Wonks on the Web: E M Risse

The Shape of the Future



 

 

 

Quantification of Land Resources and the Impact on Land Conservation Efforts


 

A root cause of the lack of support for comprehensive, Commonwealth-wide land conservation efforts is failure to understand the scope and depth of the current status of land vulnerability to scattered urban land uses.

 

The need for more extensive land conservation is obscured by Geographic Illiteracy and Spacial Ignorance in the general population. It is exacerbated by the lack of quantification that clouds the perception of conservation professionals and concerned citizens.

 

An abysmal lack of meaningful quantification results in the pervasive obliviousness to reality and hobbles land conservation efforts in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

 

Disclaimer

 

The following material is not:

  • A condemnation or critique of any current land conservation effort

  • A recommendation that any current conservation effort should be changed or abandoned

Summary

 

The following material demonstrates beyond a shadow of a doubt that:

Taken together, all the current conservation efforts are ineffective in creating a balance between Open Land and urban land. A balance between the Urbanside (including Openspace) and the Countryside is essential to a prosperous, stable and sustainable society.

 

The current trajectory of urbanization will cause the Commonwealth to evolve a profoundly unsustainable distribution of urban and nonurban land uses. The principal culprits include:

  • Failure to establish a Clear Edge between the Urbansides and the Countryside

  • Scatteration of urban land uses across the Countryside

  • Collective failure of land conservation efforts to address this pattern of urban disaggregation 

These facts might be thought of as “The Really Inconvenient Truth.”

 

The Big Picture

 

There are about 25 million acres of land in Virginia. (The acreages and percentages in this document are rounded for ease of understanding.)

 

20 Percent: Perhaps 20 percent (5 million acres) of the land area in Virginia is “conserved” in relatively large (200 acres +/-) contiguous agglomerations – the National Forests, National Parks, National Wildlife Refuges, State Forests, State Parks, State Wildlife Management Areas, large municipal and subregional agency parks and agglomerations of private holdings with permanent conservation restrictions.

 

10 Percent: There is now perhaps 10 percent (2.5 million acres) of the 25 million acres in Virginia devoted to or actively held for intensive urban land uses.

 

There are three fundamental problems illustrated by these numbers:

  • The 20 percent number is far too low to provide an Open Land context and support for urban land uses in the Commonwealth.

  • The 10 percent number can be demonstrated to be far too high to support sustainable urban activities given the current projected population for the Commonwealth.

  • 20 percent plus 10 percent = 30 percent and that leaves 70 percent of the Commonwealth as neither urban nor nonurban.

That equation may not seem alarming until one considers the numbers more closely.

 

Urban Virginia

 

The Commonwealth of Virginia is a vital part of the most dynamic and prosperous urban nation-state in history. Over 95 percent of the population of Virginia is engaged in urban activities, so it is reasonable to start with the land needed for Virginia citizens’ every day urban activities.

 

The citizens of the Commonwealth can efficiently use (at minimum sustainable density at the Alpha Community scale of 10 persons per acre) only about three percent (700,000 acres) of land for intensive urban land uses. These are maximum areas (minimum densities) and much of the urbanized land is already developed at higher densities. Old Town, The Fan and other very desirable components of Urban Virginia have density ranges from 50 to 100 persons per acre at the village scale. Much of the affordable and accessible housing averages from 30 to 50 persons per acre throughout the Commonwealth. For this reason, 700,000 acres is a good working number for the amount of land realistically needed for all the intensive urban activities of all Virginians.

 

It is important to understand that this 700,000 acres is not the ecological footprint of Virginia’s citizens but rather is the amount needed for daily activity. There is a profound difference between the area for daily activity and the ecological footprint. Most of the ecological footprint covers areas in the Countryside (food and fiber) and in other regions and other continents. These two numbers are discussed elsewhere in The Use and Management of Land.

The bottom line is that there is more than three times more land already devoted to urban uses (or held/ planned/zoned for intensive urban land uses) than for which there is a foreseeable need.

To achieve a sustainable trajectory, it is imperative to shrink the amount of land devoted to and held for urban land uses. In the following discussions we use a generous four percent (one million) acres as the target for urban land. This area would accommodate intensive urban activities for the foreseeable future in the Commonwealth.(1)

 

Nonurban Virginia

 

With respect to the nonurban lands – the focus of this discussion – the 20 percent number should raise alarm bells among those concerned with land and water conservation: If 20 percent is protected for open land (Countryside land uses) and four percent is needed for urban land uses, then 76 percent is unprotected from conversion to scattered urban land use.

 

The bottom line is that 19 million more acres (76 percent) of the Commonwealth needs to be protected from further scatteration of urban land uses. The unprotected 19 million acres of land in the Commonwealth, including most of the land within 100 miles of the three New Urban Regions that fall all or in part in the Commonwealth, is becoming a checkerboard of conserved and urbanized/exploited/ mined land.    

 

If current trends continue, at best it will be a 50/50  split instead of a the 4 percent/96 percent ratio that is the basis for a sustainable Urbanside and sustainable Countryside in the Commonwealth. (For a overview of the amount of land subject to the most intense pressure from scattered urban land uses see “Stark Contrast: Two Views of the Road Ahead,” May 2001, S/PI.)

 

Under the Hood

 

The maximum land area needed (minimum functional urban intensity at the Alpha Community scale) for the daily activities of 95 percent of the citizens (the urban residents) of the Commonwealth is around 700,000 acres. Rounding this number up to 1,000,000 provides a very generous upper bound for the amount of land for urban uses needed within Clear Edges. (For a discussion of Clear Edges see: “Beyond the Clear Edge,” May 26, 2003, and the three-part special report starting with “Wild Abandonment," Sept. 8, 2003.)

 

Between two and four times that amount of land (let us take three times as a conservative estimate) is already committed to, or held for, urban activities. Even worse, vastly more land is speculatively held for future urban land uses by those that advocate, and benefit from, scattering urban land uses outside Clear Edges.

 

The VA GAP analysis found that there were about 2,225,000 acres of public and private land managed for conservation purposes in Virginia. The U.S. Forest Service holdings accounts for two thirds of this acreage. The vast majority of this land is along the western boundary of the Commonwealth, far from the Cores of the three New Urban Regions that fall all or in part in the Commonwealth.

 

An optimistic estimate is that there may be five million acres of land already “conserved” in large federal, Commonwealth, municipal and private holdings.

 

There is additional land that is “completely unsuitable for urban land uses.” The fact that land is “completely unsuitable for urban land uses” is not slowing down the pace of land subdivision for second home/retirement home/hobby farms/ “off-the-grid- living” and other forms of urban development. Land suitability is not a useful metric for considering the potential for scatteration of urban land uses. (For a further exploration of the issues raised in this section see the Outside the Clear Edge section of the End Note.)

 

The Relevance of a 400,000-Acre Goal

 

In late April of 2006 Gov. Timothy M. Kaine committed to “conserve” 400,000 additional acres of land in the Commonwealth by 2010. In response we posted at Bacon’s Rebellion blog, “400,000 ACRE FOOLISHNESS.” The following is an edited version of that posting:

 

For those concerned with conservation, to conserve 400,000 acres over the next four years sounds like a major step in the right direction. It might be for one county, but not the entire Commonwealth which is roughly 25 million acres. It may be a “politically realistic” goal but not an ecologically functional goal.

 

Let us be clear about the value of “saving” 400,000 acres: If citizens of the Commonwealth could be assured that the 400,000 acres of land will be used in the future for agriculture & forestry/air & water recharge/hunting & gathering/passive recreation and other extensive land uses, then the conservation of 400,000 acres could be an economic, social and physical benefit to the land owners and to the public in general -- but only if, all 400,000 acres of conserved land are in the right locations. (See End Note for a discussion of “right” and “wrong” locations of land conservation actions.)

 

It is just as clear that if the 400,000 acres are conserved in the wrong locations, they will have the opposite results. (See End Note.)

 

Preserved/conserved acres in the wrong locations could and often does:

  • Raise the speculative value of adjacent land for urban uses, as in “no one can build next to your five-acre lot.”

  • Cause urban development to leapfrog to unprotected land in even more dysfunctional locations.

  • Waste the public investment that has already been made to serve urban land uses on the newly “conserved” land.

The list goes on. Underlying the “location” problem is the fact that there are no region-wide, much less Commonwealth-wide, strategies or plans to provide a context for conservation actions of 40,000, 400,000 or 4,000,000 acres. A survey of past actions documents that many of the “conservation” efforts – especially high-profile “rescues” by municipal and state action – are in the wrong locations. (See End Note.)

 

A compounding problem is that the announcement of a 400,000-acre goal without a context to evaluate it generates a false impression that something really meaningful is being done to rationalize human settlement patterns – in the Urbanside or in the Countryside. A total of 400,000 acres is an inconsequential percentage (1.6 percent of 25 million acres) of the land area of the Commonwealth.

 

The Bottom Line

 

Even if five million acres are now “conserved,” that means the Commonwealth needs to “conserve” 1 million acres of land a year, every year, for the next 19 years for there to be a suitable framework for functional human settlement patterns. That is 10 times the pace of the Governor’s 400,000 acres in four years. Even spending 19 years to remove land from the potential of urban scatteration may not be rapid enough, given the rising cost of settlement pattern dysfunction.

 

The impact of not fairly allocating location-variable costs of goods and services is sapping individual, family, enterprise and agency resources. Settlement pattern dysfunction is best illustrated in the lack of access and mobility and the lack of affordable and accessible housing. The broadly publicized 400,000 acre “goal” illustrates a systemic problem with land conservation efforts, as well intended as such efforts may be. No one has yet addressed:

 

1.  The scale of the land conservation problem.

 

2. The reality that there is already far more land committed to urban land use than will be needed in the foreseeable future.

 

3. Fair and equitable ways to transition to more functional human settlement patterns.

 

4. The dramatic impact of land conservation in the “right” and the “wrong” locations explored in the End Note.

PROPERTY DYNAMICS provides a strategy to bring these critical issues into the arena of public discussion.

 

Quantification End Note

 

Our comment on a history of inappropriate locations of “conservation” efforts is based on a survey for an S/PI client several years ago. A request for examples of land conservation initiatives in the wrong locations is relevant but not easy to provide. The original list needed to be updated but quickly grew quite long. In addition, a list of examples without context raises more questions than it answers. The following is an attempt to put in perspective the locational dysfunction of several “conservation” efforts since 1972 in the northern part of Virginia.

 

Some caveats:

 

First, in reviewing these examples, recall that what happened in Radius Band R=6 Miles to R=12 Miles (about 70,000 acres of land in Virginia) in the 1970s is now happening to land in R=20 Miles to R=50 Miles (about 1.5 million acres of land in Virginia).

 

Second, there is profound difference between “conservation” inside the Clear Edge and “conservation” outside the Clear Edge. This is the difference between “Openspace” and “Countryside.”  We will not try to sort out all the differences at this time. We have chosen examples that do not turn on these definitions. We have divided the End Note into two sections – one discussing conditions inside the logical location for the Clear Edge, the second addressing land outside the Clear Edge.

 

Third, what happens inside the Clear Edge around any urban enclave determines the need to add to or remove land from within a Clear Edge. Also recall that dysfunction within the Clear Edge drives families, enterprises and institutions to scatter urban land uses across the Countryside outside the Clear Edge.

 

If you are familiar with examples cited below, you may recall some were positioned by MainStream Media in terms of lowering density to protect the “character” of the “neighborhood.” Even if not on the front burner, each initiative had a strong conservation rationale.

 

The author was directly or indirectly involved in each of these examples. Each case has a long, complex history. In the real world, there are no short stories. These examples are brief summaries from memory, and we may have omitted some important details.     

 

I. Inside the Clear Edge

 

We address the examples in three categories concerning Balanced Communities, Shared-Vehicle System Station-Areas and Large-Acreage Initiatives.     

Conservation Initiatives Trumping the Evolution of Balanced Communities

 

Huntley Meadows Park was a surplus World War II Navy radio-antenna field that was used by the Federal Highway Administration to test asphalt paving after the war. Beavers started to dam up Barnyard Run on the site, recreating “wetlands” that pre-revolutionary farmers had drained to make the land useable for agriculture.

 

Residents with lots that backed up to the site lobbied for the surplus federal property to become a park to thwart planned roadways from being extended through the site. Huntley Meadows Park is now a nice place for bird watching and nature education. There is a need for parks and useable Openspace throughout the urban fabric, but ...   

 

There was (and is) no plan for the Balanced Community that should (and eventually will have to) evolve in southeastern Fairfax County. This asphalt test site, along with the surplus Belvoir Proving Grounds, the recycled Lorton Reformatory site and Ft. Belvoir itself, together with the gravel pits that became Kingstowne and the existing development along U.S. Route 1 plus major parts of ‘Greater Springfield/Franconia’ should have been viewed as an opportunity to create a Balanced Community and not be chopped up into what Jim Bacon correctly called “pods” in his April 3, 2006, column, “Pod People.”

 

Why bother to reconsider this “conservation” decision?

 

You may recall the Pentagon is planning to move 20,000 or more military jobs to Ft. Belvoir. It is widely agreed that a loss of mobility and access in southeastern Fairfax County will be a result of this shift in jobs. It would help considerably if Fairfax County Parkway and Van Dorn Street had been extended to US Route 1. Construction of these planned improvements was thwarted by creating Huntley Meadows Park.

 

It would be even better to evolve a settlement pattern that supported more fuel-efficient mobility systems than private-vehicles for citizens to get to the new jobs. It would have been even better to have a Balanced Community in southeastern Fairfax so there would be housing, services, recreation and amenity to balance with the relocated military jobs and other jobs that would be a natural fit in the community but for congestion and high prices due to imbalance.

 

Now a few of the families that could be living in a Southeastern Fairfax Balanced Community are living in “pods” like the ones Jim Bacon describes. Some are really nice pods; some not so nice, but all are pods. The rest are living in eastern Prince William, Stafford and Spotsylvania Counties and are now spreading to Caroline County and beyond.

 

As documented by the 87½ Percent Rule, almost all the scattered urban residents are now living in exactly the same pattern at the Unit-scale and the Dooryard-scale as they would if their home was in the sustainable pattern of a Balanced Community. The difference is that the Units and Dooryards of which the Clusters, Neighborhoods and Villages of the Balanced Community would be composed are instead scattered over half a million acres.

 

The Southeastern Fairfax Balanced Community of 60,000 +/- acres could be home to over 600,000 people with nearly every family having access to the 40 percent of the land in the Community that could be openspace if intelligently planned. Now openspace is available to some pod residents – primarily those who live on lots that back up to a park – and to those who drive to the park. Did someone say gas prices are going up?

 

Traffic in the I-95 Corridor south of the Occoquan River would be dramatically reduced if 400,000 fewer people who derive their livelihood north of the Occoquan River were not scattered in Prince William, Stafford, Spotsylvania, and beyond.

 

As much as 500,000 acres of land south of the Occoquan would have been “conserved” because there would be no need to develop it in the first place.  t will cost millions of dollars to retrofit settlement patterns so that Southeastern Fairfax can evolve to become a Balanced Community. It will require new roadways, new rails and new sewer lines through backyard parks.

 

Huntley Meadows is not a unique case. There are approximately 16 potential Balanced Communities inside the Clear Edge in the northern part of Virginia.  There is a “conservation” story in every one of those potential Balanced Communities, not all as clear as Southeast Fairfax but all bad.

 

Shared-Vehicle System Station-Areas

 

No land is more important in the evolution of functional human settlement patterns than the 500 to 1,000 acres nearest the station platform of any high-capacity shared-vehicle system.  Shared- vehicle systems like METRO are very expensive and must have a balance of ridership and system capacity to work efficiently.

 

We briefly reviewed the history of the Vienna-Fairfax-GMU station area in our 28 March posting “METRO WEST – 22 Years Too Late.” Nottoway Park and Oakton High School were carved out of the 800 acres of vacant land near the station. The existence of vacant and underutilized land was the reason the METRO station was located there and not in Tysons Corner. However, as soon as the station location decision was made, the Fairfax supervisors moved to take as much land as possible out of play. (East Blake Lane Park came along later and was a trade-off to secure approval of a pod of townhouses off of U.S. Route 29 in the station-area.)

 

With intelligent planning in the station-area, nearly all the 50,000 to 80,000 residents could have had access to openspace, not just those who back up to a park or get in a car to drive there. They could have walked to jobs and services as well.

 

You may have heard that gas prices are going up, and that METRO costs are rising each year because of unbalanced ridership?

 

From 1973 through 1990, we worked on five projects in the Vienna-Fairfax-GMU station-area. “Conservation” was a theme in both governance practitioner and resident opposition to functional settlement patterns in the station-area.

 

This has been the case in many other station-areas. METRO-West is a step in the right direction, but think how much better the Vienna-Fairfax-GMU station area and all the other station areas might have been with a more intelligent view of “conservation.”

 

Large-Acreage Conservation Initiatives

 

The “preservation” of part of the watershed on the Fairfax (north) side of the Occoquan Reservoir (a potable water resource) was sold as a “conservation” measure. This is what we called at the time “The 83,000-Acre Occoquan 5-Acre Lot Lifestyle Strategy.”

 

We documented the context and foolishness of this action at the time but will spare you the details. It really helped a lot of speculative land owners who could sell off five-acre lots rather than wait for the market to develop for smaller lots that would become Dooryards and Clusters in functional components of settlement.

 

In summary, there would have been less polluting runoff into the water supply and a place for 800,000 citizens to call home and find work, services and recreation if planned and developed in an intelligent, balanced and more sustainable manor. That is more citizens than the total now living in Loudoun and Prince William Counties combined.

 

We will address the issue of five- and 10-acre horse farms in our forthcoming Use and Management of Land.

 

Had the 1965 plan for the distribution of land uses for the northern part of Virginia been followed, all the urban development supporting the National Capital Subregion in Virginia would have been inside Radius=20 Miles. There would also have been Countryside-supporting urban enclaves which we call “Disaggregated but Balanced Communities” inside their own Clear Edges. (See "Regional Rigor Mortis,” June 6, 2005, and “Reality Based Regionalism,” Oct. 17, 2005.)

 

Had the National Capital Subregion expanded in a sustainable manner, there would be no need for other large-acreage “conservation” initiatives such as the “Rural Crescent” in Prince William County.  The “Rural Crescent” is well on the way to becoming  80,000 acres of 10-acre lots with a generous scattering of one-, three- and five-acre subdivisions and 7-11s (aka, low-density pods).

 

In 20 years, it will be closer to “lunar crescent” than “rural crescent.” Or perhaps lunatic crescent? On both sides of the logical location of the Clear Edge around the Core of the National Capital Subregion, there are both large and small conservation-excused inappropriate actions taking place. One of our favorites is the attempt to “save” a former farmstead that the recently deceased owner explicitly wanted developed. The site is next to the RV sales lot not far from Wal-Mart and Home Depot in the southwest quadrant of I-66 and VA 234 Business in Greater Manassas.

 

The site in question is right across I-66 from a new million-square-foot +/- big box center. This new center backs up to Manassas National Battlefield Park. The vast majority of those who go to the new big box center must:

  • Drive through Manassas National Battlefield Park.

  • Drive under I-66 and take a left turn against two lanes of traffic.

  • Use the constrained I-66/VA Business 234 interchange.

If Greater Manassas/western Prince William County needed another big box center (most would suggest the answer is “no”), the “conservation” site behind the RV sales lot would make a lot more sense than the site that was developed. A better idea would be to redevelop the entire Greater Manassas urbanized area into a West Prince William/Greater Manassas Balanced Community.

 

This vignette suggests that Greater Manassas/ western Prince William is well on the way to becoming another Southeastern Fairfax. (For a view of the other end of the 15,000 acre West Prince William triangle, See “Anatomy of Bottleneck: The US Route 29/Interstate 66 Interchange at Gainesville.”

 

In summary, these inside-the-Clear-Edge examples are not unique cases. They are the norm. See “The Role of Municipal Planning in Creating Dysfunctional Human Settlement Patterns.”

 

II. Outside the Clear Edge

 

The prior section documents the growing dysfunction inside the logical location for a Clear Edge around the Core of the National Capital Subregion. Much of this dysfunction is rooted in misunderstandings concerning the role of “conservation.” The following examples document why “conserving” a parcel here and a parcel there outside the Clear Edge is foolishness – or worse.

 

An overview of how to understand this reality starts with the First Natural Law of Human Settlement Pattern: A= PiR2. Recall that, as noted above, “what happened in Radius Band R=6 Miles to 12 Miles (about 70,000 acres in Virginia) in the 1970s is now happening in R=20 Miles to 50 Miles (about 1.5 million acres in Virginia).”

 

While the logical location of the Clear Edge around the Core of the National Capital Subregion has now moved out to between R=22 Miles to R=25 Miles, most of the 1.5 million acres between R=20 Miles and R=50 Miles is land that should not be devoted to urban land uses.

 

Preventing urban scatteration and thus dysfunctional human settlement patterns in this area is critical if citizens are to achieve functional, sustainable places to work, live, seek services and participate in leisure activities (aka, work and play).

 

All of the 1.5 million acres outside the Clear Edges around the components of the Balanced but Disaggregated Communities in the Countryside needs to be “conserved” in order to:

1. Create a market sufficient to support the evolution of a viable Urbanside inside the Clear Edge around the National Capital Subregion’s Core, and

 

2. Provide the context for viable components of Countryside throughout the Washington-Baltimore New Urban Region.

We noted in the original post “The 400,000 ACRE FOOLISHNESS” that “preserved/conserved” land in the wrong locations can:

1. Raise the speculative value of adjacent land for urban use (“no one can build next to your five-acre lot”),

 

2. Cause urban development to leapfrog to unprotected land in even more dysfunctional locations and,

 

3. Waste the public investment that has already been made to serve urban land uses on the newly “conserved” land.”

At this point, the parcels that are candidates for “conservation” are awash in a vast area that is a checkerboard of interests and expectations. There are 1.5 million acres inside R=50 in Virginia alone.  There are up to 10 million acres in Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania around the Washington-Baltimore New Urban Region.

 

There are at least 14 million acres Commonwealth- wide in Virginia outside the three New Urban Regions and the other urban enclaves where over 85 percent of the population resides.

 

The Virginia Outdoors Foundation (VOF) uses municipal “comprehensive” plans to determine the appropriateness of parcels for conservation. Other groups, especially land trusts, set up to preserve a specific parcel or interest, are said not to follow such criteria. The municipal “comprehensive” plan may not be a useful guide. (See “The Role of Municipal Planning in Creating Dysfunctional Human Settlement Patterns.")

 

Note that every one of the problems listed in the Inside the Clear Edge review above was done in conformance with a municipal comprehensive plan – although in some cases the “comprehensive” plans were amended to “conform” after the political decision was made. VOF leaders are aware of the issues outlined here and are doing as much as they can without broader public understanding and therefore political support.

 

Are there threshold criteria that can be applied? Of course!

 

New conserved land should be located next to existing protected land or be of a scale and in a location that the land can become the anchor for a major new agglomeration of conserved land. It is, however, the holes in the donut near these preserved places where the greatest negative impact from raising the value for scattered urban land use comes home to roost. Our experience as a member of the Board of the Maryland Environmental Trust (MDET plays the role of the Virginia Outdoors Foundation in the Commonwealth) suggests that only when the three major issues noted in our original post (and rephrased below) are addressed can sound and rational principles and criteria be articulated.

 

Major Countryside resources such as the Appalachian Trail, or a major viewshed, can be anchors of land conservation efforts. Our experience as the Vice Chair for Stewardship of the Maryland chapter of the Nature Conservancy when the chapter Board was faced with finding a context for 11 “ecological gems” that had been donated to the Conservancy over the prior 30 years sharpened our appreciation for the problems encountered.

 

In this discussion, we lay aside the entire issue of who benefits from actions to conserve land and who pays the ultimate costs. (See Jim Bacon’s April 21, 2006, post on purchase of development rights and easements.)

 

A recent study by Resources for the Future (RRF) titled “The Value of Open Space: Evidence From Studies of Nonmarket Benefits,” documents how far the “state-of-the-art” is from establishing a fair value for “open space.”

 

The first paragraph of the Executive Summary of the RRF report includes this sentence: “And in rapidly growing urban and suburban area, any preserved land can offer relief from congestion and other negative effects of development.” That sort of misinformation is the cause of the Huntley Meadows Park problem.

 

(The entire first paragraph of the Conclusion in the RRF study noted above is a dictionary of error with respect to understanding human settlement patterns. It will be the subject of further review in “Use and Management of Land.” Also see four columns on Vocabulary starting with “The Foundation of Babble,” Nov. 28, 2005.)

 

Conservation of land a few acres here and a few acres there in the 1.5 million acres within R=50 Miles, or within the 19 million acres of land Commonwealth-wide that need protection will not solve any known problem. There must be a recognition of:

 

1. The scale and scope of the problem and the difference between and the role of “Openspace” and the role of the “Countryside.”

2. The reality that there is already far more land committed to urban land use than will be needed in the foreseeable future.

3. The need to establish fair and equitable ways to transition to functional human settlement patterns.

 

A first step is to develop a “Wright Plan” for Virginia that provides a rational basis for defining Clear Edges for the urban development in the New Urban Regions and the Urban Support Regions of the Commonwealth. This will help citizens understand the difference between Openspace and Countryside.

 

It goes without saying that efforts inside the Clear Edge to “lower densities” of urban uses result in the scatteration of urban land uses outside the Clear Edge. The same is true for those outside the Clear Edge around the Core of the Region or Subregion.

 

These actions scatter urban land uses whether they are inside or outside the Clear Edges around the components of Disaggregated but Balanced Communities.

 

PROPERTY DYNAMICS, a program of 1000 Friends of Virginia’s Future.  Suite 100, 124 Derby Way, Warrenton, VA 20186-3031

 


(1). The area for intensive urban use does not include uses such as multi-regional airports, regional facilities such as landfills but does include all Community-scale and smaller urban activities.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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