Land-Use Expert Argues For Long-Range Planning
By Michael Laris
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 29, 2005
When Anthony Downs took a driving tour through the western two-thirds of Loudoun County, he found large expanses of scenic land scattered with miniature suburbs.
"They don't seem to be related to any particular planning. They are not related to each other," said Downs, an author of books on housing, growth management and traffic. "I believe some planning is a good idea."
Downs, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, came to Loudoun last week to offer his take on how the county should approach its future now that the Virginia Supreme Court has thrown out restrictive building limits passed in 2003 after three years of planning debates and political feuding.
County supervisors have in recent weeks put forward a variety of proposals for regulations governing building in western Loudoun. Several say they hope to decide on rules for the west by next month. The supervisors are also considering whether to dramatically increase the number of homes that can be built within a large area near Dulles International Airport, as many developers are advocating.
Downs -- who has a doctorate in economics, has worked as a real estate consultant and was appointed to a commission on urban problems by President Lyndon Johnson and on affordable housing by former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Jack Kemp -- took a broad look at Loudoun's demographic landscape.
His suggestion for Loudoun leaders: Consider several "alternative futures," map them, do population projections, enlist a broad spectrum of county participants to measure those alternatives against a list of key criteria and figure out which idea best fits the county's aspirations.
Downs was invited to speak at the National Recreation and Park Association's headquarters on Belmont Ridge Road to an audience assembled by the Loudoun Leadership Council, a group largely made up of representatives of the real estate industry. Last week's session, attended by about 100 people, also heard from Joel Kotkin, a California-based author with a focus on suburbia.
Downs noted that Loudoun is much less densely populated than its closer-in Northern Virginia neighbors. Countywide, Loudoun has an average density of 475 people per square mile. The county's sparsely populated western region has 103 people per square mile, compared with 1,498 people per square mile in eastern Loudoun. Fairfax County's density in 2000 was 2,385 per square mile, while Arlington County's was 7,297, Downs said.
Downs presented five alternative development patterns to illustrate the general range of "futures" the county might choose. For instance, he said, the county could pick a "low-growth" alternative dominated by large estate-size lots in western Loudoun. It could choose a "high-growth" path that would develop the entire county at higher densities than are now allowed in the east.
Between those poles, he said, the county might create a broad area, or specific "islands," in the west for comparatively dense home building, or decide to generally allow more growth in the west without deciding where it should go.
Using what he called "crude and arbitrary" projections, Downs said the county's population of about 250,000 might rise to 325,000 to 421,000 using the low-growth scenario or to 1.8 million in the high-growth scenario. The middle options might clock in at about 550,000, he said. Fairfax's population is about 1 million.
Once people in Loudoun outline more precisely the possible alternatives, the county could measure them against a series of criteria, Downs said. Those might include the impact on the county's fiscal resources; provisions for affordable housing; aesthetic desirability; traffic; compatibility of commercial and residential land uses; impact on air and water; and political feasibility.
"The future of your county is too important to be left to simplistic slogans rather than a deliberate and careful analysis of realistic alternatives," Downs said.