Powhatan County, lying southwest of Richmond, faces similar challenges to a dozen or more other fast-growth counties in the Virginia countryside: rapid population growth that (1) strains infrastructure, and (2) brings an influx of urban residents who demand an urban level of services. The population is forecast to grow from about 28,000 today to an estimated 46,000 by 2020.
Powhatan Tomorrow, a citizens group, and the Powhatan County Transportation Study Group sponsored a panel presentation from an impressive group of luminaries — and me. Our purpose: to discuss the transportation-land use connection. The fact that the citizens of Powhatan are discussing the transportation and land use as a common issue is a tremendous sign of progress. It provides a glimmer of hope that the county may adopt a new, more realistic vision of growth as it goes through the process of revising its comprehensive plan.
The other panelists were informative and respectful. (I wish I’d had a pen to take notes, I’d have a lot of blog fodder this morning.) By contrast, as the resident blogger and hell raiser, I decided to get up close and personal with Powhatan and tell it exactly like I saw it.
The county’s existing comprehensive plan is a disaster: If the document is left intact, the county will be unlivable in 20 years. The plan endeavors to limit population growth by smearing new residents over the county’s 175,000 acres. History has demonstrated that the ol’ one-house-per-five-acres gambit doesn’t stop growth, but does ensure that the growth that occurs is incredibly inefficient. In recognition that some growth should be channeled into concentrations that could be served with roads, utilities and public services, the plan does calls for “village preservation areas” — but the “densities” allow only two dwellings per acre!
According to the county’s own planning documents, long stretches of its main roads will deteriorate to Level of Service D and E (extremely unstable) by 2020.
You’re on your own, I told the crowd. Don’t expect anyone else to bail you out of your poor decisions. The federal road highway trust fund is a shambles. The state road program is shrinking, and there’s nothing resembling a consensus on how to raise new money.
Powhatan doesn’t have many options. Borrowing millions of dollars like Prince William County doesn’t seem like a viable plan amidst global turmoil in financial markets and collapsing real estate revenues. Business As Usual will lead to entropy and congestion. The only solution, I proposed, was to concentrate growth: not in low-density agglomerations bearing no resemblance to villages, but in real villages.
I urged everyone in the audience to buy a copy of Claude Lewenz’ book, “How to Build a Village,” to get ideas of how a village might be built from scratch. Lewenz’ auto-free village sounds radical, even heretical, to Americans who have known nothing but an autocentric society. But two of the 5,000-person entities would accommodate the county’s growth for the next decade in very small, low-impact areas, preserving farmland, reducing car trips and constraining impact on county roads.
I wouldn’t propose that Powhatan actually zone for Lewenzian villages (unless a developer asked for it), but reading the book would stretch the minds of citizens to think more creatively about compact forms of village-scale development. Of all the people in the audience, the young people seemed most enthused by the idea; several came up to me after the panel discussion with astute questions and observations. Our youngesters haven’t yet absorbed the conventional wisdom of what’s possible and what’s not. If there is hope for the future, they are it.
