Tuesday, May 16, 2006

Going to school...

Evan at Howard County Blog has written a response to my post about a school in Town Center, which also drew a response from a commentor. I had hoped to address these critiques today, but the blogging clock struck all naughts before I had a chance to finish.

But, I don't want to go without posting at least something. So, since neither answered the main question that I have, I'll pose it again. If we force the landowners to set aside a piece of land for a school, what other amenity will we be sacrificing? I think we have to assume that there is a limit to the amount of "proffers" we can expect from General Growth and that this limit is related to what we give them.

Given this limited community "profit," however much it is, what do we think is the best way to allocate it? A school site, I would argue, takes up a pretty major portion of this bounty, leaving less for all the other stuff we want. So, if we decide a school site is our top priority -- and we'd still have to foot the bill for the building of that school -- what gets cut from the priority list when the bill comes due?

Perhaps tomorrow I'll post a full response.

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