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Morning Reads – 21 July 2014 – Transportation News Abounds

in Albemarle Charlottesville General Real Estate on

Each of these is going to affect how we get around Charlottesville and Albemarle … and I’d wager quality of life will be affected (mostly positively in the long run) as well.

Why People Still Move to ‘Unhappy’ Places

“… we’ll give some key data points. Some of the happiest cities measured by Glaeser and company were Charlottesville, Virginia; Rochester, Minnesota; Lafayette, Louisiana; Naples, Florida; and Flagstaff, Arizona—”

Belmont Bridge’s future may be decided tonight – This is the sort of thing that will shape the City and how we live in it.

City engineers have whittled down the options for the Belmont Bridge replacement project to two resolutions for Charlottesville’s City Council to consider Monday night: endorsement of a $17.2 million design less than half the length of the current span, or scrapping all four concepts now in the running and return to the drawing board.

The engineers are recommending the shorter replacement — 205 feet instead of the 440-foot span now standing — as the most responsible use of public funds available to the city, according to a staff report.

State seeks completion of Route 29 projects by fall 2017 – I’ll be shocked and impressed if this happens on time. Keep in mind that 29 will be a construction zone for some time.

Cilimberg said VDOT expects most of the projects recommended by former Commissioner Philip Shucetto be completed by October 2017. On Thursday, the agency will issue a request for qualifications from firms that want to bid on the universal contract.

UVa rolls out bike-share program – With the assistance of Blue Ridge Cyclery!

Very, very cool. I do hope that they require (or at least strongly suggest/offer) a class in how to ride a bicycle safely and considerately.

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Charlottesville: #1 College Town

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I should have made a “list” category when I started this blog to efficiently catalog the lists on which Charlottesville (Charlottesville + Albemarle) has made it.

From Travelerstoday.com:

However, the number one spot is reserved for a more Southern town. Indeed, Charlottesville, home of the University of Virginia, does the best job of any city on the list of combining traditional metropolitan interests with the interests of the students who frequent it. The result is a harmonious whole, balancing the resources of an urban area with the desires of the students who live there. From the historical aura of Monticello, to the entertainment provided in the famous (and recently redecorated) Paramount theater, Charlottesville has it all, a place any college student would be proud to call home. Which is why we at Traveler’s Today have listed it as the best college town in America.

Taking the fluff our of what they’re saying: Charlottesville is a great place to live. I did chuckle at their reference to the harmony and balance that they perceived.

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The Proposed Solution for 29 North

in Albemarle Charlottesville General Real Estate on

29 is changing. What’s that mean?

– Lots of money is going to be spent.

– 29 is going to be more challenging for a number of years.

– Hopefully things will be better and more efficient when they’re finished.

– Page 6 of this PDF shows the roads that will touched by the $203 million – Hillsdale, Berkmar, 29 North, Rio, Hydraulic and the Best Buy ramp. Plus funding for Amtrak to DC (which I think is super-cool).

– The segmentation of Charlottesville – Albemarle will continue (more).

K. Burnell Evans reports that: (read the whole thing)

Albemarle County supervisors decided Tuesday to back a $203-million plan to address congestion and mobility on Albemarle County’s main artery.

Two hundred and three million dollars. To fix 29 North.

conceptual-rio-road-1.jpg

If you’re curious to learn more:

– Sean Tubbs at Charlottesville Tomorrow has an excellent recap of yesterday’s meeting and where we are now.

– Charlottesville Tomorrow

– Download the PDF of the final proposed plan.

– Read the thoughts at the Free Enterprise Forum.

– Southern Environmental Law Center

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What is the value of a Greenway?

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Bikes on a deck in Charlottesville

What is the value of a green way to a buyer in today’s market?

Had an interesting conversation this morning in the Crozet Mudhouse with someone who was noting that the attitude shift toward greenways has shifted significantly in the past 10 years or so.

It used to be that real estate agents and developers and even buyers placed little to no value in having access to a means of passage that was not centered around an automobile.

Today, that attitude has shifted 180°.

Access to bike paths or suitable walking trails (for strollers) is an enormous asset. through my admittedly myopic view as seen through the eyes of my buyer clients who are seeking such access and proximity, and through the eyes of my seller clients who are advocating for the benefits of such access, I would say that the world has shifted in this respect.

In the Charlottesville Albemarle area my view is that the City of Charlottesville is fairly well poised to design and build more greenways and bike paths (hint: West Main). The County of Albemarle needs more will and more money. And they both need to work together to have the respective systems work together.

Worth noting is that the departments within the respective localities are filled with remarkable people doing remarkable work.

The market wants these things.

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What do Buyers (Moving to or In) Charlottesville Read?

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In last month’s Monthly Note I asked – What do you read? One of the best responses was this:

What do I read? The sites I’ve used as we’ve considered where to move include the local newspapers and related sites — just to get an idea about the town and the issues that are important, as well as the economic health and forecasts for the area. As far as real estate specific, not so many. I opened up searches on Trulia a couple years ago to get a feeling for the houses we could afford in a couple areas. I keep tabs on things like greatplacestoretire.com, but I find them more useful in making me feel good about where I’ve chosen than helping me choose someplace out of the blue. Almost all of their recommendations are places I’d never consider for any reason.

I see it as my responsibility to educate my clients as best as I possibly can. Part of that education includes informing clients as to which information sources I’ve found useful and credible and which aren’t. (this is sort of like when I tell clients they don’t want to see a house because it’s awful)

A quick listing of what I tend to advise folks read:

– Charlottesville Tomorrow – hands down, the best source of information on Charlottesville and Albemarle transportation, growth, development news. And their archives don’t disappear.

– CvillePedia – Charlottesville Tomorrow’s Charlottesville wikipedia.

– The Daily Progress – their writing and information seems to have gotten better and more comprehensive in the past few months, although their website is an ad-ridden abomination. Install Adblock plus before you visit their site.

– RealCrozetVA – if you’re thinking about moving to Crozet, I (selfishly) highly recommend reading this. I’ve heard from many people who’ve moved to Crozet that they used the site (and many have said they wished they’d contacted me).

– C-Ville – In the absence of The HooK, C-Ville has become the only other newspaper in Charlottesville.

– Free Enterprise Forum – one of my favorite blogs. Disclosure: sponsored by the Charlottesville Realtor Association and Charlottesville Homebuilders, it has a pro-growth slant (but y’all could figure that out)

– cvillenews – one of the original Charlottesville blogs

A reader commented on my Google+ post:

Blogs: My favorite is Young House Love, and Apartment Therapy is also good (it’s probably better for how to manage a space/issue and less to do with home-buying).

And now I’m awfully curious to know what other blogs and sites my buyers and sellers read – where do you get your advice and insight into the home buying and selling process?
I’m really quite interested in this – too often the real estate “advice” my clients cite is from other markets markets and other states – where real estate business practices are very, very different. Real estate practices are highly localized and knowing the differences and idiosyncrasies matter.

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Bad Data, Sexual Offenders and Property Values

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Question everything. Always.

You can search for sexual offenders in Charlottesville and Albemarle (and the entire Commonwealth of Virginia); but how do you know if the data is accurate?

Now that sexual offender data display is becoming more commonplace, how long until consumers start to eliminate areas outright because one sexual offender is nearby? What recourse do homeowners have?

Story after story shows that consumers don’t seem to mind that the big real estate sites don’t always have the most current or accurate real estate listings. Zillow is said to be a “starting point” in the process; but what if they end up being the only point consumers (wrongly) reference? It seems that many of my clients warily use Zillow, but I also know that they understand that Zillow is but one point in the research process and that all information on the internet needs to be vetted.

Sellers already care when the Zestimate for their home is absurdly and wrongly low – and they have no viable recourse to remedy said Zestimate. What recourse would homeowners have if the real estate search sites they use allow searchers to, say, filter out homes that are within one mile of a sexual offender?

What does one do about inaccurate sex offender data? It’s fairly easy for me to demonstrate how a zestimate is crap. It’s another thing for me as a real estate professional representing my clients to research the current and accurate location and then discover whether the offender is a violent offender or an innocuous one.

A study from a few years ago noted that sex offenders’ presence may devalue a home by 17%.

They find a reduction in housing prices of 17% within a tenth of a mile of an offender’s home, and find significant changes in price up to a third of a mile.

What if the referenced sexual offender is no longer there? Is Zillow (or whichever data provider, but they’re the big dog) liable?

Inman News brings this story back to the fore with their story yesterday. Sexual offender’s presence tends to elicit binary responses – either “yes, I’m willing to risk (whether personal or financial) living close to a sexual offender or no, I’m not willing to risk it. And Inman poses the question:

But even if the data is accurate, buyers might misinterpret it. Many offenders have not committed crimes that are as nearly as heinous as many might initially assume.

* If you’re a client or potential client, ask me for a story about a sexual offender in Charlottesville whose crime and presence in a neighborhood almost caused my clients to not buy.

There are nuances to data that demand more than a binary response. Is this the result that we want?

The data also could help herd offenders into enclaves, depressing home values in some neighborhoods and scaring away families with children.Research published by four professors from Longwood University in Farmville, Va., in late 2013 found that sex offenders tend to cluster together, and that such clustering increased from 1999 to 2009 in Virginia.

Read the whole story.

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The Western Bypass is Apparently Dead. So What’s Next?

in Albemarle Charlottesville General Real Estate Politics Transportation on

So says the Daily Progress.

One decades-old question was answered with a resounding no.

“A bypass is not something we would consider,” Norfolk-based consultant Philip A. Shucet, the head of the advisory panel and former commissioner of the Virginia Department of Transportation, told the board.

Nearly two years after officials awarded a contract for the bypass, and after $54 million was spent on the project, the planned 6.2-mile road has become a footnote.

The transportation board, a 17-member panel of gubernatorial appointees that presides over Virginia’s transportation system, will determine what happens to unspent money from a project state officials had valued at more than $244 million.

If nothing else, this seems to remove the uncertainty from the conversation about the Western Bypass. We can return now to our discussions about the woes of traffic on 29 North and how the CharlAlbemarle area is woefully incapable of understanding the issues and equally incapable of implementing solutions. Such is life.

Rather than go into the history of the Western Bypass (it goes on for decades), discuss the various regional influences (Lynchburg is key), the various local players (broadly it’s growth vs no-growth) and whether VDOT is going to sell the houses it bought many years ago (it should if the Bypass is truly dead) or even whether the Western Bypass was the right route (it wasn’t but that’s because it’s a 30+ year old design, designed well before massive growth on 29 North) – start looking at background at Charlottesville Tomorrow.

Lynchburg is mad.

There is a fundamental disagreement over what, exactly, U.S. 29 is. Is it a major north-south transportation corridor with the goal of providing relatively unimpeded traffic flow to through traffic along its 1,000-mile path or is it, in Charlottesville and Albemarle County, a local retail strip? It can’t be both. …

Charlottesville and Albemarle, however, still persist in their silly, outdated belief that U.S. 29 is really just “Emmett Street,” the local retail strip, and has no connection to the rest of the state. That’s evident in Albemarle’s “plan” to address improvements on Emmett Street: a silly, utopian Places29 with overpasses ” built where major retail centers now sit” for through traffic, pedestrian-friendly amenities and added lanes for traffic.

I think they’re right. If the bypass is truly dead, what’s the solution?

Short story – a new solution needs to be implemented. One would assume it would need to be agreed upon first, so let’s accept that the segmentation of the Charlottesville – Albemarle region will continue. Not that that’s a bad thing, it just is. (more)

One of the first things I thought about what this line from Ocean’s 11.

I’m thinking we will need to wait for Elon Musk’s hyper loop.

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