Shiloh Baptist Church Properties

Shiloh Baptist Church is often mentioned in discussions of the problem of vacant structures in Shaw. Using public city sources I created the map above illustrating the properties owned by the church in the Shaw neighborhood. The church owns seven vacant rowhomes and two parking lots in addition to three occupied church buildings. I have […]

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Nationals Stadium Taking Shape in Southeast

Today I visited the Southeast DC neighborhood where the Nationals new baseball stadium is under construction. As you can see from this photo the form of the roughly $600 million stadium is taking shape. Fans can follow the project on this website created by the construction companies that features two webcams and a daily archive […]

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No Connection Between Metro Stations and Crime

The urban legend is often repeated in D.C. that Georgetown didn’t get a Metro station because that neighborhood’s rich residents feared an invasion of crime and undesirables. The statement is totally false, and has been debunked thoroughly by Zachary Schrag in academic articles and his book about the history of the Metro where he describes […]

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First-Ever Guide to Planning Schools Published

Because I know a lot of my planning-interested friends read this blog, I thought I would note that I just noticed the urban planning website Planetizen has published what I believe to be the first-ever comprehensive guide to Urban Planning graduate programs in the U.S. and Canada. The directory includes program rankings, and here is […]

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Finding Local Blogs

Recently I have been hearing about two recently launched websites designed to help folks find blogs by geographic location. PlaceBlogger is a fairly straight-forward directory that has some aggregated content on the main page. Outside.in is much more powerful — it aggregates blog posts and allows you to view all the posts for a given […]

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The New Puritainism: The Politics of Alcohol in DC

Since 2001, the regulation of the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages in the District has been controlled by the Alcoholic Beverage Regulation Administration, a seven-member regulatory body of city government. ABRA issues licenses to all types of sellers of alcohol in the city, monitors compliance with city law, and has the power to issue […]

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