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Introduction

American prosperity was at a historic high during the 1990s. Low unemployment rates and growing incomes gave rise to an explosion of homes, businesses, and new opportunities across the country. The most noticeable boom was in the Southwest, which was home to six of the nation’s fifteen fastest-growing metropolises.¹ Scottsdale, a sleepy town outside of Phoenix around 1950, was by the end of the century a sprawling suburb covering three times the land area of San Francisco with barely a quarter of the population. Southern cities featured even more uneven growth than their Southwestern counterparts. The city of Atlanta, for example, grew by an anemic twenty-two thousand residents during the 1990s compared to its suburbs, which ballooned by 2.1 million.

While the rapid expansion of the “Sunbelt”—the large region spanning the South and Southwest—captured national attention, stories of rapid sprawl into rural areas could be found throughout the United States. Loudoun County, Virginia, was the epicenter of this exurban growth in the Washington, D.C., area.² In the early 1990s, local voters unseated a preservationist-oriented Democratic majority on the county’s board of supervisors in favor of growth-hungry Republicans. For several years, the county rode the high tide of rampant development, even as community activists cautioned more careful planning to curb the environmental and fiscal impact of sprawl. By 2001, hasty suburbanization had doubled Loudoun’s population while opening a Pandora’s box of traffic congestion, rising taxes, and loss of rural land. The dramatic clashes between growth and the county’s rural character were chronicled in newspaper headlines and played out in tense public hearings. At the turn of the century, environmentalists routinely condemned developers as “landscape rapists” for wanting to build on pristine rural land, while advocates of suburban growth cast environmentalists as “frog-kissing Stalinists” who wanted to seize private property and turn it into useless open space for the masses.³ These struggles over the scale, timing, and type of growth played out in communities across metropolitan America, and the challenge of supporting public interests in the private use of land was made more complicated by the fractured political environment that prevailed in most regions. Dozens of local governments in Atlanta, for example, were inclined to pursue growth to suit their own parochial ends rather than support regional development through a coordinated transportation plan with robust environmental safeguards.⁴

Around the turn of the century, many metropolitan areas that had seemed to thrive on years of rampant development saw a groundswell of support for more careful growth. John Sibley, chair of the Georgia Conservancy, remarked at the time: “Everybody in Atlanta seems to be against sprawl now—developers, bankers, utility companies, all the interests that have profited from it for five decades…. You think back two years and the change in the mind-set is stunning.”⁵ In 1999, the Georgia state legislature gave the governor nearly singular authority, as head of a superagency, to shape land use decisions in Greater Atlanta to control suburban sprawl.⁶ In sum, community members, public officials, and even a significant part of the business and development communities, were calling for more gradual, better-planned, and environmentally sensitive—in a word, “smarter”—growth.

When people think of smart growth, Portland, Oregon, likely comes to mind. Public officials in the region used a state law during the late 1970s to draw an urban growth boundary around the metropolitan area in order to concentrate urban uses on the inside and maintain farms and open space on the outside. Since then, Portland’s residents, public officials, and organized groups have embraced its metropolitan orientation to a greater degree than most other regions in the United States through a coordinated planning framework, guided by the Metro Council, which promotes clear distinctions between urban, suburban, and rural.⁷ This has enabled Greater Portland to regulate growth more extensively than its peers in the West and positioned it as one of the most environmentally conscious metropolitan areas in the country.⁸

While the example of Portland is noteworthy, I would argue that another region—metropolitan Washington, D.C.—is the progenitor of a smart-growth movement that blossomed in the late twentieth century. It followed a familiar pattern of suburbanization as residents, commerce, and industry gravitated quickly to the periphery during the postwar era, producing massive depopulation and disinvestment in the core while generating explosive growth in the suburbs. This decentralization gave rise to more complex patterns of social segregation in the late twentieth century with the formation of mostly white, middle-class communities in Northern Virginia and outside of the Beltway in Maryland, along with poorer and more socially diverse communities inside the Beltway and in outlying areas, where housing was more affordable. By 2014, Greater Washington had over six million people and extended across six thousand square miles of land, both more than double those of 1970.⁹

Metropolitan Washington allows us to explore how a variety of local communities balanced suburban development and environmental protection. The region includes two states and nearly two dozen counties with different political cultures, legal traditions, and attitudes toward growth. This makes it instructive for evaluating different approaches and outcomes for environmental protection in the face of development pressures. Metropolitan Washington is also distinctive for the robust influence of the federal government in all aspects of the region’s history and politics.¹⁰ This includes not only the unique federal-local power-sharing arrangement in the nation’s capital but also the role of the federal government as a major employer and contract provider, landowner, and investor in the region’s development. As a result, federal agencies were often involved in local growth debates where they otherwise would not have been. Metropolitan Washington thus provides a window onto the fullest possible scope of federal government in local environmental affairs while also offering a more diverse mix of state and local policies and grassroots movements compared to more politically bounded regions like Portland or Atlanta.¹¹

With Metropolitan Washington as its focus, the broad goal of Smarter Growth is to reorient our understanding of the environmental revolution that began in the late 1960s from familiar stories of national politics and policy to grassroots activism and the impact of national policy making on local communities. Many existing narratives recognize how local concerns over industrial pollution and the impact of suburbanization after World War II inspired environmentalism and policy making at a national scale.¹² As a result of this advocacy, federal policies to clean up pollution, along with the aggressive lobbying and litigation of large environmental organizations, became potent forces for change in metropolitan America during the late twentieth century.¹³ However, the work of grassroots movements and the impact of federal policies on the ground have received far less scholarly attention. A closer look into metropolitan communities reveal that much of the work of environmental protection occurred at the local level, where public officials, community activists, and interest groups continually debated how to harness the benefits of growth while mitigating its impact—all while protecting private property rights.

As a new national paradigm of environmental 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,” local politics frequently did not ensure substantive representation of the public’s concerns about suburban development. Endless meetings, complex planning and environmental regulations, and the dominance of growth-oriented officials and business interests often buried civic concerns.²⁴ Finally, in the adversarial world of community politics, grassroots activists often spent so much time fighting fires that they were rarely able to form broad movements with those of different viewpoints.²⁵ Indeed, their insistence on the self-evident merits of smart growth at times downplayed the broad value of development, increased housing costs, and elevated their interests in land preservation over the economic concerns of farmers and other rural business operators.²⁶

Following a context-setting overview of Greater Washington, Smarter Growth includes spatially oriented case studies to explore how movements for smarter growth developed on the ground. The first examines how grassroots activists improved the water quality of the Potomac River. Aside from construction of the Metro, the river’s cleanup was one of the few issues that garnered attention across the region. It is a shining example of how even robust federal policy making established a foundation, rather than a guarantee, for environmental protection. Indeed, as sources of water pollution became more diffuse, civic activism proved more critical than national policy in cleanup efforts. Next, I examine two communities that adopted quite different approaches to waterfront development along the Potomac. The first, in Fairfax, featured a heady group of local environmentalists seeking to protect the ecological resources and natural amenities that they enjoyed from an upscale housing project. The second, in Prince George’s, saw an outpouring of political and public support for a landmark economic development project in a county that had been shut out from upscale commerce and whose residents were disinclined to worry about the environmental impact on the Potomac. The next case, a study of a cross-county highway in Maryland, explores how fervent local environmentalism may not be enough to override the widespread view of highways as panaceas for enhancing mobility.

The debate over suburban highways—and about the sprawl of growth more broadly—raised tough questions over how to alleviate the pressures to develop rural land. The final two chapters offer a case of contrasting local approaches to agricultural and rural land preservation. Montgomery County, the site of the cross-county highway, combined progressive land use planning with innovative market-based incentives to help rural landholders earn income by selling development rights in exchange for preserving their land in perpetuity. Meanwhile, rural land preservation in Loudoun County reveals far more political and public opposition, especially at the state level, to robust development regulations and land preservation incentives. The book ends with some general recommendations for promoting environmental stewardship in the fractured political landscape of metropolitan America in the twenty-first century.

An Overview of Greater Washington

Before World War II, the nation’s capital was the center of a small region that included the bedroom suburbs of Alexandria and Arlington County in Virginia and the southern third of Montgomery and Prince George’s Counties in Maryland. Residents in outlying areas may have had jobs or occasional business in Washington but otherwise lived in rural communities. As the region’s major urban center, Washington, D.C., had most of the area’s residents, the great majority of its jobs, and its best shopping, dining, and leisure options. During the war, migrants from across the country flooded into the city to work for the federal government. Temporary offices, housing, and a few major federal facilities like the Pentagon were hastily built near the district to accommodate workers and families, commencing the region’s suburbanization.²⁷

After the war, officials prepared to satisfy the pent-up demand for housing and the desire for a more commodious way of life. The National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC), a federal agency officially responsible for planning the District of Columbia and informally charged with shaping a common vision for the region, favored a compact model of a development-guided mass transit system and a handful of highways. Their desired “wedges and corridors” planning model for the region soon unraveled, however, as rapid and expansive suburbanization took hold and local officials struggled to keep up.²⁸

Between 1940 and 1970, the population around Washington quintupled to more than two million, while that of the nation’s capital declined from a historic high of 802,178 in 1950 to 756,510 by 1970.²⁹ There were three major factors that sparked this major demographic and spatial shift. The first was the proliferation of single-use residential zoning and the advent of mortgage incentives from the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) to build homes in outlying white communities rather than socially diverse urban neighborhoods. The second was the emergence of “community builders” that developed large tracts of inexpensive homes on the rural periphery. While the Levitt Corporation in the Northeast is the most remembered, each metropolitan area had some of its own—the Arlington-based Yeonas Corporation was an example in Greater Washington. A young Milton Peterson got his start with the company, becoming one of the most prodigious developers in the region during the late twentieth century.³⁰

Like housing, the demand for automobiles skyrocketed after the war. State highway departments rushed to build major highways to enhance mobility and open the countryside for the construction of new homes.³¹ In Greater Washington, the opening of Shirley Highway from the Pentagon to Fairfax during the late 1940s and early 1950s contributed to an eightfold population increase in the Northern Virginia county by 1960, while the construction of the Washington National Pike from Rockville to Frederick County, Maryland, in the early 1950s quadrupled the population of Montgomery.³²

Even after Virginia and Maryland spent the first decade of the postwar era engaged in an aggressive campaign of road building, political interest in a comprehensive national system of highways persisted. In response, Congress passed the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, which laid the groundwork for transportation and land use planning centered on the automobile for the next several decades. The act offered an unprecedented federal contribution of 90 percent toward building forty-one thousand miles of interstate highways that was paid for by a dedicated Highway Trust Fund that collected taxes on fuel, tires, and heavy vehicles.³³ These highways, along with thousands of miles of primary and secondary roads planned, funded, and built by the states, enabled a type of mobile, suburban lifestyle that many Americans desired. The Capital Beltway, which opened in 1964 to connect the suburbs radiating around Washington, punctuated an era of automobility.³⁴

As America’s postwar suburbs expanded, they became highly segregated. In Greater Washington, the white middle class moved rapidly out of the nation’s capital, settling in Fairfax and Montgomery Counties. This, in concert with an influx of black residents, led Washington, D.C., to become the nation’s first majority African American city by 1957. City officials, as in many regions, attempted to curb the exodus of the white middle class through residential urban renewal projects, most notably in the Southwest, but instead displaced thousands of working-class African Americans.³⁵ Prince George’s, on the other hand, became the leading suburb for the region’s African American population because of its proximity to eastern Washington and its affordable housing.³⁶ White middle-class suburbanites tended to overlook how their allegedly “colorblind” desire for socially homogeneous communities actually fostered racial discrimination in housing.³⁷ Although passage of the federal Fair Housing Act of 1968 broke down the most overt policies of racial discrimination in the real estate industry, housing affordability and public attitudes prevailed as barriers to more inclusive communities.

Employment and commerce decentralized like housing patterns, albeit a little later. Like housing developers, the federal government grew outside of Washington, where land was cheaper and easier to acquire. Cold War–era concerns about the potential impact of a nuclear attack bolstered the idea of dispersing federal installations. In Virginia, Rosslyn and Crystal City in Arlington and Tysons Corner in Fairfax became centers for defense agencies and contractors given their proximity to the Pentagon, while the Washington National Pike (later Interstate 270) corridor became a hub for the biomedical industry near the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. Conversely, Prince George’s was often bypassed by the region’s major white-collar employers and retailers because of the lack of major highways and the presence of a more socially diverse, working-class population. The result for the nation’s capital was that its share of employment and commerce declined despite efforts to revitalize its commercial core.³⁸

The postwar suburban boom dramatically increased costs for schools, utilities, and other services. Rather than provoke the ire of residents by continually raising their property taxes, many local officials sought out commercial development to generate tax revenue. Even as outlying areas looked to strengthen their land use planning tools to guide development, the growth imperative—the pressure to add new development to pay for existing and projected commitments of services—discouraged most officials from insisting on robust environmental safeguards. The net result of the growth imperative, based in conservative attitudes about regulating property, was the conversion of agricultural and rural land for suburban construction, rising costs to provision services in more remote locations, and worsening pollution.³⁹

Postwar growth especially threatened the Potomac River, which served as both the region’s major source of drinking water and the dumping ground of pollution. In 1940, Congress created the Interstate Commission on the Potomac River Basin (ICPRB) to organize the four states and numerous localities in the basin in support of protecting the river’s health. The ICPRB, however, lacked any regulatory authority. Instead, states and communities were left to address their individual pollution of the river, which the imperative of growth discouraged.⁴⁰ As a result, rapid development tapped the Potomac’s water without concerns about supply; produced waves of eroded sediment from site development; and overloaded the region’s main wastewater treatment facility at Blue Plains in Washington, which then dumped untreated sewage back in the river.⁴¹ Congress had little pressure to counteract these activities. Instead, it financed individual projects for drinking water, sewage treatment, and hydroelectric power to support postwar expansion.⁴²

The widespread material abundance of postwar America, which had given rise to suburbanization, also sowed the seeds of modern environmentalism to counteract its negative impact. It featured two main aims. The first involved a shift of environmental concerns from conservation, which emphasized economical use of the productive capacity of nature, to quality-of-life interests in protecting nature for its scenic, recreational, and open space amenities.⁴³ A good example of this in Greater Washington was a series of successful civic campaigns to block high-rise apartment construction along the Potomac waterfront during the 1960s.⁴⁴ These cases tended to invoke an aesthetic clash between high-rise apartments and the landscape of single-family homes and open space that prevailed in affluent waterfront communities. More critically, the privileging of aesthetic over affordable housing obscured a social bias among the white middle class that viewed the waterfront as an amenity only for those who could afford to live nearby in single-family homes. As local environmentalists continued to advocate for reducing the scale of suburban development and preserving open space, they invited charges of elitism that proved hard to shake during the late twentieth century.⁴⁵

The other major branch of modern environmentalism focused on the consequences of pollution for the environment and public health. Air pollution from industrial facilities and automobiles as well as the unsafe disposal of waste were issues across metropolitan America. Public environmental concern awakened through a combination of high-profile events such as the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962 and the conflagration of the Cuyahoga River in 1969, along with the everyday local concerns about sewage backups, air that was difficult to breathe, and the loss of rural and forested land to development.⁴⁶ Near the end of the 1960s, Congress passed several ambitious policies to conserve and protect natural resources.⁴⁷

The most pronounced commitment to environmental advocacy in American history was made during the early 1970s. On January 1, 1970, Richard Nixon signed the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) into law. Nixon was not an environmentalist, as his predecessor Lyndon Johnson perhaps was, but an opportunist who acquiesced to political pressure from Democrats and the public for strong environmental regulations. NEPA required federally funded projects or actions undertaken by a federal agency to undergo a comprehensive review process that involved the public. For large projects, an environmental impact statement (EIS) review process would identify the environmental impacts of the project, mitigation measures, and possible alternatives. These policies, an outgrowth of the “rights revolution” of the mid-twentieth century, insisted that ordinary people should have a meaningful voice in political decision-making.⁴⁸

NEPA offered an expansive vision of sustainability at a time before that term came into vogue. It also coincided with a decade of unparalleled national policy making that included passage of the Clean Air Act (1970) and Clean Water Act (1972), the Endangered Species Act (1973), the Occupational Health and Safety Act (1974), and Superfund legislation (1980) to clean up hazardous waste sites.⁴⁹ The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was created as part of the executive branch in 1970 to consolidate and coordinate enforcement of these policies. Its work soon became highly politicized given the strictness of these new policies and their punitive consequences.

While Congress and the EPA were major policy actors, their work would have been far less impactful without large groups of environmentalists working at all levels of government and society.⁵⁰ Ten organizations, ranging from newer and more aggressive groups like the Environmental Defense Fund and Natural Resources Defense Council to older conservation organizations with new agendas such as the Sierra Club and National Wildlife Federation, built an influential lobbing and litigation presence around their expertise.⁵¹ Their members, along with many local civic activists, built grassroots environmental movements across the United States, the coming-out party for which was the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970.⁵²

Although this national attention to the environment was quite significant, environmental protection in metropolitan America over time depended less on national policy decrees and more on the results of citizens and officials working on the ground at the state and local levels. This political devolution had its roots in the social reform programs of the Great Society that championed community empowerment during the late 1960s. Under the Nixon administration, devolution continued under the aegis of making federal agencies more responsive to citizens, but it also gave states and localities more flexibility in compliance.⁵³

The issue of water pollution is a good example of this shift from policy to advocacy. Passage of the federal Clean Water Act created a permitting system with strict standards governing the discharge of pollutants into rivers and other navigable waterways. It also offered several billion dollars to help states and localities pay for wastewater treatment infrastructure to clean up pollution from sewers, industrial facilities, and other discrete sources. Yet these groups still had to stage the cleanup and determine who would pay the high costs not covered by federal funding. As a result, grassroots activists and national lobbies were critical for creating the political and legal pressure needed to advance environmental progress.⁵⁴

Federal policies played less of a role in curbing suburban sprawl during the late twentieth century. NEPA and the environmental impact statement process, for example, applied to only a subset of development projects involving federal interests and focused more on mitigating impacts based on community concerns rather than ensuring a minimum standard of environmental protection. Federal policies also did little to protect rural land from suburban conversion; indeed, they promoted the consolidation of farming. Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz highlighted the acceleration of this trend in the 1970s when he famously advised farmers to “get bigger or get out.”⁵⁵

As part of the high tide of modern environmentalism, grassroots activities joined with supportive public officials in several Washington-area communities to curb pollution, the loss of open space, and the financial costs of sprawl during the early 1970s.⁵⁶ After supporting rapid suburbanization for a quarter century, voters in Fairfax elected local leaders who enhanced land preservation and passed a 1973 ordinance that tied development to the capacity of existing infrastructure. A conservative state judiciary, however, overturned the ordinance as an undue infringement of private property rights. In 1976, voters elected leaders who returned the county to a dogged pursuit of commercial development to offset rising property taxes.⁵⁷

Montgomery County benefited from having a more environmentally conscious population and officials committed to a model of compact planning. Montgomery embraced the wedges and corridors model of planning after World War II.⁵⁸ Under planning board chair Royce Hanson, the county took two major steps to bolster growth management during the 1970s. First, officials adopted an adequate public facilities ordinance that was never struck down, unlike in Northern Virginia. Second, they created a master plan to preserve agriculture and rural land by curbing suburban housing and implementing a program that allowed landowners to sell the right to develop parcels of land in exchange for agreeing to permanent conservation easements.⁵⁹ Purchasers in this transfer of development rights program could then use their rights to build extra housing in certain areas. Montgomery’s planning measures were quite successful in curbing population growth: while Fairfax’s population increased 31 percent during the 1970s, Montgomery’s rose less than 11 percent.⁶⁰

The contrast between Fairfax and Montgomery Counties highlighted the importance of state support of local growth regulations for achieving environmental goals.⁶¹ In addition, Maryland’s land preservation programs offered funding to local communities for permanent conservation, while Virginia’s employed temporary protections and did not offer funding for conservation easements until 1997.⁶² State support for growth management, however, still required local commitments for environmental protection to be successful. The influx of working-class African Americans into Prince George’s County during the 1970s spiked property taxes to pay for infrastructure and services. Rather than seeking to slow growth to rein in the cost of supporting it, residents instead voted to cap their property taxes, joining a tax revolt movement that swept across suburban America.⁶³ In the short term, this vote accomplished its fiscal objective. Over the longer term, the tax cap intensified the need to attract commercial development, with two results. First, public officials and residents were more likely to discount the environmental impact of development in order to attract the revenue it offered. Second, local officials undermined the value proposition of growth by offering financial subsidies to try and lure businesses to locate.

As its suburbs struggled to manage growth, Washington, D.C., attempted to redefine its image in the face of population loss, commercial disinvestment, poverty, and crime. With passage of the Home Rule Act of 1973, the nation’s capital acquired new rights to govern itself. Under Mayor Walter Washington, the city redeveloped commercial areas along Pennsylvania Avenue and the Georgetown waterfront, built a new convention center downtown, and created more public spaces.⁶⁴ The city, and its suburbs, also began construction of the Metro mass transit system after overcoming fifteen years of congressional struggles that had delayed financing.⁶⁵ Washington was one of the few places where a public transportation system was built in the second half of the twentieth century. It took twenty years to complete, however, leaving the District and inner suburbs hard-pressed to stem the tide of expansion into the outlying counties of Prince William and Loudoun in Virginia and Charles County in Maryland.

Rapid growth returned to Washington in the 1980s and 1990s in step with the rise of political and cultural conservatism. At the national level, the Reagan administration undermined the enforcement authority of the EPA, blocked passage of new regulations, and curbed citizens’ use of environmental lawsuits. Although these efforts slowed after 1983, they marked a new legacy in the devolution of American politics inaugurated by the Nixon era. As a result, coalitions of growth supporters regained control in many communities.⁶⁶ By 2000, the population of Greater Washington had increased to 4.8 million as the region’s boundaries doubled to include nearly a dozen new counties in Virginia, Maryland, and even West Virginia.⁶⁷ Virginia localities experienced larger population increases and more extensive growth than their Maryland peers due to lower taxes, more permissive land use policies, and vigorous road building campaigns that opened land to development.⁶⁸

Figure 2. Aerial view of Northern Virginia looking northeast toward Washington, D.C. Source: Carol M. Highsmith Archive.

The rapid suburbanization of Greater Washington intensified residential segregation as much of the white middle class moved into outlying areas while people of color, immigrants, and the working class settled in the older, close-in suburbs. Four decades after Washington, D.C., became the nation’s first major black-majority city, Prince George’s became the nation’s first black-majority suburban county. Meanwhile, a handful of older suburbs, such as Springfield, Virginia, displaced the traditional role of central cities as gateways for immigrants thanks to their proximity to major highways and recently completed Metro stations. Incomes in the region remained higher than the national average, but this affluence was not shared equitably. High housing prices pushed lower-income workers into communities inside the Beltway or pulled them out to the urban fringe.⁶⁹

Employment and commerce closely followed residential suburbanization. Greater Washington added fifty-five thousand jobs per year between 1980 and 2002 and had lower unemployment rates than the national average. While the region maintained a large federal workforce, there was considerable growth in the technology, business services, education, health care, and leisure sectors. The competition for the highly mobile capital in these industries transformed the business core into a more complex, uneven network of jobs and commerce that tended to favor Northern Virginia because of its strong bias toward unencumbered growth.⁷⁰ At the same time, inner-core communities struggled to attract investment, even when they used major financial incentives to lure upscale commercial projects.⁷¹

The construction of the Metro offered a major opportunity to reorient Greater Washington around a wedges and corridors model of regional development, but the results varied by community. In places where planners and officials had promoted compact development, like Montgomery and Arlington, Metro stations fitted nicely in and helped organize growth. In places where they had not, like Fairfax, much development lay outside of the Metro service area.⁷² Just as the last set of original Metro stations opened in the early 1990s, chronic congestion on the Capital Beltway and many of the region’s other major highways pulled political attention to the periphery.⁷³ In Northern Virginia, two toll roads were built in Loudoun to accommodate exurban growth; however, the state of Maryland and its localities focused their planning efforts on improving existing roads and increasing use of Metro.⁷⁴

Compared with the postwar era, the end of the century was a far more cautious time regarding highway building in light of the troubling social legacies of urban freeways and environmental concerns about air pollution. As construction of the interstate system came to a close, Congress passed the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991 (ISTEA). Although ISTEA continued the long-standing tradition of prioritizing highways over transit, it had several features that were helpful for developing highways that were sensitive to the environmental and social context of their surroundings. These included mandating public participation in assessing regional projects, shifting more authority in the decision-making process to states and localities, and requiring regional planning organizations to approve major projects.⁷⁵ While environmentalists used ISTEA and related policies to curb regional growth, many citizens and public officials continued to see highways as the only way to enhance mobility, even though these roads would likely perpetuate the congestion that was a by-product of sprawl.

Rampant development between 1980 and 2000 made farming on the urban edge more challenging in Greater Washington. Suburban encroachment, for example, raised land values and therefore property taxes for rural property owners. The agriculture industry also changed as high land costs, nuisance complaints from suburbanites, and low prices reduced the number of animal-based and commodity farming (e.g., wheat) operations. Federal price supports under the Farm Bill as well as the Conservation Reserve Program, created in 1985 to encourage farmers to take environmentally sensitive land out of production, were insufficient to sustain highly capitalized farms on the urban edge. The results of this were not favorable to the region’s farmers. The percentage of land in farms in Prince William County dropped from 27 percent in 1978 to 15 percent by 1992, and in Prince George’s from 25 percent to 17 percent.⁷⁶ As farming costs continued to rise, a growing number of part-time and hobby farmers found success in operating small, specialized farms for produce and boutique items that allowed them to clear higher profit margins and depend on other work for their primary income.⁷⁷

For most of the late twentieth century, public officials and environmentalists on the urban edge had been more concerned with losing the natural amenities of rural land than with farming operations per se.⁷⁸ This fostered support for policies that restricted the development potential of land and offered incentives to discourage farmers from selling their land because it was too expensive to work. The tendency to see farms as land to preserve rather than businesses to support frustrated farmers because it was often associated with limiting the infrastructure they needed to support their operations and reducing the developable potential—and thereby the value—of their land as collateral to borrow funds to reinvest in their highly capitalized businesses.⁷⁹

Gradually, environmentalists realized it took more than land preservation to protect farms from suburban encroachment; it also required support for farms as businesses. Montgomery established an Agricultural Services Division in 1996 (renamed the Office of Agriculture in 2016) to help them navigate local planning issues, manage local preservation programs, and provide technical assistance, Loudoun took similar measures.⁸⁰ Getting the public to visit farms and buy locally also became more popular. By 2000, there were thirty farmers markets in the Washington area and several farm tours. Some localities, especially in Virginia, had success with marketing local farms as part of a rural tourism strategy including historic sites and outdoor scenic and recreational opportunities.⁸¹

The feverish growth of Greater Washington during the 1990s sowed seeds of discord for slowing it down. As metropolitan development became more diffuse, sprawl consumed rural land, degraded resources such as water and open space, drove up taxes to pay for public services further out, and failed to resolve mounting traffic congestion. These consequences forged a broad but loose coalition of civic, environmental, antitax, and broader-based groups committed to compact, transit-oriented development—the basis for the smart growth movement.⁸²