Articles

Will the Real Prince William County Please Stand Up?

Prince William County has embraced a new approach to managing growth – you just can’t tell yet because the market is still working through the backlog of traditional, sprawl-style development.

by Peter Galuszka

Time for a multiple-choice quiz: Which best describes Prince William County?

(A) It’s a standout example of intelligent planning for land use and transportation, where forward-thinking policies will tame the suburban sprawl pulsating southwest from Washington.

(B) It’s another troubled suburb where a handful of good projects are lost amidst ill-connecting subdivisions, catch-up road widening projects and insufficient public transit.

(C) Both of the above.

If you picked “C”, you must know the area pretty well. Prince William contains some of the best and worst planning in Northern Virginia. It has acted aggressively to fix clogged roads with little help from the state or federal governments, and it is pushing high-density, transit-oriented development in the far eastern and western parts of the county. Yet at the same time, large subdivisions are sprouting in areas with inadequate highways, buses or trains to handle the commuting demands the new residents will create.

With a population of 350,000 in 2005, Prince William has been one of the fastest-growing jurisdictions in Virginia. The county added nearly 50,000 residents between 2000 and 2005. Prince William’s response to growth will do much to shape the character of the larger Northern Virginia region -- and the wider growth debate in Virginia.

At a time of growing consensus among state lawmakers that transportation and land use planning should be aligned, the experience of Prince William is particularly instructive: No other jurisdiction in Virginia has made a comparable commitment to invest local tax dollars in upgrading its transportation infrastructure. If any locality has an incentive to consider the transportation impact of its rezoning decisions, it’s here, where local taxpayers are on the hook to fund new transportation capacity.

The lesson from Prince William: Don’t expect immediate results, even from a local leadership committed to transportation-efficient development. Previous boards opened up so much land for development and demanded so little in the way of proffers and other financial contributions for infrastructure, that sprawl-style development will continue to swamp local roads -- and the county will be playing catch-up -- for years to come.

But changes, though frustratingly slow, are occurring. The development mix is changing. Prince William is seeing more transit-oriented development around Virginia Railway Express stations, and builders are gravitating toward pedestrian-friendly, mixed-use communities where residents can attend to more of their daily needs without driving for miles and adding to the congestion of arterial roads.

To a remarkable extent, the debate comes down to whether the glass is half empty or half full. Road to Ruin spent a day recently with two men with very different perspectives: Sean T. Connaughton, chairman of the Prince William board of supervisors, and Stewart Schwartz, executive director of the Washington-based Coalition for Smarter Growth.

Connaughton is an optimist. He candidly acknowledges the problems that Prince William County is wrestling with, especially the difficulty in counteracting zoning decisions made long ago. But he insists that Prince William is moving in the right direction. The glass is half full.

Schwartz by contrast sees some attractive, well- planned projects. But he’s overwhelmed by the ugly, polluting, land-consuming growth that he sees taking place, and he’s frustrated by transportation funding priorities that defer major investments in mass transit for years down the road. The glass is half empty.

Here are their stories.

Standing in his shirtsleeves over a large conference room table at the McCoart Government Center in Prince William, Sean Connaughton unfurls a large county map. “You see, development in Prince William is a barbell,” he says, gesticulating towards the eastern and western ends of the county.

In the middle of the barbell, development is squeezed. Much of the land -- a state park, protected areas along a reservoir and the sprawling Marine Corps training base at Quantico – is off limits to development. Buildable properties in the middle of the barbell are generally rural or zoned for 10 acres.

The barbell configuration pushes development to the far western and eastern ends of the county. Both are served by the Virginia Railway Express commuter train system and by the county’s own “Omniride” bus system, which connect Prince William’s bedroom communities with employment centers in Alexandria, the Pentagon and the District of Columbia.

Connaughton says the three goals with transportation and land use are dealing with past mistakes, handling regional problems and guiding future development to where it can best be handled.

This is no small task considering that the county approved a mass of new projects and rezonings during a building boom in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Development fizzled briefly during a downturn in the market, then resumed with a vengeance. In recent years, houses have gone up at a pace of about 6,000 units annually, far surpassing the 2,000 units per year that planners once assumed for purposes of building infrastructure.

One result has been serious road congestion. Because the state is perennially short of funds for new construction, the county under Connaughton has taken transportation into its own hands. Today, Prince William has an ambitious $1.5 billion plan to fix the road network over 15 years, financing improvements through a series of bond levies. A $200 million bond issue to widen roads will be held this year, with a $400 or $500 million levy in 2014 and then an $800 million issue in 2018. Among projects earmarked for improvements are widening U.S. 1 to six lanes, widening Route 28 from four to six lanes and continuing work on Route 234 which connects Prince William with Loudoun County. Public transit -- notably more bus routes and transit parking -- will be featured prominently in the 2014 bond issue.

Connaughton knows, however, that Prince William cannot build its way out of traffic congestion: The county also needs to adopt patterns of land use that generate fewer and shorter automobile trips. The chairman is most positive about the development taking place in the eastern “barbell” near the Potomac River.

For years, the old U.S. 1 corridor was notable mainly for its gas stations, slipshod strip malls and decaying motels. The area still has a cheap, military-base feel, with the Army’s Ft. Belvoir just over the Fairfax County line to the north and Quantico to the south.   

According to the recommendations last year of the federal Base Realignment and Closure Commission, which assesses military base needs every 10 years, Quantico soon will be getting 5,000 more Marines and Ft. Belvoir 25,000 more Army personnel. The county is getting no federal assistance to accommodate the extra roads, schools and public services required by the new arrivals. “Marine awareness [of its impact on a community] ends at the base border,” says Connaughton, a former Coast Guard and Naval Reserve officer who will become head of the Federal Maritime Administration in Washington in September.

County supervisors know the corridor needed more than road improvements to accommodate all that growth. In 2003, the board adopted many of the ideas from the non-profit Urban Land Institute, which had been contracted to study economic development and land use planning in the area.

The board is expediting more mixed-use and higher-density development along U.S. 1, including apartments and condominiums and more routes for buses. About one mile south of the Fairfax County line, the county has approved a “Woodbridge Urban Plan,” in which three 15-story towers will stand at the center of revitalized shopping and eight-story condominium buildings.

Not far away, along the Occoquan River, arises the Belmont Bay project, a New Urbanism-style development that wins praise from a wide spectrum of opinion. Belmont Bay features Georgetown-style townhouses on narrow, city-like streets, a marina, and easy walks to the local VRE train station.

Just south of Woodbridge, Hazel Land Cos., Inc., is developing Rippon Center, a mixed-use project with 550 high-rise condominiums, 27,000 square feet of retail space and 250,000 square feet of office space. This mixed-use, pedestrian-friendly project will offer handy access to the VRE’s Rippon Station.

Projects such as these, Connaughton says, will spearhead eastern Prince Williams’ metamorphosis into a higher-density, higher-income area that offers attractive settings, the natural beauty of the Potomac and a 20-minute train ride to employment centers in and near Washington.

On the western barbell of the county, Connaughton says, the county hopes to spur more higher-density development around the independent City of Manassas. Pharmaceutical giant Eli Lily plans a production facility that will employ at least 400, and the FBI plans to build a regional headquarters in the area. County officials hope to leverage these developments with more higher-density, mixed-use projects. To improve access to this area, the county plans to improve the U.S. 29 and Interstate 66 interchange, initiate bus transport and bolster the VRE light rail line.

“The west is a little more of a disaster,” concedes Connaughton. “The old problems have been compounded by rapid growth.”

Besides the vested rezonings, which gives county government little control over how much of the land is developed, Connaughton cites a number of problems. One is worsening congestion on Interstate 95, which diverts traffic onto U.S. 1, which runs parallel to the interstate. Congestion in the U.S. 1 corridor makes it more difficult to build support from locals for higher density.

Another challenge is the difficulty of launching mass transit in the absence of the densities needed to support ridership. “We cannot add lines that may make sense but don’t have the ridership to pay for some of the costs yet,” he explains. “It’s a chicken-or-the-egg problem: Which comes first, transit or the riders?”

Change doesn’t happen “with a snap of the fingers,” he says. Financial constraints, legal impediments, market conditions and public opinion are all obstacles to moving the county forward as fast as he would like.

Driving a shared-ownership “Flexcar,” Stewart Schwartz pulls to a stop atop a hill in eastern Prince William that offers a view of the development taking place below. “Looks kind of like mountaintop removal,” he comments, referring to the coal mining practice in Central Appalachia of denuding hundreds of acres of forest and lopping off the tops of entire mountains to get at coal seams.

He’s got a point. A big slash has been cut through broad, newly-treeless corridors not far from the Potomac. The slash will become the Cherry Hill Road, big enough to handle four lanes of traffic. From that road, tentacles of cul-de-sac arteries will slither through the Cherry Hill peninsula that juts into the Potomac.

The 2,300-acre project, which was approved by the board of supervisors in 2001 – Connaughton cast a minority vote against it -- is being put up by KSI Services Inc. of Vienna. The mixed-use project, Harbor Station, will have 2,500 housing units, two million square feet of office space, a marina and a golf course. Some of the housing will be high-density townhouses but most will be low-density single-family units.

The project, which KSI took over from a floundering Norwegian company, is not completely without public transit assets, however. It will feature a new VRE rail station called Town Center, to be located between the VRE Rippon and Lorton Station train stops. Some high-density development, including townhouses and stores will be centered around the rail station but most new residents will have to rely on their cars.

An earlier part of Cherry Hill development, approved in 1990, resembles old-style sprawl with large houses on small lots with little accommodation for pedestrians.

On the plus side, Schwartz says, is the Belmont Bay project. Driving his Flexcar around the projects’ Georgetown-like brick townhouses a few miles from Cherry Hill Road, Schwartz praises its human scale, walker-friendliness and soon-to-be-built amenities such as coffee shops and dry cleaners, all set amidst the natural beauty of the Occoquan River. The community is far more compact than Cherry Hill and far better served by sidewalks, although getting to the VRE station seems like a bit of a hike.

Other than Belmont , Schwartz is critical of most development in eastern Prince William. The 15-story towers slated for construction near U.S. 1 are really upscale “gated” communities designed precisely not to be part of the local community, he says. Most of U.S. 1 consists of beleaguered strip malls and old neighborhoods of tiny, 60-year-old homes accessible only by car and cut off from bus and rail lines. At one point, driving along a collection of shopping centers at Route 123, he comments, “Maybe this is what some people in the county mean by ‘mixed retail development.’ But it looks like the same old stuff to me.”

It’s possible, he says, that the county will eventually boost its bus system through bond referendums at some point years from now. But the priorities are clear: stop-gap measures of widening clogged roads.           

What really sticks in Schwartz’s craw is that projects like Cherry Hill show so little kindness to nature as they are developed. True, new plantings will someday replace the naked tan soil, but in the meantime, the potential for erosion and pollution is enormous, he says. “They’re ripping up huge sections of land with no respect for the [Chesapeake] Bay.”

Prince William is making progress. The county blends generally positive land use initiatives with a gutsy willingness to take road improvement into its own hands. Positive results are still hard to see, however: The momentum for better planning and better thought-out public transit gained momentum only five or so years ago. Meanwhile, traditional, developer-led projects are still working their way through the pipeline.

The new direction may not meet the full approval of Schwartz and his smart-growth friends, but it represents a clear shift in direction from the Busines As Usual approach that prevailed for so long.  At the very least, Connaughton and his allies in the county deserve credit for thinking longer term, as their plans for transportation-related bond issues over the next two decades attest.

-- August 16, 2006