wholly out of place amid more recent arrivals. The Warehouse Theater is just such a place. Sitting quiet and unassuming on a small stretch of 7th Street NW near the hulking new Washington Convention Center, the Warehouse has been......

Former Editor-in-Chief Ryan Avent writes a weekly column about neighborhood and development issues. It isn't particularly surprising, I suppose, that in Zachary Schrag's Metro history The Great Society Subway the role of central city savior is played by, you know, Metro. What is somewhat surprising, even to an unapologetic transit supporter like me, is how convincing his case is; faced with riot scarred neighborhoods and a downtown abused by suburban office and retail growth, the......

Former Editor-in-Chief Ryan Avent writes a weekly column about neighborhood and development issues. Early this year, I took advantage of one of our strangely mild January days and went on a short walk with my dog. I was tossing a ball for the little guy on an ugly square of WMATA-owned scrub near the Brookland Metro station, when a fellow resident of the neighborhood came by and encouraged me to defend the grassy lot from......

Former Editor-in-Chief Ryan Avent writes a weekly column about neighborhood and development issues. It's nearly two years now since the great Housing Boom of the Aughts© peaked. While prices have leveled off or declined in many places, the affordability of homes in metropolitan areas as an issue has not gone away. In central cities in particular, where the issue of gentrification is most sensitive, prices have shown the most resilience. Certainly, matters haven't changed enough......

Former Editor-in-Chief Ryan Avent writes a weekly column about neighborhood and development issues. Except for the last two weeks, when he was on vacation. Amid the cascade of (welcome) local news stories chronicling the growing momentum for District voting rights, one tangential piece in the Post, a Saturday essay from staff writer Philip Kennicott, stuck out to me. My attention was assured, specifically, when I read the following passage concerning a symposium which took place......

Former Editor-in-Chief Ryan Avent writes a weekly column about neighborhood and development issues. It is disappointing, though not surprising, that the bill to grant Washington a voting respresentative ran into difficulties on the House floor this week, just as it was unfortunate but entirely predictable that the White House, so careless with the Constitution in other situations, cast itself as the document's determined defender and threatened to veto the bill should its allies in Congress......

Former Editor-in-Chief Ryan Avent writes a weekly column about neighborhood and development issues. It's easy to focus on the problems and pathologies at the margins of a rapidly growing city. The pains of congestion and growth are frequently more dramatic in the far flung counties, where populations increase annually by astounding percentages and where infrastructure is least developed. At some point, though, you have to realize that one of the best ways to fix the......

Former Editor-in-Chief Ryan Avent writes a weekly column about neighborhood and development issues. The timing was impeccable. On Friday morning, newspapers across the country ran versions of a story highlighting increases in violent crime in cities nationwide -- but not, as it turned out, in Washington, where for over a decade crime has trended in one direction only. Hours later, the D.C. Circuit lowered its boom on behalf of six gun-desiring Washingtonians and the libertarian......

Former Editor-in-Chief Ryan Avent writes a weekly column about neighborhood and development issues. I asked in a post last week that developers not go out of their way to accomodate cars and that residents not go out of their way to drive. Reasonable propositions. Still, as a number of commenters noted, you can't suggest something along those lines and then expect Washingtonians to be heroes, throwing knapsacks over their shoulders as they head off on......

Former Editor-in-Chief Ryan Avent writes a weekly column about neighborhood and development issues. Joe Englert wants a parking garage. So it says in the Washington Business Journal, on page four of a six page testament to the change he’s helping spread along H Street NE, once one of the District’s proudest thoroughfares and now in the midst of a facelift. When he hasn’t been opening businesses there himself, it seems he’s been grooming and instructing......

Former Editor-in-Chief Ryan Avent writes a weekly column about neighborhood and development issues. "Has a second core emerged?" asked a Bureau of Labor Statistics report this week, drawing the metropolitan area's attention to the remarkable growth in business and professional employment in Virginia's Fairfax County. Headline after headline emphasized the county's new status as second pole in a newly bipolar metropolis, after we learned that Fairfax had pulled to within 100,000 jobs of the District......

Former Editor-in-Chief Ryan Avent writes a weekly column about neighborhood issues. I know that certain, wonderfully stubborn organizations continue to press for an underground tunnel through Tyson's Corner. It's a very sensible thing to pursue, and I don't blame them at all. Still, there are advantages to running your rail above ground, if circumstances permit it. The view, for one thing. Simply by riding the Red Line east three stops out of Union Station, you......

Former Editor-in-Chief Ryan Avent begins a new weekly opinion column on neighborhood issues today. To many central city residents, the suburban enterprise can seem a quixotic one, and the suburbanite a perplexing character. Pressing ever outward, he seeks to leave behind the impedimenta of urban life, only to find that the more pristine his new surroundings, the faster and thicker does the baggage of congestion gather around him. Almost immediately he finds that his new......