Noting for posterity that I got a second piece published in Greater Greater Washington: this one about the Eckington asphalt plant’s permit renewal.
I am both amused and conflicted about being an agent by which such NIMBY sentiment penetrates the region’s best YIMBY site. I wrote the analysis mostly to put out my shingle as a geo guy, not out of heartfelt hatred for this plant. Sometimes it’s hard to account for this last decade, you know? I know Postgis, I swear. I can load Census data for you and tell you stuff about it. It’s all true.
But it turned out that this plant is legitimately weird, situated in an area that’s about forty times as dense as is typical for this kind of facility. Look at that: I radicalized myself.
The actual permit renewal is not going to get rid of the plant, the indignant shock of the folks on the community meeting Zoom notwithstanding. But the neighbors are plenty mad and if Fort Myer Construction Corporation has any sense at all they’re thinking hard about how to maximize this rapidly depreciating asset’s value before some underemployed lawyer in the neighborhood starts giving them real trouble. I’m happy enough to have stoked that fire with some numbers and Javascript.
