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.
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