Before I Get Off My Soapbox About Urban Sprawl

I apologize for the rant, buttttttttttt

It’s always remarkable to me that, whenever I return home for the holidays, small forests continue to give way to new brutalistic looking data centers, how 4 lane highways continue to get wider and wider, and how homes continue to get uglier, cheaper, and less sustainable to build.  Last time I checked, people prefer to live in beautifully built communities that are walkable and safe.

So how is it that the nation’s richest county just miles outside of Washington, D.C can’t get its shit together?  Why is it that the area continues to funnel billions of dollars into the defense industry, when not even a fraction of that money is spent protecting the earth? Why is it that we still aren’t building mixed use properties despite how much of our population wants to live in them?

Spending much of my adult life in walkable communities namely Blacksburg, VA, San Diego, CA, Santa Barbara, and Porto, it’s always so jarring to come back to a place so dependent upon cars and gas.

Northern VA, as it relates to D.C., is growing, but not in the ways I’d hoped.  Instead of mixed use building plans and an attempt to save the few healthy green spaces that exist in this area, I see shopping centers cropping up with parking lots that take up triple the space.  Housing prices and cost of living in general continue to skyrocket, making it challenging for anyone my age to move out or lead a self fulfilling life.

So how did we get here? How is the nation’s wealthiest area still failing its citizens?  In other words, why can’t I get to the grocery store without having to get in my car?

Well in 1926, when the most detrimental nationwide zoning laws were approved, the landmark Supreme Court case, the Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co., passed a zoning law that delineated property construction into three respective categories: residential, industrial, and commercial.   It essentially created regulations as to where one sector could be built as it related to the others.

Now the biggest supporters and lobbyists of this law going into effect were— shocker— the gas and automobile companies that served to profit the most from increased distances between homes and anything else.  So American stores started being built a little bit further away from people’s places of residence, roads got bigger and longer, the distance people traveled to work increased, and with that suburbia and urban sprawl were born.  The U.S. really said welcome to cul-de-sac land, and here— now you have a commute to work that will take you an hour and a half each day.

I’m sorry to sound like that twenty-something year old, study abroad bitch, but it’s no surprise that European countries tend to be more sustainable than us.  The most sustainable cities are the ones built over 500 years ago.  Why?  Because they tend to be more walkable, the architecture is built to last and integrates itself into the environment, suburbs hardly penetrate their society except as an American cliche on TV, and central heating/ac is hardly a staple in most homes.

According to the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, American residential and commercial buildings account for around 29% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.  Our residential buildings account for 20% of these emissions.

Now I get it, the benefit of time is not on our side and our country is a mere baby in the eyes of our European counterparts, but it’s not too late.  We need to stop constructing buildings with non sustainable materials that need to be repaired every decade.  Say goodbye to composite siding!  Say goodbye to cookie cutter neighborhoods full of homes with the exact same layout.

It’s the American capitalist in all of us to expect constant growth, but what I’ve hoped for NoVA and still hope for is a change in the way we approach growth in the first place.  By incorporating citizens’ desires for walkable communities, mixed use buildings with shops underneath homes and apartments, and a preservation of green spaces, we can start to see growth in new facets of our lives.  Not only do walkable communities promote business development, but they also increase levels of happiness and contentment.

So while, yes, I might be an idealist without realistic solutions to a daunting problem, something has simply got to give.