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Stop Sprawl
To the Editor:
The Battle of Gettysburg has long been recognized as the “high tide of the Confederacy.” The bloody rebuff of Pickett’s charge at the stone wall marked the point at which the South’s fortunes of war turned and began their long agonized decline down the road to Appomattox.
Similarly, future students of urban planning and growth management will recognize the Disney’s America debacle last year in Haymarket as the turning point in our nation’s war against sprawl. The Disney fight shocked Americans across the nation into a horrified and irreversible recognition of the costs of paving the countryside.
A few months later, in February of this year, another harbinger of change appeared with a report from the Bank of America entitled “Beyond Sprawl.” Although focusing on California, its general conclusions apply to Virginia as well. For example:
“In the decades after World War II, (Virginia) emerged as an economic and political powerhouse, providing jobs, housing, and prosperity for most of its rapidly growing population.
Underlying this success was a development pattern that emphasized expanding metropolitan areas, conversion of farmland and natural areas to residential use, and heavy use of the automobile. In the postwar era, this way of life worked for Virginia...Government agencies and private businesses were able to provide the infrastructure of growth — new homes, roads, schools, water system, sewage treatment facilities, and extensions of gas and electric distribution.
Within the last generation, however, this postwar formula for success has become overwhelmed by its own consequences. Since the 1970s, housing has become more expensive, roads have become more congested, the supply of developable land has
93.5%