While quality of life issues are indeed pressing in the District, the state of our decaying, antiquated schools needs to be addressed. Essentially, you have to either approve higher taxes to pay for those types of quality of life enhancements (we are already asking businesses to pick up the tab for our baseball stadium) or allow DCPS to raise the capital by leveraging current resources (i.e. valuable land) to rebuild schools. This is not a developer’s agenda, as any developer will be paying market prices for the land and would see no extra profit from such development. Such asset-based management and improvements would increase the quality of public schools, doing a great deal to improve the quality of life for all residents.
The baseball stadium adds little value to quality of life. Those tax dollars should have been spent both on transit expansion (www.dctransitfuture.com) and rebuilding of school, library, and parks infrastructure.
I haven't looked at this issue in depth. I am not against "adaptive reuse" of school buildings--have you read anything I've written about Sumner School, etc...? But without going about this in an incredibly focused and citizen-centric as opposed to rolling over and accepting dribbles of money, we're likely to get f*d as a community.
This is more about the "Growth Machine" than it is about maintaining and extending those factors that make cities great places.
IMO anyway...
Commenting by HaloScan
