Too Many Parks
Dear Correspondents:
A few times before, I’m written that Matthew Yglesias strikes me as
being almost always wrong and badly informed when he blogs about
Washington. Now he has outdone himself, and even his regular readers
have expressed almost complete bewilderment over his opinion. In http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2009/08/how-many-parks-do-you-need.php,
he says that DC has too many small pocket parks and that small urban
parks serve no important purpose, so that there’s no reason to
preserve more green space that could be turned into productive apartment
buildings or office buildings. This is consistent with Yglesias’
opinions that DC’s height restriction on buildings should be lifted so
that we could become a city of skyscrapers and that public policy should
discourage the private ownership of automobiles so that more people
would have to use public transit and bicycles for their transportation
needs. Basically, Yglesias doesn’t understand why cities shouldn’t
be built primarily to satisfy the needs of twenty-something singles like
him — more bars, clubs, and coffee shops, and less of everything else
— and he thinks that nobody else’s preferences are as legitimate as
his. But as his commentators have tried to point out to him, cities have
to satisfy the needs of many different people, including parents with
small children who play in parks, people with pets who run and play in
parks, and old people who socialize in parks. For them, the greatest
good does not come with the greatest density, and land “wasted” on
parks is already being put to a valuable use.
Speaking of small pocket parks, Bruce DePuyt of NewsChannel 8 and
WJLA freports that there’s no appetite among members of the city
council for renaming the park at 14th and Girard Street, NW, after
President Obama. “Contributing to their reluctance is the President’s
apparent failure to use any of his clout on issues District residents
hold dear,” writes DePuyt.
Ralph Chittams, below, writes that canceling the tax-free
back-to-school shopping week probably costs DC tax revenues. In the long
run, the increase of DC’s sales tax to 6 percent will probably
decrease tax revenues, too. Why should suburbanites, or even DC
residents, do major shopping in the District, when every big store has
branches in Maryland and Virginia that will charge less, and will pack
your purchase in paper or plastic bags without an extra charge imposed
by the government? It isn’t smart to make the city even less
competitive when the suburbs are ready and willing to serve shoppers
better and at a lower cost.
Issues are getting shorter as the weather gets hotter. Help us beef
up the next issue of themail; tell us about your life in DC.
Gary Imhoff
themail@dcwatch.com
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Penny Wise and Pound Foolish
Ralph J. Chittams, Sr., rjchittamssr@gmail.com
This past weekend was the Tax-Free shopping weekend in Virginia.
Granted my observations are unscientific, but there were many cars with
DC tags at the malls in Leesburg. What our District officials seem to
forget is that, even though they may lose the tax revenue on
back-to-school supplies and clothes, those shopping will also purchase
other items. Without giving specifics, I’m sure I paid $50 in sales
tax to the Commonwealth of Virginia. Most of the items purchased could
have been purchased in the District, but I was shopping in Virginia. DC,
better luck next year.
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There was a recent article in the Post about possibly
requiring annual fire drills in private apartment buildings. Isn’t
this overkill? Is there any city in the entire world that requires such
fire drills in residential apartments? In my building, each rental
apartment has a smoke detector and a fire extinguisher, plus there is
another fire extinguisher in the hallway of each floor. Periodically we
get notices from the Fire Department or Emergency Services reminding us
about basic fire safety rules and to have an evacuation plan ready if
one is needed. Isn’t that enough? Evacuation is not necessarily the
best thing to do in all fires. If there is smoke and fire in the
hallway, the residents may be better off closing their doors to keep the
fire from spreading into their apartments and wait for help to arrive.
I am even more concerned about how this would be enforced. Is the
Fire Department going to hire lots of additional staff to monitor all
these fire drills in all of the hundreds of apartment buildings in DC
(even if each building has only one fire drill per year) or will they
rely on building management, as in the case of office buildings? If so,
the building management would have to check each apartment to make sure
that all the inhabitants had actually left. If any of them were not
careful to re-lock the doors, there could be numerous burglaries. Not
only that, such entry could be a violation of the Fourth Amendment
prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures. Generally, the
courts have applied that right more strictly to people’s homes than to
their offices. A fire is an emergency, but a drill is not. It might be
hard to convince the courts that residents’ Fourth Amendment rights
can be waived to conduct drills that have never been deemed necessary
since the city was founded in 1800.
[The article is a notice of a hearing on the Fire Alarm Notice and
Tenant Fire Safety Amendment Act of 2009, Bill 18-178, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/17/AR2009061701542.html
— Gary Imhoff]
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Capital PC User Group Meetings
Phil Shapiro, pshapiro@his.com
Some of the most interesting technology-related meetings and events I’ve
attended have been run by people in the Capital PC User Group. You can
now stay in the loop on these on Twitter. Follow CPCUG on Twitter at http://twitter.com/cpcug
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Public Transportation
Harold Goldstein, mdbiker@goldray.com
James Treworgy writes [themail, August 5]: “This doesn’t mean we
shouldn’t intelligently plan for growth in some areas, but if the
potential use of a new metro station is too low then the benefits would
not outweigh the cost.” He seems to equate public transportation with
Metro. That’s wrong; around the world public transportation can mean
anything from jitneys to small buses to trolleys. You use what is
appropriate. There is no reason that some form of public transportation
cannot be available to every residence in the city and near suburbs.
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