One of my favorite habitats in Michigan are marl fens. Typically you expect carnivorous plants in acidic bogs, but in this special habitat with extremely alkaline soils Sarracenia purpurea and Drosera linearis thrive along with calciphiles like Primula mistassinica

I just love this native pine lily, Lilium catesbaei, blooming in my bog garden today. #ncnativeplants

Then there are pitcherplants that time their production of new leaves until after their flowers are pollinated so they don’t eat their pollinators!

Here is one of my favorites, Lactarius (Lactifluus) corrugis. When cut it bleeds a white “milk”. When cooked it has a very meaty flavor. Very good marinated and grilled.

I’ll keep eye out for some of my favorite easy to ID mushrooms and share some with you if you like. Should be a good year for them.

It appears to be a polypore of some kind but it’s infected by another fungus that makes it hard to tell what species it is. Could have been Ganoderma.

I’m pretty certain it isn’t just based on habitat alone. I did once find a huge bunch of oyster mushrooms on the Corner by a frat house that appeared every year. Given the location I wasn’t going to eat them!

If building was causing prices to drop (or even stabilize) then I’d expect to see a graph of home price and days on market that contrasts with overall economic conditions. It’s the sort of thing that may be difficult to detect until after it’s already happened.

I assume you aren’t serious, but porcini is Boletus edulis, and I’ve only really seen it in spruce forests at higher elevation. There are other edible boletes one can find locally. Boletes are can be identified because they have pores instead of gills. There are some poisonous ones too.

IDK, price in Crozet really don’t seem to be down much. Do you have more recent data? Plus, one has to take into account the effects of the larger economy and consumer sentiment, which dropped to a record low.

It’s what Julius Caesar said when he crossed the Rubicon, “The die is cast”. It means essentially “What’s done is done, no turning back now”.

It’s worth noting that current policies originated over fears that rural sprawl would cause the South Fork Rivanna reservoir to silt up and be unusable as a water supply. They were clearly right.

Albemarle politics is now headed in a radical new direction which will undo decades old conservation policies. Virginia Beach went through this years ago too. Remember this moment, there may be an “I told you so” in the four years when housing is less affordable and residents are displaced.

Alea iacta est. It’ll be whatever it is and either this shift in policy for Albemarle will be good, or it won’t (Obviously, I lean towards the later camp.). Take a mental snapshot of this moment though so we can discuss again in four years. We should know by then if things are better or worse.

Nothing is “shot down” at this point. Keep in mind Crozet has the highest rate of growth in the whole county. Part of the issue is that we’ve made density a dirty word. People associate it with declining service and loss of greenspaces. You can’t just have density, it needs to be livable.

If you go back in time, Charlottesville had many of the same issues in regard to large underutilized areas. It was the fact they couldn’t annex anymore that has really driven redevelopment of those spaces. If expand prematurely, it will completely remove any incentive to redevelop and cause sprawl

What responsibility do neighboring localities have to provide jobs and compact development? Isn’t part of the problem also that neighboring localities have a laissez faire towards planning and zoning? Why would we want to be more like them?

I agree completely.

The problem is that the supply is local but a bunch of the demand is from elsewhere Virginia or even elsewhere in the U.S. It only takes one retiree from NOVA to outbid everyone on a single house in a neighborhood to blow home prices out of the water for the whole neighborhood.

We both want the same thing here, just different philosophies and priorities on how to get there.

I would never expect someone to take something like that on faith. Skepticism is good. Just be willing to consider that it *might* be true until I can show you some better local examples.

It didn’t really work out that way during the housing market collapse. Some people did benefit, but banks also stopped lending so mostly only wealthy people with cash on hand could take advantage of lower prices. Now if we were allowed to pass a tax on second homes…

I think the shortest term way to get to affordable housing is definitely not by relying on the “invisible hand” of the free market… Just building it in partnership with non-profits is the most efficient way. Also, AHIP is an instant way to make homes affordable.

I think we should accelerate that redevelopment by putting significant incentives on the table. For the record though, greenfield development can sometime take decades as well (like Old Trail).

I did say it was an extreme example, but you definitely can see how building came to a stop during that time.

The other piece you should know is that when the Biscuit Run deal happened the developer of Old Trail expressed relief because he was concerned that that many units would make Old Trail not viable. Even so, he came back the BOS and asked them to reduce the density of the remaining property.

…regarding easements, they save the county millions of dollars on schools and revenue sharing. How this works though is probably too complex to explain here. Regardless, we cannot really prohibit them any more than we can force someone to build at high density if they just don’t want to.

Charlottesville once used a similar argument for annexation and claimed it would wither and die because it was landlocked. Instead, it finally became more walkable and more dense. We should live within our means before considering expansion. There is enough unused parking lot to satisfy density.

I don’t agree with you about conservation easements, but land use valuation is an issue. There is a lot of legitimate agriculture in Albemarle, but also a lot of abuse particularly in regards to “hay”. The challenge is how to protect legitimate farmers who need the program and still reform it.

Yeah, I’m not sure how well it applies at the national level. I can only speak to how I’ve seen it play out locally. An extreme version of this was Biscuit Run. In a perfect world, Capshaw would have developed it anyway and the homes would have just gone for less money.