Some Neighbors of Self-Contained Clusters in N.Va. Feel Isolated
By Stephanie McCrummen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 1, 2005
Lately, Ivan Barry, who is 12, feels like a stranger in a strange land, which is odd, since he and his family moved to their red brick rambler on Ryan Road in Loudoun County seven years ago, before most of their neighbors arrived.
They were part of a rural community then, their street mostly fields and woods where Ivan could romp with abandon, discovering creeks and paths to such hidden spots as an old mill, where he'd go sometimes to think, hunt for red-tailed skinks or just pretend that he was lost in the wilderness. Then, things changed.
It was not simply that thousands of houses came; it was how they came -- in such self-contained communities as Brambleton and Forest Manor, Forest Run and Belle Terra, all with their backs turned to the rambler. And Ivan, once the insider in a sense, became an outsider -- a resident of nowhere.
"At school, they're like, 'What development do you live in?' " Ivan said recently. "And I'm like, 'I don't live in a development!' And they're like, 'Do you live in the woods?' And I'm like, 'I've been living here for seven years!' And they're like, 'This didn't exist seven years ago!' " he said, throwing his hands in the air.
Scattered across such rapidly suburbanizing counties as Loudoun and Prince William in Northern Virginia and Charles and Frederick in Maryland are scraps of communities left behind. They are remnants of places where people live the old-fashioned way: in a house, on a road open to other roads, forming a place that anyone might pass through on the way to somewhere else.
Increasingly, these places have become balkanized by self-contained communities, now the dominant form of home building in suburban America. In Prince William and Loudoun, for instance, virtually all new homes in recent years have been built that way.
According to the Community Associations Institute in Alexandria, four out of five U.S. homes built since 2000 have been in homeowner association-governed subdivisions, where residents pay dues to support such amenities as clubhouses and pools that usually exclude those outside.
While life inside such places as Brambleton often is vibrant with block parties, poker nights, book clubs and a sense of identity, life on the outside feels quite different these days, altered in ways large and small.
"I don't know what community means anymore," said Nancy Siler, who is retired. "Do they mean subdivision? Or can it be a group of houses spread out?"
She was genuinely confused. Siler moved in 1956 to Gainesville, then a rural community in western Prince William. It was not a well-defined place, she said, but she felt she belonged.
She still lives on Linton Hall Road, which these days often is smeared with construction dirt and where signs point to Victory Lakes, Allison's Ridge, Broad Run Oaks, Braemar, Lake Manassas, Heritage Hunt, Independence, Dunbarton and others, the federation of subdivisions that Gainesville has become.
In relation to that new geography, Siler is tangential, in some netherworld in between.
That sense is exacerbated by the fact that it can take 10 minutes to pull out of her driveway because of the traffic. Sometimes she walks through the new subdivisions, where people, who are friendly enough, wave at her as if she's a visitor from a foreign land. Then there is all the talk about the "new Gainesville."
"There is the new Gainesville and there is the old Gainesville," Siler said. "So, does that mean I don't exist?"
Down Linton Hall Road, Cornelius Ennis, 74, has posted "No Trespassing" signs in his driveway because people are constantly peeling into it to turn around, spewing gravel onto his living room windows. "It's not our community anymore," he said.
Not too far away, the residents along Catharpin Road, adjacent to Heritage Hunt, Piedmont and other large developments, have given their row of brick homes a name.
"We call ourselves the Strip," said Belinda Hess, 36, who has lived there seven years. "It feels different. I feel -- small."
In eastern Prince William, Anthony Mullins, who lives in a neighborhood built in the 1960s on a small hill in Woodbridge, is struggling with the effects of the changing geography.
"We're like an island," said Mullins, 42. "An island in dirt."
His back yard, which used to overlook trees, now overlooks a vast, dusty, denuded valley where a subdivision called Eagle's Point is being built. With no trees, the sun is brighter these days and the wind so stiff that once it blew over his weight-lifting bench.
Across the street, James Kline, 62, noted that a way into the neighborhood is being sealed off because of increased traffic.
"We've been here all these years, but they're the ones who are going to benefit," he said, referring to new residents. "They're isolating us. They're penalizing us. The way they treat us now, I guess they call us white trash."
In Loudoun, Theresa Peer, 54, lives in a disappearing place called Lenah. Hers is a one-story house at the end of a long, hilly yard on the edge of the landscaped entrance to Lenah Run, a closed circuit of 4,000-square-foot homes called Brownings, Randalls and Langleys. If she is out of place now, she doesn't exactly mind.
She keeps her front door open and watches her new neighbors as though they were exotic birds.
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."
"I'm like, 'Yeah, pick your fairy tale,' " he said.
He tries to relate, he said, but it is difficult sometimes.
The new kids like to talk about the interiors of their houses because they all have similar floor plans.
"I'm like, 'This one time at the mill,' and they're like, 'This one time on my catwalk,' " he said.
But he likes his house, and when his friends come over, they seem to like it, too -- the plywood back porch with the colored lights strung all around, the screaming monkey head mounted on the wall, the treehouse he and his father built.
And although Ivan sees large-screen televisions instead of trees across the street, and the path to the old mill has been bisected by a cul-de-sac, he has made his peace with Brambleton.
Being a stranger there, he explores it like a new country, and in his own way, he has conquered it.
"I can go to their playgrounds because there's no one watching . . . but my favorite place of all is the man-made waterfall," he said, referring to the grand entrance, all landscaped with stone.
"I sit at the top," he said. "I just sit there. And sometimes I take off my socks and shoes and put my feet in. And you look there, and you can see one of the greatest views -- that's one of the few advantages. Well, it's not really an advantage, but it's one of the few things I'm okay with."