Subdivisions Impose Social Divide

Sometimes, she said, a new person will walk a dog beyond the entrance to Lenah Run, down the road and into her yard, where the owner allows the dog to relieve itself. This amuses her. Other times, neighbors just turn dogs loose as if her yard were a dog run. Once, a woman asked Peer if she could cut a magnolia blossom from her tree. Another woman asked if she could ride Peer's tractor, and another came to see her chickens and peacocks.

She obliged them all but understands that it does not exactly go both ways.

"I haven't tried to use their pool," she said, noting that it is private.

And that, after all, is the essence of it.

Beyond the exclusion, the new pattern of building in suburbia has created such confusing situations as a public park inside a planned community where most shared amenities are private. In Loudoun, two public parks, proffers from developers, wound up that way to the bewilderment of outsiders.

"When we moved to the area, we didn't know this was here," said Richard Groberg, 46, who was coaching soccer at the county park inside the South Riding development recently. "It makes it awkward to come in."

It is the sort of strange effect that Evan McKenzie, author of the book "Privatopia," thinks county and other governments are only beginning to grapple with. The very concept of local citizenship is changing, he argues, as people are identifying less with such public entities as counties and more with their private developments and homeowner associations, which largely have assumed the role of governments.

"I think we're at a brave-new-world moment here," McKenzie said. "I think we're going through a major revolution in urban governance, and we won't fully understand the consequences of this for 50 years."

Being 12, Ivan Barry doesn't know much about urban governance, but he does know that last summer, after splashing around and playing Marco Polo, he got kicked out of the pool at Brambleton, which is for dues-paying residents only.

His mother, Kaira Barry, 37, on a trip to a grocery store inside the Ashburn Farm development, noticed a sign on the community bulletin board for swim lessons and stood in line to sign up her children, only to find out the lessons were not for outsiders.

"I don't see any kind of cooperative action here," said Barry, who has two other children, Zofia, 9, and Rhiannon, 15. "If they wanted to do that, I'd be for it. But they want their own little enclaves. It isolates what's already here."

Ivan, who has plenty of friends in the new developments these days, said he doesn't mind it when he gets on the bus and children say, "Here comes Little Red Riding Hood in his little red brick shack."