Building Strategies To Map Out Growth
By Peter Whoriskey

reprinted from the Washington Post February 2, 2005

In 25 years, experts say, there will be 2 million more people, 833,000 more homes and 1.6 million more jobs in the region. Area leaders gathered for a planning exercise designed to help calculate their next moves.

The challenge of Washington's daunting population growth has been turned into a board game that might be called Everybody Squeeze!, and yesterday 300 government, business and civic leaders gathered to play.

With 2 million more residents anticipated in Washington and its suburbs over the next 25 years, the crowd of players -- which included Montgomery County Executive Douglas M. Duncan, Fairfax Board of Supervisors Chairman Gerald E. Connolly and District Mayor Anthony A. Williams -- gathered around table-size maps of the region and tried, using yellow Lego blocks to represent dwellings, to locate homes for the coming throngs.

All around the game room at the Ronald Reagan Building, there were signs of conflict and cajoling: Some environmentalists drew bold lines around lands they consider ecologically sacred. Politicians and county planners hemmed and hawed, trying to think regionally but keeping an eye on their own dominions. And some developers looked askance at proposals to build homes closer to or even on top of one another.

"Not all the 2 million people are going to want to live like they do in Manhattan -- we're not an urban community, we're a suburban community," one Charles County developer, Gary Kret, warned his neighbors.

Despite the diverse interests at the 30 map tables, the solutions reached by afternoon shared a remarkable number of themes.

Most of the map groups largely kept the Lego blocks -- yellow for homes and blue for workplaces -- out of the undeveloped areas at the region's fringe, rather than "sprawling" them outward.

Most of the groups stacked up blocks at Metro stations instead, arguing that denser populations are best served by trains. And most of the groups favored pushing new development into underused areas of the District of Columbia and Prince George's County.

The prescriptions, in many ways, reflected the "smart growth" principles that have become the new planning orthodoxy.

"It seems that today to say you're going to go build everything out in the green fields is as socially acceptable as lighting up in public," said John Bailey of the Urban Land Institute's Washington District Council, which organized the event.

Yet even among some of the most enthusiastic participants, there was ample skepticism about whether the growth visions espoused yesterday can ever come to fruition.

"This event is called 'Reality Check,' but I think we checked reality at the door," Connolly said.

For one thing, the high-density development prescribed by many tables is difficult to achieve over the opposition of neighborhood groups. And pushing development into underused areas of eastern Washington and Prince George's County will require drumming up more market demand for offices and homes than has existed there in recent decades.

"The market tells me the demand isn't there," said Gary Garczynski, a Prince William County developer and former president of the National Association of Home Builders. "Can it be created there? I don't know."

The estimates of growth, which were compiled from figures gathered by the local jurisdictions, predict there will be 2 million more people, 833,000 more homes and 1.6 million more jobs in the region by 2030. The region was defined as reaching west from Fauquier and Loudoun counties east to Anne Arundel County, and north from Frederick down to Spotsylvania and St. Mary's counties to the south.

"We're very confident in these numbers," said Paul DesJardin of the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments. "Since the 1960s, our projections have been almost spot-on for the number of new households."

Organizers agreed that the day of planning, if it stops there, will solve little. But yesterday's conclusions, analyzed by planners at the University of Maryland, will be encompassed in a report that eventually, organizers hope, will be used as the basis for regional agreements on growth.

They pointed to the example of "Envision Utah," which held a similar game simulation and has changed local growth trends for the better, its leaders say. Robert Grow, one of the leaders of that effort, addressed yesterday's crowd. He compared growing without a plan to driving into a fog.

"If there is no vision, the public slams on the brakes," he said.

If nothing else, yesterday's exercise represented a rare attempt at regional land planning in Washington, an area riven by rivalries among more than 20 local governments, each with its own views of how the area should grow.

The regional land planning map developed in 1996, largely used for informational purposes, is regarded as a breakthrough.

Given the scant history, the fact that the event brought together Connolly, Williams and Duncan as well as other elected officials and a who's who of planners from across the area was touted as a significant step forward.

"The Washington region is a stepchild that has 20 parents -- all the different jurisdictions," said Len Forkas, chairman of the Urban Land Institute's Washington group. "The idea here is to get all of the parents into one room to decide on the best way to raise the child."