Articles

Growth Backlash

In the big under-reported story of the November elections, voters said loud and clear, "We're sick and tired of growth, and we aren't going to take it anymore."

by Peter Galuszka

Riding a wave of voter frustration with clogged roads, crowded schools and undue developer influence, proponents of growth controls won what could be their biggest, most broad-based electoral victory ever in Virginia on Nov. 6.

Slow-growth candidates won in Board of Supervisor races in such sprawl hotspots as Loudoun County in Northern Virginia, Chesterfield and Hanover Counties outside Richmond and other growth-stressed areas including Orange, Spotsylvania and Albemarle Counties. Fairfax County board chairman Gerry Connolly, a backer of such touchstone issues as transit and affordable housing, won re-election handily.

Smart Growth advocates were overjoyed. “The most significant evidence of poorly-planned growth is the local elections in various races,” says Stewart Schwartz, executive director of the Coalition for Smarter Growth. The local victories overshadow the Democratic Party’s winning back the state Senate, even though that sea-change may bring about a big and possibly beneficial shift in power in influential legislative committees, Schwartz says.

Yet it's not clear what the changes at the local level will bring. The new supervisors will find it difficult to un-do a multitude of rezoning approvals awarded by their pro-development predecessors. They are largely powerless to reverse the huge number of new houses in the development pipeline.

Meanwhile, there is no assurance that the newcomers share the same vision of growth control espoused by many environmentalists and professional advocates of land use reform such as Schwartz. Among the differences, "smart growth" growth proponents urge more compact, higher density communities that offer alternatives to car transport, such as bicycle trails, pedestrian-friendly streetscapes and mass transit. Yet some of the election victors who claim the label of smart growth may be more accurately described as anti-growth, in that they want to halt growth, not reshape it. Corey Stewart, the anti-growth chairman of the Prince William County Board of Supervisors, for instance, steadfastly opposes Transit Oriented Development and advocates massive spending on road improvements to catch up with growth.

Additionally, the shifting economic landscape adds a handful of wild cards to the game. The crisis over sub prime mortgage lending, easy credit and skyrocketing adjustable rate mortgages is forcing developers to postpone or cancel thousands of housing starts. As housing prices drop, households are finding that locations close to the urban core are more affordable, taking growth pressure off the counties on the frontier of development.

Another factor is the inevitable slowdown of spending on defense and homeland security that has turbo-charged the Northern Virginia economy since 2001. If Democrats take the presidency in 2008 and if there are no more terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, the spending slowdown could turn into a spending decline. Between the sub-prime mess, the weakness of the dollar, rising gasoline prices and the increasing odds of a national recession, the newly elected anti-growth supervisors could find that there's no growth left to control.

“Any time you have a downturn in housing, it is the areas the farthest from the job centers that are hardest hit. We’re talking Stafford, Culpeper, outer Prince William and Frederick,” says Michael Toalson, executive director of the Home Builders Association of Virginia, the leading developer lobby. Toalson says his industry is in near crisis and is likely to ask the General Assembly for emergency relief. Such succor could come in the form of a roll back of the 33-year-old system of “proffers” whereby developers make payments upfront to help cover the social costs of building. Smarter growth advocates such as Schwartz strenuously oppose tinkering with proffers.

Some of the fiercest battles over growth have taken place in Loudoun County, the fourth fastest-growing municipality in the country. Voters replaced four out of five of the county's supervisors, who had approved a rash of development projects. Pro-development supervisors Jim Clem, Mick Staton, Bruce E. Tulloch and Stephen J. Snow, were all tossed out of office, leaving only one pro-growth supervisor, Eugene Delgaudio, a political activist and Republican fund raiser who runs hard-right lobbies attacking homosexuals and illegal immigrants. All of the losing supervisors had received considerable money from the construction and real estate industries over the years.

Another big shift will be the greatly diminished influence behind the scenes influence of Dale Polen Myers, whom Loudoun activist Joe Mayo describes as “the fairy godmother of the pro-development crowd.” A former chairman of the board of supervisors, Myers had been regarded as a major Republican Party advisor and king-maker. Her family dates back to the 1700s in Loudoun.

Unfortunately, there may not be much that the new officials can do to shape events in the near term, says Mayo, who works wtih the Voters for Loudoun’s Future. The county has an eight-year long backlog of houses on the books. “If the new board doesn’t approve one house in the first year," he says, "they’ll still have a four-year supply when their term ends."

The new board has to look beyond the current downturn, Mayo contends. “Sure houses won’t be selling, but, as they say in the movie, 'They’ll be Baacck.’ We have a little bit of time to catch up on our infrastructure. ... The best that they’ll be able to do is to stop approving houses except when everything lines up perfectly. We also need to find commercial development to help pay for it all, and that sector is slowing down greatly.”

The dynamics of local politics account for a lot of what is wrong with Loudoun, says Toalson with the state home builders. Loudoun bounces from one extreme to the other. In 2000, voters approve a slower-growth board. The development community reacted with a vengeance in 2004 and bankrolled candidates like Tulloch and Snow to push on with rezonings. Now, Toalson says, the pendulum has swung back again.

The see-swing, he contends, represents “a failure on the part of community leaders to agree on a practical approach. There have been boards of extremes.”

Schwartz retorts that “the pendulum is done swinging in Loudoun” and that smarter growth policies will take hold. “The mainstream press hasn’t connected the dots about the common frustration here,” he says.

Some of the same dynamics affecting Loudoun are present in Chesterfield, which also is coping with the fall out from sprawl. Four of five supervisors elected Nov. 6 were smart growth advocates. The Chesterfield elections weren't quite the throw-the-bums out phenomenon seen in Loudoun: two of the pro-growth supervisors were retiring. But there's no denying that the new board will take a fresh approach to growth. In one key change, slow-growth activist Marleen Dufree will replace one of the most pro-development supervisors on the board.

As in Loudoun, thousands of new homes have been approved. Construction has just started on Magnolia Green, a 2,000-acre project encompassing single-family homes, multi-family homes and a Jack Nicklaus-designed golf course. The project is located in a district of the county that has seen some of the county’s worst road congestion and school crowding.  

Meanwhile, about a month before the Nov. 6 election, the Chesterfield board, by a 2-1 vote with two members abstaining, approved another mega project in the eastern part of the county. The Branner Station project will include nearly 5,000 homes and apartments plus 470,000 square feet of store space – the biggest ever in that part of Chesterfield.

The new board will soon face a big test: the largest proposed rezoning in Chesterfield’s history. The project, called Roseland, would squeeze 5,140 homes and 1.5 million square feet of retail and office space into 1,395 acres. Developers are touting Roseland as the very kind of New Urbanism-inspired, compact, mixed-use development favored by smart growth advocates. But it would push the growth frontier farther west, past the busy Midlothian turnpike strip.

The new boards in Loudoun and Chesterfield will have plenty of company in grappling with growth. In Hanover County, pro-smart growth supervisors were elected as a backlash against moves to change the county’s comprehensive plan. In Albemarle, supervisor candidates won a majority over public disgust with sprawl-inspired traffic jams on U.S. 29 that runs through the middle of Charlottesville. Smarter growth candidates also won in Orange, Warren, Spotsylvania and Augusta Counties.

On the state level, the anti-growth backlash was less sevident. The Democratic win in the state Senate means that Dick Saslaw of Fairfax is in line to become Senate Majority Leader. Saslaw received a large amount of campaign money – at least $90,000 -– from the construction and real estate community, according to the Virginia Public Access Project. If the home builder’s lobby does decide to go after proffers, they’ll likely get help from Saslaw.

At the same time, the Democratic win means that committee assignments will be scrambled. “The number of women and minorities will be much more visible,” says Lisa Guthrie, executive director of the Virginia League of Conservation Voters. Although the Democrats are still sorting out committee assignments, it is likely that pro-smart growth choices, such as Mary Margaret Whipple of Arlington will head the Rules Committee and Janet Howell of Fairfax, will get privileges and Elections, which will have the hugely important task of overseeing upcoming election redistricting. Chuck Colgan of Manassas may be the Finance Committee and Phil Puckett of Lebanon may win transportation.

In the end, though, it is the local, not state, politicians who set land use policy. The news for the anti-growth politicians is good this time around. Whether the policies they advocate truly add up to "smart growth" remains to be seen. If local boards don't deal effectively with the challenges of a volatile economy, they might find themselves on the receiving end of voter frustration four years from now.

-- November 29, 2007