I wrote the other week:

One of the reasons I advocate so much for building up the suburbs is because this landscape is already long gone there. I think we should build where we already have, so we can not build where we haven’t. I want the country be the country, and for that to happen, you simply have to do more with low-density suburbs. I say if we let people build and live in places, instead of scattering them out to the edges, everyone comes out ahead.

I say this sort of thing all the time; in this particular case it was inspired by a little drive I took out to Berryville, Virginia, then Paris, then back home to Herndon on U.S. 50. (If you don’t know this area, those places are, respectively: a small town, a tiny country village, and a suburban community.)

I was really struck by the contrasts along the stretch of U.S. 50 I drove. Real, genuine countryside out west—small towns, horse farms, wineries—and then, just east of Aldie, another small town in eastern Loudoun County, you encounter about a 10-mile stretch of what you might call transitional land use—ruined but still very sparsely developed former countryside.

I did this same drive in 2019, and I saw the same thing. But the “edge” of the development has moved noticeably west just in those four years. U.S. 50 was being widened yet again between these awful traffic-choked newly signalized intersections. We aren’t even talking about large-lot zoning and fancy houses along here. These are expensive but pretty standard suburban houses, pretty much right on top of each other, placed wherever developers could buy a good-sized parcel. There are some data centers and, I think, a warehouse somewhere along this stretch too, thrown in for color I guess. It’s a dreadful landscape.

A little side note here: one thing that strikes me is how these landscapes lack any of the texture or human interest of the old commercial strips that we tried to remediate in the 1960s under the notion of “highway beautification.” Like “urban renewal,” this was a misnomer and a euphemism. We managed to make our roadside landscapes more boring, and more hostile to small, informal enterprise, without actually reforming the system of car-oriented separated-use zoning at the heart of the problem.

Anyway. That visual, seeing development creeping west in just a few years—seeing countryside transforming into the most stultifying sort of suburban sprawl almost in real time—was striking. And, as it happens, Google Earth allows you to see it. Here are a series of images of the same roughly 10-mile stretch of U.S. 50, with the village of Aldie at the left (west), and the planned community of South Riding on the right (east). The odd bit on the top right is part of Dulles Airport!

Here is what this all looks like today. The “edge” is now between the places marked Gilberts Corner and Lenah:

Here’s just 2010:

The year 2000, where a single stray development by Lenah is just about the only subdivision-style housing west of South Riding:

And 1995, before South Riding, now a community of 30,000 people, was built:

This is all Loudoun County. But if you go back to the 1980s, most of Chantilly, in western Fairfax County, was pretty much undeveloped. You get the idea. To orient you fully, here’s the whole D.C. area, with South Riding marked in the dashed red line:

This is pretty far away from the urban core, as are many of the region’s fast-growing communities. And in just the last 25 years, just along this corridor of U.S. 50, we lost almost 10 miles of countryside. And instead of this low-density pattern being the first step in building some sort of real place out here, it’s the first and final draft, which just keeps replicating horizontally.

As I’ve written before: some of this housing is affirmatively desired, i.e. people really want to live here, exactly like this. But for many people, these houses are a kludged-together “solution” to the fact that housing is underbuilt and overpriced in the urban core and inner suburbs. Of the same phenomenon in Maryland, I wrote:

Think of this as a sort of “law of the conservation of urban change”—you can’t stop growth, so when you try to, you end up pushing it into places where it makes less sense, costs more to build and maintain, and produces suboptimal built environments and transportation realities for people. You know those stretchy toy balls that you squeeze and part of it balloons and stretches way out? That’s what zoning inner-ring suburbs as single-family forever does to housing in a place like the D.C. area.

In other words, these subdivisions out in Loudoun County are—or at least follow directly from—the housing crunch further in. Unbuilt townhouses, duplexes, condos, or apartments in Alexandria and Arlington become townhouses or subdivision houses out here. This is not intended or planned, per se. But it follows from the way we do, or don’t do, land use at a regional level, with the understanding that growth is going to occur and must be accommodated.

As I say in the pull quote above, this is going to happen. The question for land use planning in a place like the D.C. metro area is not whether or not we will grow, but what form that growth will be allowed to take.

Where, not whether. And if we pretend it is “whether,” we get the “where” wrong.

Related Reading:

Metro Areas Are Places

Urbanist Sprawl

Neon Killer

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