The DC outpost of Buddha Bar, which was invariably described as such and which I never set foot in, has shuttered. Attention should be paid. Perhaps. I don’t know. The management claims to have based their decision on “the constant struggle of the DC cliental not understanding our concept”.
I should probably have put a “(sic)” in there, somewhere, but perhaps we beige Washingtonians do not and in fact cannot ever understand the cool new way to spell “clientele”. Given our beigeness, their failure most certainly could have had nothing to do with the inherent unviability of incredibly expensive, nonphenomenal drinks to be had in an inconvenient neighborhood devoid of any meaningful street life.
Seriously, it’s Buddha Bar. They could have gotten anything in the city, anywhere at all. They could have bought out any establishment on Connecticut Avenue between K Street and Dupont, where people go on nice dates and lobbyists spend lots of money to impress people, and it would have been incredibly chic and swank and glamorous.
But the sort of people who go to overpriced fashion bars to be seen buying overpriced drinks are not the same people who would be in Mount Vernon Square. Those people want to be seen eating artisanal sandwiches or attending radical-chic poetry slams or, you know, buying their own groceries.
I want to believe that they basically did zero site selection review for this thing. If they did any at all (which seems like a charitable presumption to me), it probably consisted of taking the Acela down from New York and then walking straight up Massachussetts Avenue until they found an available storefront of a certain size. And what else was on that block? Lido Pizza? NPR? Did they think the GAO was going to go buck-wild for mysterious clients? Leathermen? LivingSocial maybe?
Whoever was in charge of this obviously doesn’t know anything about DC and, in my imagination, didn’t actually try to prevent this thing from failing in any meaningful way.
(Incidentally, the Gii Lounge near Howard University, which I also hated, has also somewhat predictably shuttered and was replaced by a much better kebab and curry shop. But I no longer live in that neighborhood, so it somewhat caught me by surprise at this point.)
“When God gives you AIDS, make lemonades,” or so said Sarah Silverman, notably, at least once. Probably repeatedly. And so it is with infrastructure projects as well.
While regional high-speed rail projects have been drying up all over the country, and Congress barely managed to eke out some very weak tea with MAP-21 – a transportation auth with reduced transit spending, bike and pedestrian money that can be spent on left-turn lanes, and no particular HSR funding whatsoever – California has finally authorized its bullet-train project, and Amtrak has used some of Florida and New Jersey’s abandoned money to start refurbishing the Northeast Corridor, or at least to start thinking about it.
First, the California project, whose merits and errors have been written up in much more detail by Alex Goldmark and Yonah Freemark, almost in point and counterpoint.
While I’m happy something has begun, I’m also upset that California not only rejected the advice of SNCF and other experienced builder/operators, but also did not sufficiently prioritize the most obvious step of first completing the passenger link between Bakersfield and Los Angeles. Without it there is no rail connection between the Central Valley and southern California whatsoever, and vanishingly little meaningful passenger rail service between northern and southern California to speak of. This is an essential oversight; the amount of people that would travel for any amount of time from Bakersfield to Fresno pales in comparison to the number of travelers to Los Angeles.
I understand why it’s valuable to deviate slightly from I-5 to US 99 in order to hit a series of Central Valley population centers, but I don’t understand why the weird dogleg thru the Antelope Valley would be demographically or structurally crucial to that link. Maybe because service already exists to Palmdale? But would carrying tracks over the Grapevine pass really be that much more expensive? How much speed might we be sacrificing for savings, assuming they exist?
Secondly, the NEC plan. Amtrak appears to have squeezed $15 billion in savings from a $151 billion estimate for upgrading the NEC to bona fide international bullet-train standards of high-speed rail service, however incrementally, by 2040. (This, as Alon Levy notes, requires clearing significant regulatory hurdles).
Incremental, or “iterative”, isn’t a bad thing; it provides results much more quickly over time. Unfortunately, I have no idea if that will be enough to demonstrate the huge and genuine import of this project to public or private investors, whoever they might be. It is, to say the least, not abundantly clear where any of this money is going to come from, otherwise. The plan itself certainly doesn’t specify.)
Regardless, it’s necessary that amid the drumbeat of austerity, HSR projects focus on regions with the greatest existing value for their services, and while both plans have far to go (albeit in different ways), it’s, well, at least it’s something. And that, unfortunately, is somewhat remarkable.
It’s not every day that transit news is eclipsed by tragedy. …Well, actually, it’s probably very nearly every day, but you don’t get that much transit news in Hampton Roads, and my irritation that a “trial” bus service to Norfolk airport had been canceled (after only two months!) was quickly eclipsed by my shock at today’s tragic accident near Oceana Naval Air Station in Virginia Beach.
The buildings into which the jet crashed, and indeed the pattern of development generally, are fairly old. The extent to which Virginia Beach encourages development around Oceana – literally all around it, with the Southeastern Parkway representing the finality of hemming the base in – always stuck me as extremely craven and short-sighted for exactly this reason; not only does it compromise the mission of Oceana airfield, but also endangers the public. No amount of performative utterances about “the sound of freedom” are going to eliminate the basic calculus of risk taken by encouraging people to live in a crash zone. The risk patterns are as well-documented as that of a flood zone.
I’m not sure what worries me more: that things won’t change, or that they will for the worse. Norfolk’s little light rail stub is performing better than expected, and the momentum for some kind of extension into Virginia Beach was gaining – probably first to Pembroke Town Center, but possibly to complete the Base-to-Beach vision necessary to make that line meaningfully useful. Now a line to the oceanfront, skirting the northern edge of Oceana, seems a lot less appropriate – or, at least, the idea of increasing density in the airfield’s environs would be.
But just as likely, I imagine, is the possibility that the looming, upcoming BRAC round will see this as the last straw of negotiating with Virginia Beach for an increasingly compromised base, and will recommend Oceana’s closure. Jacksonville always has room for more jets, as does Cherry Point.
Virginia Beach needs to finally start getting serious, for once, about how it’s going to develop, redevelop, and manage its land. They really can’t have it both ways, and lives are at stake.
Since we’re on the subject of rebooting Hampton Roads transportation policy, I noticed HRT’s new long-range plan and was intrigued by its similarity, however superficial, to my undergraduate thesis on the subject.
It involves a deep-bore rail crossing across the harbor, which I think is a bit far-fetched, and some things are LRT that I’d make BRT (like the I-64 HOV lanes) and other things are BRT that I’d make automated LRT (like service from northern Suffolk to Little Creek via downtown Norfolk and Portsmouth), but most of the priority corridors and enhanced ferry offerings are there.
So I’m not sure whether it really means anything at all, honestly, but I’ve decided I’m kind of flattered.
Officials throughout southeastern Virginia are apparently shocked – shocked! – that public anger at the increasing privatization and tolling of nearly all routes connecting Norfolk and Virginia Beach to the rest of the region appears to be coming to a head.
Such anger is, as I see it, unsurprising. (The only thing that really surprises me here are toll rates that end in seven or seventeen cents, which is merely peculiar to those with credit cards or EZ Pass, but could amount to an exasperating inefficiency for commuters who do not.) But one thing much less surprising is the inevitability of this outcome. Frankly, Virginians are starting to see the chickens coming home to roost.
To some extent, the possibility of using toll revenue for de facto congestion pricing is not entirely inappropriate, if highly inequitable in the absence of good transit alternatives. But it should be apparent from this that VDOT is not only still fixated on road projects at the expense of transit, but unclear on which of these projects are actual priorities. Some – the Southeastern Parkway immediately comes to mind – are of dubious utility at best (in that particular case, serving few apparent transportation needs while enabling real estate speculation at the expense of Oceana Naval Air Station and its mission).
The growing sticker shock at the expense of various projects not only speaks to urban Virginian’s missteps in rejecting a 1% gas tax levy, but also to Richmond’s inability to come to terms with changes in transportation dynamics that are already underway. This appeared to be implicitly understood by many voters in rejecting those levies, given that over 95% of the billions of dollars to be raised in those proposals went to trophy road projects addressing priorities that are decades out of date.
But it appears to be slowly dawning on state officials how incredibly unserious Virginia’s approach to transportation has become, particularly in Bob McDonnell’s administration:
“I don’t think that the citizens of Virginia are ready yet to do what’s needed to solve the problem, and that’s raise revenue,” said Republican Del. Thomas Rust, whose Fairfax district is plagued by gridlock. “The citizens understand all that, but at the end of the day they say don’t you dare raise my taxes.”
Gov. Bob McDonnell had proposed privatizing the state’s liquor stores to generate funding for transportation, but Senate Democrats and even some in his own party have said that idea will never pass. McDonnell also had hoped to rely on drilling for oil and gas off Virginia’s coast to fund road and rail projects, but President Barack Obama recently announced a seven-year delay on such activity due to the BP oil spill.
With those seemingly off the table, Sen. Mary Margaret Whipple and some transportation officials said the gas tax was the best hope for new revenues.
In a perfect world, these growing rifts and dawning realizations would frighten some officials into thinking about whether the Oceana sprawlway and “Third Crossing” are actually worth it, and lead them to possibly consider a more sustainable and equitable transportation policy for the entire region.
If southeastern Virginians had better transit options – not even necessarily rail to begin with, just high-capacity, frequent bus and ferry service to start – starting in the denser nodes of the region and working from that foundation, they would be getting somewhere, faster and more reliably. Instead, VDOT continues a policy of planning more roads that do nothing to improve core capacity, exacerbate existing capacity problems, and threaten major elements of the regional environment and economic base.
This morning, I read the City Paper’sin-depth interview with Courtland Milloy, the Washington Post’s curmudgeon-type columnist who veritably exploded many of the thinly-shellacked issues of generation-gap ressentiment and racial animus in the District of Columbia after its September 2010 mayoral primary. This tendency is something he dances around, albeit inelegantly, in passages like this:
“Well, I don’t know why people think I have a problem with the influx itself,” he says. “Not to be deliberately provocative, but that is the white view, it’s white-centered. ‘Why are you opposed to us moving in?’ But nothing about, ‘Why are you concerned about the way black people are being kicked out?’ People are being displaced, and sometimes run over roughshod. To me, that’s the issue. But depending on who gets to frame the issue—who gets to pose the question, set the framework—it becomes, you know, what’s wrong with white people moving in?”
I know, at least on some rational level, that I should be checking my privilege here, that I’m skirting dangerously close to a number of “post-racial” whiteprivilegetropes like “if you don’t educate me how can I learn” or “talking about race is divisive” or “you’re racist against whites” and tone arguments and what have ye. But I really would like to talk about his use of the word “myopic”.
“Myopic”, I would wager, is the idea that working- and middle-class whites in neighborhoods like Petworth and H Street NE should be the target of contempt, not for being “twits” (though some are indeed that, and some of those are definitely myopic) but for having the temerity to move into, and even attempt to materially improve, the squalid neighborhoods they can afford, if only because African-Americans are somehow inherently more deserving tenants.
“Myopic” would be the belief that the suburbs are necessarily better places for working- and middle-class whites, even though they are not actually good for wide swaths of people, because of social fictions about the nature of people who occupy them. (This is particularly galling coming from a resident of Prince George’s County, which has steadfastlyrefused to organize land use in a way that would allow its existing transit infrastructure to work in a self-sustaining fashion, in favor of cargo-cultic sprawl and totally atomized new-urbanist theme parks like National Harbor and Konterra.)
“Myopic” is the notion that the white influx is absurd, petty or inexplicable, even in light of the fact that many of those incoming whites, particularly on the lower end of the economic spectrum, are sexual minorities who not only face greater threats of retaliation in the suburbs – particularly Virginia localities we are exhorted to “move back” to even if we have never lived there – but are also increasingly exposed to violent retaliation for having the gall to live in neighborhoods that non-residents still patrol for any kind of unauthorized sexuality or gender expression. (Actually, rather than “myopic”, I would prefer to use either the word heterosexist, in case the possibility hadn’t even occurred to him, or homophobic, if he believes these concerns are not particularly meaningful or relevant.)
Even more “myopic” is the continuing description of the “influx” as monolithically white at all, when the demographic changes affecting neigborhoods like Columbia Heights have made those neighborhoods browner and more Latin@, many of whom are working-class or even destitute by Milloy’s standards. Do they deserve contempt, or is this again not particularly relevant to the critique?
I am trying very hard not to take a racist perspective on this diatribe, and probably failing. But none of this is meant to deny the reality that many African-Americans in greater Washington have been displaced by gentrification in a way that is genuinely oppressive, and resentment is understandable. At the same time, however, many members of the “white influx” – not nearly all of whom are white – have come to escape their own circumstances of oppression, the threat of physical violence, the inability to express their sexual or gender variance, or a lack of economic opportunity in peripheral regions. And this is the heart of what annoys me about Milloy’s rant: he appears to be conflating an aesthetic critique with socioeconomic realities. I hate hipsters as much as anyone, but I don’t resent them in the sense that they have less of a right to live here than any particular subset of “native” Washingtonians.
Being a dickhead might not be as cool as dickheads think, but it’s not what’s oppressing people. Poor and difficult decisions about how to use limited and highly restricted parcels of land (both in the District, with its height limits, and in Prince George’s, with its orthogonal transit non-orientation), combined with the lack of opportunities provided the urban and suburban poor trapped in sprawl, is a big part of the problem. The physical landscapes, language, and unspoken assumptions of an auto-centric society need to be undone as part and parcel with any urban system of social justice that seeks equity and hopes to uplift all oppressed parties.
I wrote this essay a year or two ago, but I think it’s still relevant. In any case, it deals primarily with the fundamental role of urban fabric in making developed and emerging cities more sustainable, particularly in terms of energy and land use. And it’s up on Scribd now.
Recent Comments