www.roanoke.com

Since 1968, more than 2.5 percent of all the land area in Virginia has been put off limits from development using conservation easements.

That’s 687,117 acres under easement out of 27.3 million acres in the state, according to data from the Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation. (And it doesn’t include other kinds of protected lands, like national parks, national forests, state parks, wildlife refuges and so on.)

I learned all this doing data work for a story by Rex Bowman about Gov. Tim Kaine nearing his goal of preserving 400,000 acres during his term, which began in January 2006 and ends in January 2010.

The tally toward Kaine’s goal was about 352,000 acres as of September. Only thing is, as Rex and I discovered in analyzing the data on over 4,000 easements on record with the DCR, Kaine is including almost 50,000 acres put under easements during the last six months of 2005 -- when Mark Warner was governor.

Kaine’s people say they include that period because it’s the first half of the fiscal year, which runs from July 2005 through June 2006. But by that reasoning, they should have stopped counting toward Kaine’s goal on June 30, 2009, and they haven’t. So, really, Kaine is giving himself a 4-and-a-half year window, when his term as governor is only four years.

Still, it’s a major achievement, and one of the most significant of Kaine’s tenure. The number of acres protected by easements has nearly doubled during Kaine’s time in the mansion. Easements added during Kaine’s term add up to something nearly twice the size of Roanoke County.

Even Kaine’s nemesis, House of Delegates Majority Leader Morgan Griffith (R-Salem) called that a good thing – through while knocking Kaine for mathematical chicanery.

Where are all these easements? How convenient you should ask. In the process of working on Rex’s story, I developed a couple of maps that didn’t make it into the paper. I thought I’d share them here.

Here’s a density map colored by how many acres are under easement in each city and county. The numbers in the legend are numbers of acres. Note that the lightest color is for localities that have no easements.

Less useful, but just so you can see it, is this map, showing where the easements are. There are more than 4,000 easements, and zoomed out this far, they all run together, but you can still get an idea of where they are just by the density of them. That clump up there in Northern Virginia is on the border of Fauquier and Loudon counties.

Between January 1 and April 17, 585 properties were sold or transferred in the city of Roanoke. During the exact same period last year, 765 properties changed hands.

You can do your own real estate market research in the just-updated Roanoke City real estate database in the DataSphere. The database, which is the same data searchable in the Roanoke City GIS, has sales through mid-April.

Search by price range, date range, owner’s name, seller’s name, address, even neighborhood. Choose commercial properties, apartment buildings, or condominiums only. See not only sale prices, but assessments and other information like square footage and acreage.

Results are mapped for you, 100 parcels at a time.

Keep up with the DataBlog and data updates in the DataSphere on Twitter.

Hey gang, it's been a while, but I finally updated our Roanoke real estate sales search. It now has sales through mid-December for all 45,000 or so parcels in the city of Roanoke. This is the same data that's behind Roanoke's GIS, just re-tooled for a simpler search so you can find sales history on a particular home or parcel, or on a street or in a certain neighborhood.

Search by buyer, seller, address, neighborhood, a date range or a price range.

And your results are matched. Happy searching.

Our still brand new database of Roanoke City real estate transfers just got its first update, and now has sales dated to as late as July 8, 2008.

That's about an additional two weeks worth of fresh sales data, or about 29 transfers.

The most expensive was a home in Raleigh Court for $410,000.

In all, a half-dozen properties sold in the over $300,000 range, while a total of 15 sold in the $100,000-plus range, a number of them commercial properties sold by Virginia Scrap Iron to the Roanoke Redevelopment and Housing Authority.

So go nose around, and don't forget, your results are mapped.

(Originally published as a DataSphere column in The Roanoke Times, August 3, 2008)

This may be a new low in my descent into geekdom.

I gave my wife a database as an early birthday present.

Worse, I regifted it to her. Still worse, I didn't just give it to her. Anybody can use it.

On the plus side, she loved it.

It's data on all 45,000 real estate parcels in the city of Roanoke, searchable in all kinds of ways. Plus, your results are mapped. Find it right now in the DataSphere.

See, Ellen, she's real estate obsessed. Watches HGTV all the time, talks about "staging" our house for sale, disappears for hours studying home sale listings on the Web. She sneaks off to open houses on Sundays. Real estate agents tell her she knows the market better than they do.

I pegged her for just the kind of "user" -- sorry, honey -- who would love this kind of data, even if it's regifted.

Read more »

Today, the city of Roanoke is once again auctioning off properties on which there are unpaid local real estate taxes, assessments for weed and trash abatement, and demolition or board up costs. They do this once or twice a year. More than 30 properties are on the auction block this time, a number of which are vacant lots.

You can see the list on the city's department of billings and collections website, and there are photos on the Woltz and Associates site.

But I wondered where they were, so I tossed the list onto a map:

No surprises here, really. It's the more depressed parts of town where the pinpoints fall. But part of the story might be in where there aren't any pinpoints.

As Roanoke blogger and neighborhood activist Chris Muse points out, the presence of delinquent properties "a fairly good sign of the progression or regression of a neighborhood."

Chris is rightly proud that there's a single delinquent property on the list this time in his part of Old Southwest. I know that property, and while I haven't asked Chris, I wonder if some aren't glad to see that vacant property seeing some action and the potential for a new owner to make it a credit to the neighborhood, and not a blight on it.

That, after all, is what the city says it's up to with these tax sales. It might be a bad sign when your neighborhood is host to landowners who can't or won't pay their taxes or maintain their properties. But everytime one of those properties is turned over to a new owners, it's a new chance for the land, the house, and the neighborhood.

Few governments in our area don't have a GIS (geographic information system) mapping function on their website these days.

But Roanoke Times business writer Jeff Sturgeon just turned me onto a local GIS site that's offers some stuff others don't.

The Western Virginia Water Authority has a GIS that will, among other things, show you where buried utility pipes are and the topography of the land.

Just another friendly data offering from the DataSphere.

Yeah, I know. Pretty geeky. I didn't know there was such a thing as National GIS Day until a news release from Roanoke City landed in my in box. It's part of the National Geographic Society's Geography Awareness Week to promote geographic literacy. The city and the Western Virginia Water Authority are offering a GIS seminar with demonstrations today from 10 a.m. until noon today in the Noel C. Taylor Municipal Building. (Sorry for the late notice.)

What's GIS? It stands for geographic information system. Basically, it's a way to access information using a map as the basis for it. What it means for you is, lots of good stuff you need to know about your locality (or one you might move to) is available now on almost every local government website. At least around here.

You can see real estate sales info, tax assessments, where schools are, where fire hydrants are, where the flood plain is, and on and on and on.

So, in honor of National GIS Day, I'm posting links to area government GIS sites in the real estate section of the DataSphere. You'll see some are better than others. Roanoke's has the most to offer. Roanoke County's offers surprisingly little by comparison, but it's still there for you. Others fall in between.

So, dive in, click around the map and see what GIS can do for you.