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Green-Space Saver: Pack It to the Max

Kristin Pauly is a greenie, one of those eco-enviro types. She's big on saving the bay. She was sitting at a cafe table, sipping coffee and checking out the view.

Which was not of the bay.

Which was not of water of any sort.

It was of buses, garbage trucks and workers headed to high-rises. It was fumes, cars, noise, businesses and concrete. Such concrete. Signs of nature? Hah. There were no flora or fauna visible, because Pauly's table was tucked so far inside a bus terminal that its roof cut off all but a wedge of the sky.

Ahhhh, just her kind of spot.

In fact, Pauly probably would like the view even better if there was more development. That might be exceptionally eco-friendly.

We have a paradox, no? A build-more greenie?

Well, hang with me. I unravel paradoxes for a living.

Pauly was sitting in Friendship Heights, the mini-downtown that straddles the District-Montgomery County line at the confluence of Western and Wisconsin avenues. Long, long ago, its acres were all-natural, but sprawl engulfed them, and Friendship Heights today is urban and will remain so. The cutting edge of development is now way, way out.

And moving farther.

Even as we speak, developers are chewing up countryside for houses and businesses. According to one portrait of 2020, the Washington area eventually will stretch 80 miles north to south and 70 miles east to west.

Now that's sprawl. Think of all the 7-Elevens.

But for all the yapping about it, sprawl is pretty green. New suburbs are full of lawns, gardens and parks, and eventually they grow trees to replace those murdered to make way for growth. Suburbs are quiet. They're cool. How could they possibly be less desirable than a dense, loud, hot spot such as Friendship Heights?

"People on our staff have a hard time making that connection," said Pauly, who works for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation.

But the more the suburbs spread out, the greater the demand for new roads, schools, libraries and post offices -- and they cost money. Police patrols must cover more ground, as must garbage routes and utility lines -- and that costs money. Commuting takes longer, which consumes time, money and air quality. There's less open land to absorb runoff, so oil, gas and chemicals wash off parking lots and driveways and into rivers and the bay.

And there's a psychic cost: However green a suburb might look, it's still a suburb, not open space.

To spare as many outer acres as possible, Pauly and many others appalled by sprawl's price want to increase development in inner suburbs and in cities. The close-in acres already have been tampered with. There's nothing to lose. So, stick more offices on them. Give them more shops. Give them more houses. Bring them back to life, if they've gone dormant. Build where infrastructure already exists. Use what we've paid for.

Such as Metrorail.

We paid $13 billion for Metrorail.

There are hundreds of acres of potential building sites near Metro stations across the area, according to a May report by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and the Environmental Defense Fund. Those acres offer this future: people riding Metro to jobs in new office towers built near the stations and to new, nearby restaurants, movies and shops. And this future: people living in new, nearby town houses, because proximity to Metro means they can get around so easily that they need only one car. Those scenarios beat this one: families relegated to outer suburbia, where they need two cars to get to distant jobs and spend hours commuting on costly new roads.

Does Metro have room on its trains if newcomers flock to its stations?

"Definitely yes, no problem," spokesman J. Roderick Burfield said Friday. "We would love to have that situation."

Among the places with available acres is Friendship Heights. And, swept up in the spirit of channeling growth to where it's already happened, Montgomery County planners want to step up significantly the residential, retail and commercial footage near the Metro station there.

That proposal, however, has generated emotional opposition from many of the homeowners in the adjacent neighborhoods. Making Friendship Heights more densely developed, they fear, means more traffic, more crime and more pollution. Property values might fall. They want growth to go elsewhere.

But where? To the outer green fields?

That choice is easier on a politician or a planner. There are fewer people out there to raise a stink. But development there is so massively wasteful of both land and dollars.

Nobody wants to overwhelm Friendship Heights or any existing neighborhood just because a Metro station is handy. But growth is going to happen during the next three decades. It has to go somewhere. How much should go in Friendship Heights? I don't know. (Nor does Pauly, who has not followed the dispute.) But some growth should go to Friendship Heights. Callum I. Murray, a county planner, says studies suggest that traffic won't be paralyzed and that property values won't sink.

My house is about a mile from the proposed site of a megamall in Silver Spring, and if the project becomes reality, traffic in my neighborhood will never be the same. I'm worried, just as many residents of Friendship Heights are worried about their neighborhood. But if the megamall comes, I'll live with it, because pumping life into a faded downtown makes more sense than dropping another mall into a pasture somewhere.

Sprawl, Kristin Pauly said between sips of her coffee, is the single greatest threat to this area. It has to stop.

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