Smarter Growth. John H. Spiers
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protection formed in the late 1960s, its reach and impact on metropolitan growth largely depended on local and regional constituencies. For example, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and the environmental review process it set up applied to only a small percentage of development projects involving federal lands or monies. Federal agencies also became less stringent over time as national policies, judicial decisions, and administrative practices eroded their regulatory power and devolved political authority to states, localities, and metropolitan planning authorities.14 In addition, command-and-control policies such as the Clean Water Act (CWA) became fewer as pollution from more diffuse sources, often tied to local development, increased.15 Last, long-term federal support for highway construction and the consolidation of farming on the urban edge made mass transit and rural land preservation critical for smarter growth.16
Compared to other studies of environmental protection, which focus on policy making or regional planning, Smarter Growth explores political change through the interests of elected and planning officials as well as grassroots activists.17 While the development boom of the 1990s fashioned the smart growth movement, the aftermath of postwar suburbanization and the environmental revolution of the late 1960s allowed the movement to take root. Residents of Fairfax County, Virginia, such as local environmentalist Marian Agnew, pushed elected officials to embrace slow growth and protect environmentally sensitive places. In Montgomery County, Maryland, planning board chair Royce Hanson built on a tradition of progressive land use policies to develop a nationally recognized master plan to protect an Agricultural Reserve. Across Greater Washington, environmentalists pressured local and state officials to comply with new federal standards to clean up water pollution by improving sewage treatment. Last but not least, the beginning of construction of the Metro brought Greater Washington a regional mass transit system that would help organize growth for decades to come.
Following this brief window of support for stricter growth management, local communities reembraced rapid development during the 1980s and 1990s. Waves of new residents seeking commodious accommodations in the suburbs and the rural periphery pushed growth outward. Although many benefited from the economics undergirding this expansion, it also created uneven competition for people, jobs, and investment. Poor and socially diverse inner-ring communities were far less insistent on strong environmental safeguards given their competitive disadvantage, lack of existing opportunities, and need to attract commercial revenue to finance an ever-widening array of social services. A good example was Prince George’s County, Maryland, where a broad coalition of liberal middle- and upper-class African American residents and elected officials endorsed the National Harbor commercial development and downplayed concerns about its impact on the Potomac waterfront.
Citizens across Greater Washington galvanized in favor of compact development beginning in the mid-1990s as rampant suburbanization eroded farmland acreage, worsened traffic congestion, increased runoff, and raised taxes to provide outlying areas with infrastructure. When a developer proposed a large religious school in Montgomery’s Agricultural Reserve, local environmentalists including Caroline Taylor mobilized in opposition and, in the process, began to offer a broader defense for preserving rural land and farms. Opponents of the Intercounty Connector (ICC) rejoiced when Maryland governor Parris Glendening rejected the highway as being at odds with the state’s smart growth policy—his signature legislative accomplishment—adopted in 1997. Voters to Stop Sprawl helped elect officials in Loudoun, led by moderate Republican Scott York, who created a Rural Policy Area to protect the county’s western third from large-scale development. Across the Potomac, the thirty-year campaign to assemble Montgomery’s Agricultural Reserve concluded in 2009 as officials closed development loopholes, a last group of conservation easements was secured, and civic organizations such as the Montgomery Countryside Alliance touted the values of the reserve. The health of the Potomac improved with new federal regulations, improved regional wastewater treatment, and civic initiatives by the Alice Ferguson Foundation, Potomac Riverkeeper, and the Potomac Watershed Partnership to confront polluters, educate the public, and forge public-private partnerships for cleanup.
While local environmentalists could take pride in many successes in the past two decades, their case-based activism ran up against a broader and more politically influential coalition supportive of large-scale growth. Despite its earlier rejection, the ICC moved forward in Maryland after three decades of intense debate as residents grew more frustrated with traffic congestion. National Harbor was built out adjacent to the Potomac in Prince George’s, delivering the upscale shopping, dining, and other leisure opportunities that many African American residents had sought. Rural land preservation suffered setbacks as the Virginia judiciary and a group of local activists known as the Citizens for Property Rights undercut more stringent environmental safeguards in Loudoun’s Rural Policy Area. These and other cases have affirmed a half century pattern in which community debates over growth, situated within regional patterns of inequality, yielded variable and incomplete commitments to environmental protection.
Figure 1. The Washington metropolitan area in the early twenty-first century. Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
In Smarter Growth, I discuss how grassroots activists applied principles of environmental stewardship to advocate for growth that was “smarter” than the models of suburbanization that prevailed after World War II. Their advocacy included a few tenets: promoting compact development that used existing resources rather than new infrastructure and services; preserving rural land and open space; and protecting the air, water, and soil from pollution. Over time, these activists and their allies in government and elsewhere expanded on their concerns about the environment and public health to argue that large-scale suburbanization was also more expensive than carefully planned compact growth. In the early 1970s and around the turn of the century, they were fairly successful at securing more rigorous pollution cleanup, stronger development regulations, and greater strides in rural land preservation as palliatives for the environmental and fiscal impact of growth. Their successes came mostly during high tides of sprawl, when the bucolic quality of life associated with bedroom suburbs was threatened.
Outside of some basic principles, what constituted smart growth was subject to political and public whims. Communities in Maryland had strong support from state officials for promoting compact development, market-based land preservation programs, and funding for land preservation. They were more inclined to organize higher-density growth around Metro stations, for example, than Fairfax or Loudoun Counties in Virginia, which developed largely outside of the Metro service area.18 Montgomery’s Agricultural Reserve was also a testament to local planners and elected leaders who used tools authorized by the state to regulate growth and preserve rural land. Many counties in Northern Virginia, however, favored strong property rights safeguards, permissive land use planning, and aggressive road building. While state support was important for local communities pursuing environmentally sensitive growth, it was not the only factor. Communities that struggled to attract upscale commercial development, like Prince George’s, were less willing to insist on robust growth control and environmental safeguards than wealthier peers in Northern Virginia.19
Although local environmentalism was full of promise, curbing the impact of development over the long term was a formidable challenge. The construction of homes, businesses, and institutions—key signals of general prosperity—forged enduring coalitions among officials, residents, business leaders, and interest groups.20 This, combined with the mobile capital of the servicebased economy of the late twentieth century, fostered an insatiable appetite for development.21 Over time, policies and public preferences transformed Greater Washington, like many regions, from a central city hub with dependent suburbs into a diffuse agglomeration of communities with an uneven distribution of people, jobs, and investment.22 These inequalities left central cities and lower-income suburbs at a disadvantage, pushing their officials and residents to further sacrifice environmental safeguards for marquee projects. The unceasing competition for growth also impaired cooperation on affordable housing, economic development, and regional mobility.23
The focus of grassroots activists on community-based struggles also limited the reach of their work. Contrary to the notion of being “laboratories of democracy,”