Anything that I have tested empirically, or explain with detailed calculations, or just generally bother to get all the facts straight.
This page gives a brief discussion of the cost of burying the power and phone lines along Maple Avenue. Best guess, this is going to cost $25M, or roughly the same as the cost of the new community center and the new police station, combined. It is not clear, yet, what portion of that we are going to pay for.
Continue reading Post #210: The cost of putting utilities underground
I did a rough survey of Maple Avenue retail, just a quick count of establishments by type, following up on my prior estimate of the retail vacancy rate. The mix of Maple Avenue retail was mentioned at the Town’s 3/20/2019 joint work session, with the basic idea being that service-oriented retail is required to make retail work in Vienna.
In this brief posting, I’m going to give my characterization of Vienna retail. I don’t think a simple goods-versus-service cut is adequate to understand what we have now.
Continue reading Post #208: Maple Avenue retail, goods versus services
Edited 3/22/2019 to soften my conclusions about Sunrise and 100 beds. Edited late 3/22/2019 to explain what all those eight-bed assisted living facilities are.
On this page, I assemble, map, and tabulate some fairly hard-to-find data on a) location of all licensed assisted living facilities in Fairfax County, and b) the base monthly rates charged by most of them (2017 data).
Surprisingly, the table of monthly rates goes a long way toward explaining Sunrise’s behavior at the last Planning Commission meeting. When questioned about five floors in their building, they were prepared. They whipped out several other sets of building plans, all of which had more-or-less the same number of beds as their original plan. And now I see that the Sunrise buildings in Fairfax (or, at least, for which I could find monthly price data) mostly cluster tightly between 100 and 120 beds. It looks like they build these for a standard operating model. So, one way or the other, I would guess, they’re going to get their 100 beds.
The Historic Mattress District is my son’s name for Maple Avenue just west of the Sunoco (Maple and Center, see map below). For his entire life, there has always been a mattress store in that space. Not the same mattress store. Just some mattress store. At this point, I’d guess three, maybe four different mattress stores.
In its glory days, the Historic Mattress District also had a mattress store directly across the street. But I fear those heady days are gone forever. The sole survivor no longer even has a name — Google simply labels it “Mattress Firm Vienna“. And that’s what it is — it’s the current occupant of the location that must, by long-standing Vienna tradition, remain a mattress store.
I’m actually going somewhere useful with this. Continue reading Post #201: A survey of Vienna retail.
A colleague asked about the “bioretention area” in the 380 Maple West proposal (Maple and Wade Hampton, 40 condos). I had to learn about this topic nearly ten years ago, for a construction project at the church I was attending. On this page, I’ll try to put that learning to use, and explain what that bioretention area is, what key role it plays here, and what the potential drawbacks are. Continue reading Bioretention, 3/7/2019
Updated 2/28/2019 to remove a couple of properties that I thought were vacant, but are either occupied or in the process of being occupied. I’ll put the new material in … whatever color you’d call this. Continue reading Retail vacancy rate estimate, 2/13/2019, REVISED 2/28/2019
Are apartment-dwellers less likely to participate in civic life? For example, are they less likely to vote? Continue reading Apartments and voter participation, 1/28/2019
While I work on a write up of a recent meeting between Sunrise assisted living and some Vienna residents, and while we wait for the developers to erect the front face and tall tower of the Chick-fil-A, here are a few heights of tall structures on or near Maple. These were all measured using Google Earth Pro. Continue reading Some building heights and setbacks, 11/6/2018
This is a placeholder as I develop the surveys that should be done instead of the planned “visual preference survey”. I only want to make three points.
1) We should learn what we can from Falls Church. Continue reading We need a real survey.
It’s no secret that the Sun-Gazette is strongly pro-developer. Every editorial regarding this current MAC zoning controversy has them wagging their finger at the Town of Vienna, warning of the vague-yet-dire consequences if Vienna does not allow 444 Maple West to be built as proposed. Continue reading Yesterday’s Sun Gazette and thoughts on a survey of Vienna residents, 7/27/2018