Although local environmentalism was full of promise, curbing the impact of development over the long term was a formidable challenge. The construction of homes, businesses, and institutions—key signals of general prosperity—forged enduring coalitions among officials, residents, business leaders, and interest groups.20 This, combined with the mobile capital of the servicebased economy of the late twentieth century, fostered an insatiable appetite for development.21 Over time, policies and public preferences transformed Greater Washington, like many regions, from a central city hub with dependent suburbs into a diffuse agglomeration of communities with an uneven distribution of people, jobs, and investment.22 These inequalities left central cities and lower-income suburbs at a disadvantage, pushing their officials and residents to further sacrifice environmental safeguards for marquee projects. The unceasing competition for growth also impaired cooperation on affordable housing, economic development, and regional mobility.23
The focus of grassroots activists on community-based struggles also limited the reach of their work. Contrary to the notion of being “laboratories of democracy,” local politics frequently did not ensure substantive representation of the public’s concerns about suburban development. Endless meetings, complex planning and environmental regulations, and the dominance of growth-oriented officials and business interests often buried civic concerns.24 Finally, in the adversarial world of community politics, grassroots activists often spent so much time fighting fires that they were rarely able to form broad movements with those of different viewpoints.25 Indeed, their insistence on the self-evident merits of smart growth at times downplayed the broad value of development, increased housing costs, and elevated their interests in land preservation over the economic concerns of farmers and other rural business operators.26
Following a context-setting overview of Greater Washington, Smarter Growth includes spatially oriented case studies to explore how movements for smarter growth developed on the ground. The first examines how grassroots activists improved the water quality of the Potomac River. Aside from construction of the Metro, the river’s cleanup was one of the few issues that garnered attention across the region. It is a shining example of how even robust federal policy making established a foundation, rather than a guarantee, for environmental protection. Indeed, as sources of water pollution became more diffuse, civic activism proved more critical than national policy in cleanup efforts. Next, I examine two communities that adopted quite different approaches to waterfront development along the Potomac. The first, in Fairfax, featured a heady group of local environmentalists seeking to protect the ecological resources and natural amenities that they enjoyed from an upscale housing project. The second, in Prince George’s, saw an outpouring of political and public support for a landmark economic development project in a county that had been shut out from upscale commerce and whose residents were disinclined to worry about the environmental impact on the Potomac. The next case, a study of a cross-county highway in Maryland, explores how fervent local environmentalism may not be enough to override the widespread view of highways as panaceas for enhancing mobility.
The debate over suburban highways—and about the sprawl of growth more broadly—raised tough questions over how to alleviate the pressures to develop rural land. The final two chapters offer a case of contrasting local approaches to agricultural and rural land preservation. Montgomery County, the site of the cross-county highway, combined progressive land use planning with innovative market-based incentives to help rural landholders earn income by selling development rights in exchange for preserving their land in perpetuity. Meanwhile, rural land preservation in Loudoun County reveals far more political and public opposition, especially at the state level, to robust development regulations and land preservation incentives. The book ends with some general recommendations for promoting environmental stewardship in the fractured political landscape of metropolitan America in the twenty-first century.
An Overview of Greater Washington
Before World War II, the nation’s capital was the center of a small region that included the bedroom suburbs of Alexandria and Arlington County in Virginia and the southern third of Montgomery and Prince George’s Counties in Maryland. Residents in outlying areas may have had jobs or occasional business in Washington but otherwise lived in rural communities. As the region’s major urban center, Washington, D.C., had most of the area’s residents, the great majority of its jobs, and its best shopping, dining, and leisure options. During the war, migrants from across the country flooded into the city to work for the federal government. Temporary offices, housing, and a few major federal facilities like the Pentagon were hastily built near the district to accommodate workers and families, commencing the region’s suburbanization.27
After the war, officials prepared to satisfy the pent-up demand for housing and the desire for a more commodious way of life. The National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC), a federal agency officially responsible for planning the District of Columbia and informally charged with shaping a common vision for the region, favored a compact model of a development-guided mass transit system and a handful of highways. Their desired “wedges and corridors” planning model for the region soon unraveled, however, as rapid and expansive suburbanization took hold and local officials struggled to keep up.28
Between 1940 and 1970, the population around Washington quintupled to more than two million, while that of the nation’s capital declined from a historic high of 802,178 in 1950 to 756,510 by 1970.29 There were three major factors that sparked this major demographic and spatial shift. The first was the proliferation of single-use residential zoning and the advent of mortgage incentives from the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) to build homes in outlying white communities rather than socially diverse urban neighborhoods. The second was the emergence of “community builders” that developed large tracts of inexpensive homes on the rural periphery. While the Levitt Corporation in the Northeast is the most remembered, each metropolitan area had some of its own—the Arlington-based Yeonas Corporation was an example in Greater Washington. A young Milton Peterson got his start with the company, becoming one of the most prodigious developers in the region during the late twentieth century.30
Like housing, the demand for automobiles skyrocketed after the war. State highway departments rushed to build major highways to enhance mobility and open the countryside for the construction of new homes.31 In Greater Washington, the opening of Shirley Highway from the Pentagon to Fairfax during the late 1940s and early 1950s contributed to an eightfold population increase in the Northern Virginia county by 1960, while the construction of the Washington National Pike from Rockville to Frederick County, Maryland, in the early 1950s quadrupled the population of Montgomery.32
Even after Virginia and Maryland spent the first decade of the postwar era engaged in an aggressive campaign of road building, political interest in a comprehensive national system of highways persisted. In response, Congress passed the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, which laid the groundwork for transportation and land use planning centered on the automobile for the next several decades. The act offered an unprecedented federal contribution of 90 percent toward building forty-one thousand miles of interstate highways that was paid for by a dedicated Highway Trust Fund that collected taxes on fuel, tires, and heavy vehicles.33 These highways, along with thousands of miles of primary and secondary roads planned, funded, and built by the states, enabled a type of mobile, suburban lifestyle that many Americans desired. The Capital Beltway, which opened in 1964 to connect the suburbs radiating around Washington, punctuated an era of automobility.34
As America’s postwar suburbs expanded, they became highly segregated. In Greater Washington, the white middle class moved rapidly out of the nation’s capital, settling in Fairfax and Montgomery Counties. This, in concert with an influx of black residents, led Washington, D.C., to become the nation’s first majority African American city by 1957. City officials, as in many regions, attempted to curb the exodus of the white middle class through residential urban renewal projects, most notably in the Southwest, but instead displaced thousands of working-class
