It is past the airport, once you've entered Loudoun County, that the history lesson ends and the future of suburban sprawl is now being determined. Two years ago, Loudoun voters tossed out a board of supervisors they judged to be too comfortable with the seemingly endless proliferation of development. The new supervisors are out to make Loudoun a land-use planning showcase, where local officials and developers from around the nation might learn lessons of "smart growth." They are suburban revolutionaries, determined to stop patterns that turned closer-in suburbs into harried, traffic-clogged places. "I have nothing against Fairfax County," the group's leader, Scott York, says of his huge neighbor to the east. "But it would be a crying shame if Loudoun County ends up looking like Fairfax."
In the eastern part of Loudoun, York's crying shame may actually be a fait accompli. The high-tech boom has spread there from Fairfax, with America Online, WorldCom and dozens of other companies planting giant office campuses. The employees of those companies are moving to nearby subdivisions such as Broadlands, a 1,500-acre planned community of townhouses and single-family homes. Percentage-wise, eastern Loudoun is growing faster than the metropolitan areas of Las Vegas, Phoenix and Atlanta. "I'm afraid to go on vacation for two weeks," says one east-county resident. "By the time I'd come back, I'd lose all my landmarks for finding my way home."
But on the western side, Loudoun is still largely undeveloped, and the new government wants to keep it that way. Driving west from AOL's headquarters, you stop seeing office buildings surrounded by parking lots and start seeing farmhouses surrounded by acres of green land and white fences. Busy highways turn into bumpy dirt roads. Business- casual yields to denim overalls. Accentless suburban speech fades into a light twang that hints of the South, passed down to farmers whose families have owned land in Loudoun for centuries.
As Scott York and his colleagues get down to fleshing out exactly what they mean by "smart growth," they are finding that the election was the easy part. If they want to preserve Loudoun's ancient landscape, yet still ensure its place as a hub of the Internet economy, they are going to have to make some difficult choices. The hardest one of all is this: They can't have growth without a substantial increase in density.
It is often said, only partly in jest, that density is the only thing Americans hate more than they hate sprawl. As the smart-growth movement spreads to suburbs everywhere, local officials are coming face-to-face with the density devil. Smart growth still means growth. It means growing in a more compact way, even an urbanized way. It means placing development close to existing roads, sewers and infrastructure, rather than turning farmland into the next concentric ring of subdivisions. It all but requires making suburbanized eastern Loudoun County even denser than it currently is.
This is a popular idea with the county's anti-sprawl leadership. But it doesn't sound so good in the east, where most of the people are already feeling crushed by bulldozers tearing up the open space that lured them to Loudoun in the first place. In eastern Loudoun, controlling growth by steering it their way seems like a cruel irony. "People are moving out here to avoid urbanization," says Dick Black, eastern Loudoun's delegate to the state legislature. "There's simply no interest among the citizens here in creating that kind of environment."
Density politics in the eastern suburbs is only half the county's battle. Smart growth has opened a rift among landowners in the rural west, where "gentleman farmers" who want to preserve the pastoral status quo are pitted against struggling dirt farmers who would like to quit that life and cash out their land. "We're mad as hell," says Jack Shockey, a landowner who says smart growth will rob him of his property rights. Along with his wife, Patricia, Shockey has rallied working farmers to oppose the county's plans.
The real estate establishment is also fighting the supervisors, arguing that "smart growth" is really a code for "no growth" at all. Developers say the current policies will kill off an impressive run of prosperity that brought in heavyweights such as AOL. They predict that as demand for housing outstrips supply, it will cause a shortage of affordable housing. "You can't just shut it off," says Patrick Quante, head of the Loudoun chapter of the Northern Virginia Building Industry Association. "If people can't afford to live here, then businesses won't locate here."
Change hasn't come easy or often to a county that has long defined Virginia country living. In her book "Bingo Night at the Fire Hall," author Barbara Holland describes easygoing village life in Loudoun and the slow pace. "In 1820, James Monroe was wearing knee breeches and buckled shoes in the White House and the Civil War was still forty years in the future, and the population of the county was 23,000," Holland writes. "In 1960, when John F. Kennedy was elected president, it was still 23,000."
It was during Kennedy's administration that 10,000 acres on the Fairfax-Loudoun line were cleared to make way for Dulles Airport. While the passengers and cargo were mostly headed to Washington, D.C., the airport's sewer lines headed north through Loudoun County. Those lines were a conduit for development that would change the face of eastern Loudoun forever. By 1990, the county's population had more than tripled, to 86,000.
Wary of the invading sprawl, county officials in 1989 went through the gut-wrenching process of writing a 20-year growth plan. In many ways, the plan presaged the current debate over growth: Development, it said, should happen primarily where roads, sewers and services are available to handle it. The American Planning Association was so impressed that it eventually gave the 250-page document its "outstanding planning" award.
But just as the plan gained final approval in 1991, the local economy sank into a recession and the real estate market went bust. Suddenly, Loudoun officials didn't care so much about how the county grew. They just wanted it to start growing again. When developers asked to rezone land for subdivisions, they usually got what they wanted. And as the economy rose out of recession into the Internet-fed boom of the late '90s, those lenient policies continued. In the past decade, Loudoun's population doubled, to 172,000, and it is currently growing at a staggering 8 percent a year.
By the time of the 1999 election, a backlash against growth was in full swing. To counter the development community's clout, a hodgepodge of activists formed a political action committee. Voters to Stop Sprawl received much of its financial backing from Loudoun's "landed gentry" in the west, including $50,000 from Jeffrey Osborn, a retired Internet millionaire who spends summers on his 28 acres near Leesburg. But the message was largely tailored to suburbanites in the east, the ones who commute in traffic every day and who find their school district lines changing almost every year.
Scott York, a Republican supervisor who became increasingly interested in development issues (for a number of years, he used "landuseman" as his e-mail address), led a slate of eight candidates campaigning on a smart-growth platform. To underline their point, they swore off contributions from the development industry. Not only does sprawl eat up farmland, they said, but it bankrupts county government. They cited studies that show that for every $1 in tax revenue a new home brings in, the county is out $1.55 in roads, sewers and other services. School construction alone--23 new schools are slated to be built over the next five years--will cost $600 million. "We've grown too fast," York says. "I mean, can you imagine being a school administrator and keeping up with hiring 300 new teachers a year when there's already a shortage of teachers?"
The smart-growth slate romped to victory in every contested election. Then it began to face the hard part--translating a catchy two-word slogan into a 20-year plan for the county's future. They knew at the start that it wouldn't be easy: The more people in Loudoun you ask about smart growth, the more definitions you get. "Smart growth is a generic rubber term you can stretch and stretch," says Eugene Delgaudio, the lone supervisor opposing the new board's efforts. "After all, no one is for STUPID growth."
As Loudoun officials flesh out the details, it's the density issue that poses the greatest political risk. Some 70 percent of Loudoun voters live in the eastern suburbs. And while the bulk of them cast their ballots in 1999 in support of Voters to Stop Sprawl, their continued participation in the effort is fragile, to say the least.
The supervisors continue to argue that the only way to protect the remaining open space in the west is to build in the already-developed east. Not only are 40,000 more housing units approved and waiting to be built, but plans are for 100,000 more homes over the next 20 years- -and most of those in the east, where voters backed York and his colleagues in 1999 in the belief that they were voting for protection against more bulldozers and more asphalt.
Ray Chamberlain, a retiree living in the eastern suburbs who was active in Voters to Stop Sprawl, thought stopping sprawl meant putting a lid on construction, not building 5,000 new houses a year. "People are moving here because it's still an attractive place to live," says Chamberlain, who himself moved to Loudoun eight years ago. "But if we stay on this path to 100,000 more units, the attractiveness will start to erode."
The more virulent opponents of the supervisors' plan deride it as "density packing." They say it would benefit rich landowners in the west who want their horse-country views undisturbed, while middle- class suburbanites are forced to take the brunt of future growth. "When people in the east voted for smart growth, they thought it meant development would slow down in their own neighborhoods," says state legislator Dick Black. "But what happened is the planning commission and the board of supervisors are trying to shift all of the growth and put it into the suburbs. That's density packing."
To many of Black's constituents, the very mention of density conjures up thoughts of Manhattan high-rises and a lack of personal space. What many don't realize is that the rambling subdivisions they have grown accustomed to can be as dense as the gridded towns built before World War II. The design is just different. For Loudoun officials, overcoming this fear of density is perhaps the largest obstacle to smart growth. When they envision 100,000 new houses, they have compact, pedestrian-oriented communities in mind, where people might have a realistic choice to trade their car trips for a bus or train commute. "You can't say you're for smart growth and not be for density," insists supervisor Mark Herring, who chairs the land-use committee.
Herring sees a good bit of Loudoun's future development happening around transit nodes. Plans are to extend Washington's Metro subway system to Dulles Airport, and a rail or bus link into Loudoun beyond the airport is possible. Herring wants transit-oriented development to spring up around the transit stops, with a walkable mix of housing, commercial, retail and entertainment uses. "We can either take advantage of that and have a compact town center," Herring says, "or we could build a parking lot around it and let the county turn into Fairfax."
Loudoun's plans also call for a batch of New Urbanist "countryside villages" of 100 to 1,000 homes apiece. The idea is to re-create the Main Street feel of such historic Loudoun towns as Middleburg, where antique shops and cafes are surrounded by a ring of homes and then by farmland. The new countryside villages would have their own commercial cores, and 50 percent of the land in each village would remain open space.
These ideas represent the cutting edge of current thought about urban planning, not just in Virginia but nationally as well. The question is whether they would work in places where spacious yards are expected and car culture is a given. Many real estate developers argue that the winding subdivisions they've been building for decades--the stuff that critics now call "sprawl"--are exactly what most customers want. If there was a demand for so-called "traditional neighborhood developments," the argument goes, these would already exist in large numbers. "TNDs work great where they're closer-in and they don't compete with cul-de-sac communities," says Deborah Rosenstein, a Northern Virginia housing market analyst. "Loudoun is not an urban market. It would be nice to think that, but it just isn't."
Meanwhile, Loudoun's government continues to find itself dancing around the "D" word. In August, planning commissioners began looking at housing densities in the eastern part of the county. Current rules allow three or four houses per acre, which is pretty typical for a suburban subdivision. The county planners decided to nudge it up to five houses per acre. But the density plan met massive resistance, and the idea was dropped. "Residents in the east are as entitled to green space and open space as anywhere else," dissenting supervisor Drew Hiatt told the Loudoun Easterner newspaper. "We are not going to become the dumping ground for all the density in the county."
The fact that smart growth is taking a few lumps in the developed suburbs doesn't seem to be protecting it much elsewhere. In the still- rural western areas, where county planners want to make it difficult for farmers to sell land to developers, they are running into a property-rights backlash.
Much of Loudoun's farmland is currently zoned to allow one house on every three acres. The plan is to "downzone" almost all of that land, so that only one house would be allowed every 25 acres. Plots that size aren't conducive to subdivisions, and when faced with such zoning, developers would likely take their money and housing plans elsewhere. In a single swipe, downzoning has the potential to keep western Loudoun distinctly rural, and at no cost to the county's taxpayers.
To people such as Suzanne Wright, however, it could come at a significant cost. Wright manages a hilly 400-acre farm outside Leesburg that has been in the family since her late husband's grandfather bought it in the 1920s. But agriculture in Loudoun isn't what it used to be. Dairying failed when refrigeration made it possible to farm further out from the cities, and Loudoun's soils were never very good for growing grains. Nowadays, Wright grows hay and grazes buffalo and llamas, and she rented out a farmhouse to tenants until it burned down last fall. The farm loses $50,000 a year.
Wright is 64 years old and sounds tired. It's clear that she's just about had it with farming. She has no immediate plans to sell to a developer, but she has always figured her land was a rough equivalent to the 401(k) plans that the suburban office workers have. Now, according to one county study, downzoning could decrease the value of her property by as much as 55 percent. "My land is my everything," Wright says. "The government is coming and invading my assets."
She and a ragtag brigade of working farmers are smart growth's loudest opponents. They have formed a group called Citizens for Property Rights, and they turn out in force at every county planning meeting wearing red bandannas. At one public input session, a farmer dressed in a red flannel shirt and blue overalls lampooned downzoning by reading aloud from the work of Friedrich Engels.
Smart growth has rural Loudoun split. There is some serious wealth in this part of Virginia, where family names include DuPont, Mellon and Firestone. Some of the wealthier locals still enjoy fox hunting. Sprawl threatens everything they love about the county, and they want as much of western Loudoun as possible to remain open space. They are on a collision course with land-rich, cash-poor farmers such as Wright, who are looking at the bottom line. "Open space isn't just open by itself," she says. "It costs money to manage."
County officials say Wright and her allies need only look around them, at farmers who are trying alternatives to traditional agriculture. A "rural economy" is springing up, catering to sprawl- bound tourists who escape to western Loudoun's calm countryside on weekends. Farmers are growing grapes for wine, planting Christmas trees, and running bed and breakfast inns. Part of smart growth, says Scott York, is supporting these activities. "There's a sizable chunk of money to be made for folks who get involved in the rural economy," he says. "And that saves us from providing amenities such as schools, roads and other facilities for which we don't have money now."
This spring, Loudoun's supervisors will finish work on the new 20-year growth plan that embodies many of their principles. Next up will be the county's zoning code, where those principles will be translated into the rules that guide day-to-day land-use decisions. At least until the next round of elections in 2003, York and his smart-growth allies have the votes to prevail. From there, it will primarily be a matter of political will: Future county leadership will decide whether to stick to the plan, to rewrite it or to keep it in force but make exceptions when tempting new plans for development come before them.
A lot will depend on the economy. The current push for smart growth reflects at least in part an embarrassment of riches from the longest boom in memory. If Loudoun's economy slows dramatically, as it did in the early '90s, voters may very well stop caring about what growth looks like. They may feel they can't afford to be so choosy. They may feel that the board of supervisors elected in 1999 misunderstood public sentiment and made a mistake.
But people who look at the current dispute and decide that smart growth is doomed in Loudoun County may be making their own mistake. Smart growth has advanced as a national movement. Local anti-sprawl activists are more educated and organized than they have ever been. And institutions such as Voters to Stop Sprawl loom as well-funded political heavyweights that will stay in the ring with developers for the long run. Whoever is elected to run the county in coming years will be held accountable by an entrenched growth-control movement that believes that the future is on its side. "Think about Central Park," says Michael Chandler, a planning professor at Virginia Tech. "When Olmsted said to preserve that land, people thought he was crazy. Today, you can't imagine New York City without Central Park. Maybe Loudoun County will be the same way."
