and national lobbies were critical for creating the political and legal pressure needed to advance environmental progress.54
Federal policies played less of a role in curbing suburban sprawl during the late twentieth century. NEPA and the environmental impact statement process, for example, applied to only a subset of development projects involving federal interests and focused more on mitigating impacts based on community concerns rather than ensuring a minimum standard of environmental protection. Federal policies also did little to protect rural land from suburban conversion; indeed, they promoted the consolidation of farming. Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz highlighted the acceleration of this trend in the 1970s when he famously advised farmers to “get bigger or get out.”55
As part of the high tide of modern environmentalism, grassroots activities joined with supportive public officials in several Washington-area communities to curb pollution, the loss of open space, and the financial costs of sprawl during the early 1970s.56 After supporting rapid suburbanization for a quarter century, voters in Fairfax elected local leaders who enhanced land preservation and passed a 1973 ordinance that tied development to the capacity of existing infrastructure. A conservative state judiciary, however, overturned the ordinance as an undue infringement of private property rights. In 1976, voters elected leaders who returned the county to a dogged pursuit of commercial development to offset rising property taxes.57
Montgomery County benefited from having a more environmentally conscious population and officials committed to a model of compact planning. Montgomery embraced the wedges and corridors model of planning after World War II.58 Under planning board chair Royce Hanson, the county took two major steps to bolster growth management during the 1970s. First, officials adopted an adequate public facilities ordinance that was never struck down, unlike in Northern Virginia. Second, they created a master plan to preserve agriculture and rural land by curbing suburban housing and implementing a program that allowed landowners to sell the right to develop parcels of land in exchange for agreeing to permanent conservation easements.59 Purchasers in this transfer of development rights program could then use their rights to build extra housing in certain areas. Montgomery’s planning measures were quite successful in curbing population growth: while Fairfax’s population increased 31 percent during the 1970s, Montgomery’s rose less than 11 percent.60
The contrast between Fairfax and Montgomery Counties highlighted the importance of state support of local growth regulations for achieving environmental goals.61 In addition, Maryland’s land preservation programs offered funding to local communities for permanent conservation, while Virginia’s employed temporary protections and did not offer funding for conservation easements until 1997.62 State support for growth management, however, still required local commitments for environmental protection to be successful. The influx of working-class African Americans into Prince George’s County during the 1970s spiked property taxes to pay for infrastructure and services. Rather than seeking to slow growth to rein in the cost of supporting it, residents instead voted to cap their property taxes, joining a tax revolt movement that swept across suburban America.63 In the short term, this vote accomplished its fiscal objective. Over the longer term, the tax cap intensified the need to attract commercial development, with two results. First, public officials and residents were more likely to discount the environmental impact of development in order to attract the revenue it offered. Second, local officials undermined the value proposition of growth by offering financial subsidies to try and lure businesses to locate.
As its suburbs struggled to manage growth, Washington, D.C., attempted to redefine its image in the face of population loss, commercial disinvestment, poverty, and crime. With passage of the Home Rule Act of 1973, the nation’s capital acquired new rights to govern itself. Under Mayor Walter Washington, the city redeveloped commercial areas along Pennsylvania Avenue and the Georgetown waterfront, built a new convention center downtown, and created more public spaces.64 The city, and its suburbs, also began construction of the Metro mass transit system after overcoming fifteen years of congressional struggles that had delayed financing.65 Washington was one of the few places where a public transportation system was built in the second half of the twentieth century. It took twenty years to complete, however, leaving the District and inner suburbs hard-pressed to stem the tide of expansion into the outlying counties of Prince William and Loudoun in Virginia and Charles County in Maryland.
Rapid growth returned to Washington in the 1980s and 1990s in step with the rise of political and cultural conservatism. At the national level, the Reagan administration undermined the enforcement authority of the EPA, blocked passage of new regulations, and curbed citizens’ use of environmental lawsuits. Although these efforts slowed after 1983, they marked a new legacy in the devolution of American politics inaugurated by the Nixon era. As a result, coalitions of growth supporters regained control in many communities.66 By 2000, the population of Greater Washington had increased to 4.8 million as the region’s boundaries doubled to include nearly a dozen new counties in Virginia, Maryland, and even West Virginia.67 Virginia localities experienced larger population increases and more extensive growth than their Maryland peers due to lower taxes, more permissive land use policies, and vigorous road building campaigns that opened land to development.68
Figure 2. Aerial view of Northern Virginia looking northeast toward Washington, D.C. Source: Carol M. Highsmith Archive.
The rapid suburbanization of Greater Washington intensified residential segregation as much of the white middle class moved into outlying areas while people of color, immigrants, and the working class settled in the older, close-in suburbs. Four decades after Washington, D.C., became the nation’s first major black-majority city, Prince George’s became the nation’s first black-majority suburban county. Meanwhile, a handful of older suburbs, such as Springfield, Virginia, displaced the traditional role of central cities as gateways for immigrants thanks to their proximity to major highways and recently completed Metro stations. Incomes in the region remained higher than the national average, but this affluence was not shared equitably. High housing prices pushed lower-income workers into communities inside the Beltway or pulled them out to the urban fringe.69
Employment and commerce closely followed residential suburbanization. Greater Washington added fifty-five thousand jobs per year between 1980 and 2002 and had lower unemployment rates than the national average. While the region maintained a large federal workforce, there was considerable growth in the technology, business services, education, health care, and leisure sectors. The competition for the highly mobile capital in these industries transformed the business core into a more complex, uneven network of jobs and commerce that tended to favor Northern Virginia because of its strong bias toward unencumbered growth.70 At the same time, inner-core communities struggled to attract investment, even when they used major financial incentives to lure upscale commercial projects.71
The construction of the Metro offered a major opportunity to reorient Greater Washington around a wedges and corridors model of regional development, but the results varied by community. In places where planners and officials had promoted compact development, like Montgomery and Arlington, Metro stations fitted nicely in and helped organize growth. In places where they had not, like Fairfax, much development lay outside of the Metro service area.72 Just as the last set of original Metro stations opened in the early 1990s, chronic congestion on the Capital Beltway and many of the region’s other major highways pulled political attention to the periphery.73 In Northern Virginia, two toll roads were built in Loudoun to accommodate exurban growth; however, the state of Maryland and its localities focused their planning efforts on improving existing roads and increasing use of Metro.74
Compared with the postwar era, the end of the century was a far more cautious time regarding highway building in light of the troubling social legacies of urban freeways and environmental concerns about air pollution. As construction
