Sat.Mar 30, 2024

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Alcohol regulations against licensing due to proximity to schools, churches, and parks are dumb

Rebuilding Place in Urban Space

1. Alcohol is mostly served in the evening. Schools close around 3pm and aren't open on weekends, when most alcohol is sold. 2. Besides the First Amendment separating church and state, churches are mostly only active Saturday or Sunday morning. The establishments that serve alcohol tend not to be open when churches are. 3. With parks, plenty of parks serve alcohol at restaurants within the parks.

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Wizards and Capitals teams staying in DC after all and the failure of the mansion tax referendum in Chicago have one thing in common: failure to take the time to build consensus

Rebuilding Place in Urban Space

Change is hard. My experience in the civic arena is that it takes "a couple rounds" of putting the idea out there before there is consensus to go forward. I wrote a bunch about failures of transit referenda in Tampa Bay and the State of Georgia in the 2010s. Georgia introduced a new way to create transportation districts, then expected people to vote up or down in less than a year (" Failure of the transit-roads sales tax measure in Metro Atlanta ," 2012).

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