Reply to DC Chosen Best Place to Raise a Family

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]no one argues that the things you are describing aren't happening.  We have long avoided discussions of the long term problems involved in MANY parts of our culture.  It drives me nuts when I see new developments going up with no apparent attempt to invest in the infrastructure to support the houses, kids, traffic, etc.  I think at some point, building new homes stops (or at least slows) and we deal with the existing development.

There are no easy solutions.  We are where we are for so many reasons.  I think people are crazy if they think we can continue to let things age and decay and NOT raise taxes.  I realize it isn't popular, but it is the only way to come up with the needed revenue to maintain existing communities.  Continuing to build farther and farther into the land only makes things worse...[/quote]

I think the problem is that there's not really any way to turn the boat around.  There are more and more folks living in the MD and VA suburbs who "get it", but they're outnumbered by the folks who think doubling-down is an alternative.  Couple that with the fact that residents of "reasonable" areas in VA (e.g. Alexandria, Arlington, etc...) are shackled politically to rural and downstate concerns, and you have a recipe for disaster.  To a lesser extent there's a similar dynamic going on in MD--there are well-intentioned initiatives that inevitably seem to be undercut by compromises or otherwise watered-down.  Unfortunately, in suburban jurisdictions, given a choice between spending money on mitigating the bad decisions of the last 40 years, or constructing a new highway, the highway's going to win every time.  This stuff is incredibly hard to leverage politically, and it seems to me the areas that have the most homogenous, progressive, and non-car-oriented populations have the greatest likelihood of pulling it off.[/quote]

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