This is Arlington, Virginia’s housing shortfall.

Well, it’s actually a traffic jam on I-66 West in Prince William County. Between crashes, construction, and rush-hour volume, this is a brutal drive. My wife and I were on this route visiting a sunflower farm out by Prince William County’s Rural Crescent, a rural/agricultural area far from the urban core that is seeing development pressure.

If more housing were built closer in, we wouldn’t have to drive an hour to visit a flower farm or an orchard. Commuters wouldn’t have to brave this stretch every day. And Virginia wouldn’t have to widen I-66, a questionable move which will make the region more car-dependent and is already triggering peripheral development that is likely to add back traffic reduced by the new capacity.

Prince William County doesn’t border Arlington County, let alone Washington, D.C.; it’s on the southern and western border of Fairfax County. But housing and zoning policy in D.C., in Arlington, and in Fairfax have resulted in exurban sprawl in Prince William. It’s often noted that environmentalists in older suburban places like Arlington will cite things like a few trees being cut down for new development, without considering the clear-cutting taking place in semi-rural/exurban areas.

At a recent Sunday afternoon YIMBY meetup at Eden Center—I wrote about that here—we talked a lot about housing. (Yes, and the sky is blue.) But “housing” is not some arcane, theoretical issue. We weren’t talking about this stuff the way economists might talk about interest rate hikes.

One member told us about a couple his family is friends with. They had to leave Northern Virginia and ended up all the way in Southern Maryland. (That’s not a generic term with malleable borders, like North Jersey; it’s the southernmost mainland region of the state, out along the Chesapeake.) It probably shouldn’t be part of the D.C. area, but our housing crunch has pulled it into that orbit. You pretty much have to drive everywhere there. There’s not all that much to do. Local old-timers don’t like the influx of urbanites. Urbanites don’t want to get pushed all the way out there. Local housing policy closer to the core forces these outcomes nobody wants.

Another member who lives in D.C. was facing an untenable rent hike and was considering throwing in the towel: looking for some place in West Virginia or Pennsylvania, somewhere where the prices finally go down a level or two.

These two stories arose out of a gathering of maybe 20 people. There are dozens, hundreds more like it.

We were talking about the convention—sometimes enforced, sometimes not—that only residents of a given county/town/neighborhood give public comments at development hearings for proposed projects in those places. There’s obviously a reason for that, but you could also argue that it’s a kind of parochial hyperlocalism.

It doesn’t acknowledge the people who have been priced out or pushed out. It doesn’t acknowledge that a resident of Prince William County would be perfectly within his rights to show up at a public meeting in Arlington and say, “I support more density in Arlington because I want the Rural Crescent to stay rural.” These policy choices affect each other, but our standard process does not acknowledge that.

Some of this is just bad process. But some of it is a good localism: people feeling a sense of belonging to their place. To some extent, viewing a specific place with its own identity as one little piece of a metro area strikes people as an attack on the identity and specificity of that place.

I think I detected a little of this when I wrote about North Carolina’s Triangle metro area, which I referred to as “Raleigh/Durham.” “Raleigh/Durham is an airport. There’s Raleigh, and there’s Durham,” many people replied. But the reality is these places have all bled together into metro regions, and these regions can work together and preserve their unique components, or they can work in the dark, and find their differences diluted.

“Smart growth,” which is one way of framing regional growth, is not about saying “this place must grow.” It’s about channeling inevitable growth in a smart way, and understanding that in many places simply saying “no more people” is not an option.

That requires, on the one hand, seeing the totality of a region as one, but on the other hand, preventing the same dispiriting sprawl from semi-developing all of it.

Related Reading:

The Rest of the Country

Do NIMBYs Love Beautiful Buildings?

A Small Town With a Big Department Store

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