A War of Words Over a Changing Md. Landscape

Benefits of Rural Image Debated in Charles County

(Mark Gail - The Washington Post)

When trying to sell homes in Charles County, real estate agent Art Simpson likes to use one word: rural. "We still do have the rural flair," Simpson said, describing the fast-growing Southern Maryland county. "That's the reason they're here. That's the reason they've moved out of the city or the counties from the north."

But when developer Ray Mertz sells space in his planned technology park in Charles, he avoids that word. "I think we need to place an emphasis that this is more a suburban and urban area," he said.

The term rural has long been associated with Charles and the Washington region's other outlying counties. But as the area continues its outward expansion and rural landscapes morph into suburban ones, a war of words has taken shape.

To real estate agents, the county's rural identity is one of its biggest selling points. It is what has made Charles a popular Washington bedroom community, where more than half of its employed residents commute to jobs outside the county.

To county economic development officials trying to attract companies with high-paying jobs, the image of Charles as rural is an obstacle. To them, rural evokes tobacco farms, open fields and wooded land -- a pretty place to live but no place to base a company.

"People don't realize that we have the infrastructure," said Marcia Keeth, one of the county's economic development officers.

"When you say rural, they think they'll be out in the cornfield somewhere or a tobacco field somewhere, and there's not going to be a place to get their paper clips or paper or a supply of well-educated workers," Keeth said. "As long as we continue to define ourselves as rural, I think that we do perpetuate that image."

There are no official labels for counties, but demographers have loose definitions for the jurisdictions of the Washington region, said demographer Robert E. Lang, director of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech.

The District, Arlington and Alexandria are considered "principal cities," Lang said, because they are some of the region's largest economic and population centers. Fairfax, Montgomery and Prince George's counties are considered "inner" or "mature" suburbs.

That leaves Virginia's Loudoun and Prince William counties, as well as Charles, Howard, Anne Arundel, Frederick, Calvert and St. Mary's counties in Maryland, as "emerging suburbs." Areas farther out -- Fauquier, King George, Stafford and Spotsylvania counties in Virginia -- are considered "exurbs," or places just beginning to transition into suburbs.

A community shifts from rural to suburban when its economy becomes linked to the regional economy, Lang said.

For Charles, the turning point was when its commuter population overwhelmed its farming population. This began in the 1970s and '80s and escalated in the past decade when the state bought out tobacco farms, which had been Southern Maryland's economic and cultural identity. Meanwhile, subdivisions were rapidly being built.