News Articles, 1998
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Sprawl: The Easy Way Out

By Steve Twomey

Thursday, May 14, 1998; Page D01

A true story:

A bunch of Prince George's County planners and other officials were given a slide show, featuring scenes from anonymous communities, no slide being so specific the participants could identify the place. They recorded their reactions to each slide, using a numbered scale. When all was finished, the planners were told which kind of locale they preferred.

The Paris kind.

Well, who doesn't?

Who doesn't prefer outdoor cafes, shaded boulevards and small specialty shops with lovely apartments above? Who doesn't prefer life without car addiction? Who doesn't prefer the pulse, the architecture, the ambiance of a city, especially the most beautiful of all? Not those planners.

And the photos they dismissed?

They were of Every Suburb, housing in a gray flannel suit, strip malls on parade, sidewalk-free streets, life on four wheels. And most of the photos depicted the very county the planners had planned. The ugliness was their work. They had made possible what they loathed and called it home, because that's how it's done in America.

Dream, for a moment. Assume crime is the same everywhere, every school is excellent, all housing costs the same. Where would you want to live?

A city?

Or Broadlands?

Broadlands, another cookie-cutter subdivision out by Dulles, was the last stop on a mini-bus tour yesterday organized by the Sierra Club to show a clutch of legislators, aides, enviros and scribes what sprawl is all about, as if anyone needed a tour to figure that out.

Sprawl: Communities in search of a personality dumped where nature was. Pedestrians incarcerated pending psychiatric evaluation. Trees to come later, maybe in the lifetime of your kid. And no charge for the commute.

Vincent F. Callahan Jr., a Republican delegate to the Virginia General Assembly from Fairfax County, stood at the front of the bus, remembering. As a child, his neighborhood was Connecticut Avenue, up by the zoo. You could do most of your shopping within a block of home. You could take public transit to farther points to see friends, museums or the department stores downtown. "That's the kind of environment," Callahan said, "I wish I could have brought my kids up in."

Who doesn't?

Who's pro-sprawl, aside from the construction, auto and oil industries? Who likes how it looks? Who likes the commutes? Callahan said he gets more complaints and queries about transportation than about everything else combined. People are obsessed with getting around, because they spend so much time trying to negotiate the steppes between home, work, shopping and soccer practice.

Yet still, the mini-malls, office parks and subdivisions with faux-British monikers blossom ever farther out, and people move to them and put up with the commutes, because crime isn't equal everywhere, all schools aren't excellent and all housing doesn't cost the same. People are making sane choices based on needs that override the pull of a city, because cities -- and now inner suburbs -- have failed.

And so, more costly infrastructure goes up on the fringes as it's abandoned closer to town. We shutter schools in Washington, build them in Loudoun. Houses -- great, solid, stylish houses -- go blank-faced in the city as bland, cheap creatures rise in the green fields.

"Now on your left," Ed Risse told the tour, "is the WorldCom site, and you can see some of the initial construction."

WorldCom, a telecommunications giant, may bring 30,000 employees to a site not far from Broadlands. Those people will need homes, cars, roads, sewers, schools, little of which exists now. Meanwhile, back on the banks of the Potomac, there is Potomac Yards, 300 undeveloped acres near Metro that could easily swallow the likes of WorldCom, said Risse, a planner.

In fact, one of the great myths is that we sprawl because we have to, that there is no more space close in, close to existing infrastructure, especially Metro. If there was a clear message of the bus tour, it was: Nonsense. There's plenty of in-fill land left, more than enough to accommodate growth for years. Risse said all of the jobs the region is projected to acquire by 2020 could be accommodated south of the Capitol and along the Anacostia waterfront.

But they won't be put there, or elsewhere inside the Beltway, because the city isn't a fully functioning place, with decent schools and low crime; because elected officials won't stand together to force the growth back toward the core; because established neighborhoods scream about raising densities, telling planners to put that new stuff out there, out in those empty fields.

But recall those planners and the slide show. If I recall right from my three years there, Paris is a densely populated place. People everywhere. It seems to work. That's why it works. You don't see Frenchmen taking bus tours of Broadlands, by the way, to see how America lives.

"What we're doing now," Risse said, "is patently irrational."