Our Shrinking Home Territory

Our Washington area of 2030 is so much smaller than that of 2005 that it is sometimes hard to understand how our ancestors made such laughably wrong growth projections 25 years ago. They ignored three vital forces: the rising water, advances in communications technology and the crumbling of the federal government.

The good news has been the way the major world powers, China and India, have competed to expend some tiny fraction of their vast wealth and technological expertise on preserving the quaint historic districts of Washington. They view the District in the sentimental way Americans at the turn of the 21st century regarded Venice. That's why they have surrounded the tourist core with towering dikes.

The Asians originally viewed rescuing some D.C. real estate as a fiscal necessity. As the U.S. government's vast debt made Treasury bonds worthless, they started looking for tangible assets to claim. The melting of the south polar ice cap inundated Maryland's Eastern Shore and much of Prince George's County. So fearing a loss like that of New Orleans back in '05, the Asians enclosed the Mall with 200-foot levees. Engineered by the Dutch, not the Army Corps of Engineers, these new dikes work. At least so far.

Twenty-five years ago, the federal government's ability to turn disaster into catastrophe -- the loss of New Orleans and the bungling of the war on terrorism -- sent Americans a message: You're on your own.

Secession movements proliferated, modeled after one launched by Vermont in 2003. The Union didn't dissolve, but bit by bit, as demands for local control became impossible to ignore, taxing authority and decision-making powers over everything from energy initiatives to the teaching of evolution were grudgingly handed to the states.

Since money follows power, the Washington region, like the Rust Belt toward the end of the Industrial Age, entered a long-term decline. Even the vaunted private-sector industries of Washington's edge cities -- like the "life sciences" in Montgomery County and the "death sciences" in Northern Virginia -- moved away. Wealth flowed to the better-educated, cheaper, harder-working places of Asia. Not even illegal immigrants flock here any more.

Technological changes have challenged cities' original reasons for being. As the number of devices hooked up to the Internet exceeded the number of people by 100 to 1, fewer people had to drive to work every day. This undermined the rationale for traditional suburbs the way that, a century before, the rise of the automobile had evaporated people's need to live within walking distance of their factories. You no longer need to live in a metropolis for anything a dot-com is willing to sell.

The single remaining reason for urban concentrations of any kind in 2030 has turned out to be face-to-face contact. Establishing trust or falling in love are difficult to sustain electronically. Having fun is especially enhanced by physical encounter.

This has led to the Santa-Fe-ing of America, with a premium on places where people find it nice to congregate, like the Piedmont of North Carolina and the Gold Country of the California Sierras. These village-like concentrations, long on charm, are dispersed far beyond anyplace previously defined as urban or urbane. The list conspicuously fails to include Gaithersburg.

The end result is that the urbanized Washington area is barely half the size it was in 2005. East of the Coastal Causeway (formerly known as Interstate 95) lies the open Atlantic. The Virginia Piedmont from Middleburg to Charlottesville would be recognizable to Thomas Jefferson. Rich people who appreciate its high ground and social amenities have bought it up and restored its 18th-century charms.

There has been no speculative housing development in the region since the 2006 real estate bubble popped. These days, you can pick up a lovely Potomac tract mansion for $200,000. Then you just have to figure out how to pay for the air conditioning.

Author's e-mail: garreauj@washpost.com