Exurbanites Occupy an Unsettled Place in Va. Politics

"This is a private community," Ed Craft said. "So we tend to look internally rather than outside" for solutions to problems.

He was chatting last week with a neighbor, Nancy Perilla, on Valhalla Drive, where green and manicured lawns were free of political signs, which association rules do not allow, and where on a sunny, warm afternoon near election time, there were no candidates going door to door, because solicitation is not allowed, either.

Craft and Perilla strained to name many issues that weighed on them heavily. "There's the quality of schools," said Perilla, without much enthusiasm.

"Yeah, but there aren't really troubles in the schools," said Craft, pointing out that they are too new. "Traffic and golf scores, those are the two big topics."

"There was the timing of the gate," Perilla said, "community issues like that. But if it doesn't affect you personally, you don't have to think about it, unfortunately."

"You don't have to leave here," said her neighbor, laughing. "That's the key. You don't have to leave -- it's almost scary."

Craft said he does not vote because he does not trust politicians and because "it will never be 1,000 to 1,000 and I'll break the tie."

Perilla, who does vote, moved to Dominion Valley from a house in Manassas, which is in the older, more developed part of the region, a diverse area where Mexican and Central American immigrants have settled and where neighborhoods of single-family homes might be adjacent to townhouses and apartments. Like the Lechners, she and her family moved in part because the old neighborhood was changing.

"It sounds awful," Perilla said, "but it was turning into a more working-class neighborhood. More pickups -- not that there's anything wrong with that. . . . There were problems we didn't want to deal with -- at least on a personal level."

The Lechners were of a similar mind. They liked the diversity of their Germantown neighborhood, they said, but they did not want to subject their children to what they perceived as racial conflicts and other problems they associated with nearby government-subsidized housing.

In moving, they traded an area that was about half-Democrat, half-Republican for one that is mostly Republican, as they are. They left an area that was about 59 percent white for one where at least 83 percent of their neighbors look like them. And they left an area where residents are dealing with issues of cultural and economic diversity for one where such problems, for now at least, are abstractions.

"At a certain point, you want your kids to grow up in Mayberry," Jamie Lechner said. "And this is as close to Mayberry as we can get."