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More ‘alternatives’
LAST WEEK, the piece in this space touched on some of the contradictions that arise among friends when they get to talking about ways to improve the county and save the countryside. People don’t want highways but they say they like railways, which could be just as bad, as far as development goes; people say they want “orderly growth” instead of disorderly growth, but the end result of horizon-to-horizon paving might be so alike that no one could tell the difference; people will say they want sewage treatment plants to clean up the streams when financing of such plants could call for an influx of development that could cause more pollution than existed in the first place.
We wily touched on these few examples because we ran out of space. A week of brooding about it has brought to mind a few more: • Good, sound citizens with a demonstrated concern for the countryside will suddenly bestir themselves and proclaim that their lovely county can only be saved if it has a Master Plan. State and Federal regulations stipulating that rich, fat grants can only go to counties with such documents give added strength to their arguments. The only trouble with this, is that there are few Master Plans we’ve seen in the Northern Piedmont that do anything about preserving the countryside. Oh, they’ll protect a whole lot of “growth” and “progress,” and try to project it into certain places so it will be “orderly” (that word again), but more often than not Master Plans become road , maps for developers and speculators rather than tools for preserving a rural environment. • Get a plan here, a bureaucrat there, and a commission somewhere else, and sooner or later there’ll be talk of all the “services” that should be added to make the county a better place in which to live. Like parks. There may be acres and acres of open space for everyone to enjoy, but suddenly it isn’t right without parks. It’s always been our feeling that in a rural area, you don’t need all that many parks. A ballfield here and there is fine, but parks? • Still on the question of Master Plans, a favorite theme of such exercises in this part of Virginia is to call for concentrating development in existing towns and villages, so as to keep the countryside open. But that would mean higher densities of population—no more big shaded lawns, no more side lots for gardens or grass, no more generous setbacks from the street, and quiet back alleys. It would mean townhouses and maybe even apartments, and a great many Americans we’ve met don’t like things like that, not the ones who live in places like Rappahannock. • So what do you do to meet this objectionset up five or ten-acre, or larger, “conservation” or “agricultural” zones? That sure wouldn’t do much for preserving the countryside, and, besides, in both the higher density communities and the sprawling single-family lots you run again into sewer and septic tank objections.
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