Having it Both Ways

While we've moved to downtown Frederick, my wife and I also find ourselves in the heart of the sprawling Metro DC burbs, itself the southernmost outpost of the sprawling Washington-Boston megalopolis. And this quote from a Washington Post article (registration required) about suburban development fights in Howard County, between DC and Baltimore, is one reason why:

"People here have chosen a specific lifestyle, and they don't want it eroded."

Even if that way of life is what's causing the erosion. It seems the only thing that pisses folks in the cul-de-sacs off more than sprawling development, is proposing denser development to alleviate it. As developers had the audacity to do in "downtown" Columbia, one of America's prototype "planned communities:"

"Though most of the county was asleep early last year when the Howard zoning board voted to kill a plan for housing in downtown Columbia, it was a hard-fought victory for development opponents. The five-member County Council, sitting as the zoning board, rejected Rouse Co. plans for a density increase in Columbia."

The bastards. And it is hardly a new phenomenon on the NIMBY front. Here's a Metro Pulse piece I wrote about a similar instance in Farragut, the closest Knoxville comes to Columbia:

"That last bit—the sewer plant—apparently has quite a few people out Farragut way pretty ticked. And it’s led to my acquaintance with what may be a unique species of activist: the pro sprawl anti-sprawl advocate. It goes something like this: If they build that sewer plant, then next thing you know they’ll be building houses everywhere. Maybe even townhomes! Why, it perverts the natural order of things—a septic tank and a half-acre slice of heaven, or something like that. I don’t quite follow the logic beyond the broad strokes: Sprawl isn’t really sprawl as long as it’s really, well, sprawling.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not in any hurry to see townhouses take over the tiny amount of farmland left around Farragut. But if that same land is carved up into “estate” lots that are too big to mow and too little to plow, is it really any better?

Perhaps if Farragut and its environs had been a little more densely developed in the first place, West Knox County wouldn’t be in the dilemma it’s in: running out of room to build and struggling to accommodate the traffic that knits its far-flung fabric together.

Worse, beset by the prevailing mentality that density is the root of all evil, our solutions to runaway suburban development have been, largely, to run farther away. The setbacks get deeper, the landscape “buffers” get bigger, the uses more separated; separation of use is the golden rule of suburban development, a planning concept meaning that you live here, work there, shop over there and drive everywhere. And yet the same people who demand all this crap are mystified as to why we’re running out of undeveloped rural land?

“We are never,” writes critic and curmudgeon Jim Kunstler, “going to save the rural places or the agricultural places or the wild and scenic places (or the wild species that dwell there) unless we identify the human habitat and then strive to make it so good that humans will voluntarily inhabit it.”

Unfortunately we’ve allowed most of those habitats—our traditional towns and cities—to become so rundown that, as Kunstler observes: “Anyone with the means to do so has fled, shrieking, to dwell instead in either a rural setting or the mock-rural setting represented by suburbia.”

The irony is that as every square inch of West Knox County is being paved over and developed to the point that even the sprawl-dwellers have become anti-sprawl, large amounts of Knoxville’s center-city have more or less returned to nature. I got an email yesterday from someone working on a project to tackle the large number of abandoned houses and vacant lots in the inner city. Step one was compiling a neighborhood-by-neighborhood list of such properties, which was what the email was about. I sent him back a list of 24 addresses, more or less off the top of my head. That’s 24 abandoned, boarded-up houses in just one neighborhood. And that’s not even a complete list, or one that even counts vacant lots. Hell, it wasn’t too long ago that some people actually moved into downtown for the peace and tranquility (Boy, were they mad when the music started...).

So fight to stop townhomes from taking over Farragut if you want. Me, I’m hoping someone starts building townhomes in town."