Category Archives: Regionalism

Whither Virginia Beach?

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FOR PORT FOLIO MAGAZINE
THURSDAY, JULY 1, 1999
BY ALEX MARSHALL

Virginia Beach. The promised land.

It glistens in the sun, a shimmering mecca of backyards, beaches, prosperity and space. A wide open terrain where schools are good and crime is low, a destination, a place to start a life or fulfill one.

It still has that reputation to many, even as the city enters its 37th year and faces trend lines that dispute much of what I just said.

But looking out over the city’s many square miles, that easy optimistic view still has the ring of truth. You see the old grid of streets and homes on the North End, basking in the ocean air and sun, with their gentle, Nantucket-like charm. You see the prosperous resort, hauling in the bucks even while it nicely segregates its often tacky guests and attractions. You see Bob Dylan boogieing at the amphitheater, and kids bowling and swimming at recreation centers that resemble public country clubs. You see Kempsville, a land easy to make fun of as epitomizing suburban vapidity, but fundamentally a place where Filipinos, African-Americans, whites, Jews and Gentiles can all make a life.

But focus the telescope on different places, and you see a different city and future. In this view, you see simple suburban ranch houses around Green Run, Lynnhaven, Hilltop, Bayside and Princess Anne Plaza, their paint fading, the vinyl siding getting moldy, the homeowners converting to renters, and the property values flat or in decline. You see more people leaving the city then moving into it. You see neighborhoods resembling those of Los Angeles, in that they are purely suburban, yet problem ridden and dangerous. You see places where the mother will not walk half-block to the 7-Eleven by herself after dark for fear of being robbed. You see areas where kids with little adult supervision roam across yards, parking lots and roads like marauding tribes. You see a city that is very much part of a region where incomes lag well behind the national average.

Where is Virginia Beach going? The city is on the cusp, at the point of either heading down hill or working out some new trajectory that will keep it, and perhaps the region, a nice place to live.

For most of its life, the city’s biggest appeal has been what it is not: It was not Norfolk, with its declining schools, racial problems, high crime and sagging tax base. Not Portsmouth or Newport News.

The era of Virginia Beach exceptionalism is ending. It has roughly 440,000 people — roughly equal to Norfolk and Chesapeake put together. About 40 percent of the population of the Southside. There is no way something that big can be vastly different than the average.

Virginia Beach used to be richer and whiter than the rest of the region. It is much less so now.

“It used to be different, from demographic to social to economic,” said one planner. “But because it has matured, it has become more like the regional whole.”

It is still the same old Virginia Beach in one respect: It is a gigantic bedroom community, something city leaders loathe to admit. Of the 213,000 Virginia Beach residents who work, almost 100,000 do so outside city borders, according to stats from the Hampton Roads Planning District Commission.

This is a huge number. It’s even bigger in significance when you realize that these people are mostly traveling to the Naval Base, to downtown, to the shipyards in Portsmouth — jobs that drive the rest of economy. These jobs bring in money from outside that can be then spent on lawyers, doctors, newspapers, department stores, homes and all the other commercial and business activity. Without them, the rest of us are out of luck.

What this means is that Virginia Beach is still largely dependent on events outside its own borders. It’s only independent tax base is the resort, which is a good one, but not enough to support 400,000 people.

Virginia Beach’s future is deeply linked with the rest of the region. Even if the city attempts to “go it alone,” it will have deep implications for its neighbors.

As we approach 2000, I see Virginia Beach juggling a collection of political factions, any of which might manage to grab the wheel of the city and steer for awhile: Anti-tax folks. Pro-sprawlers. Light rail advocates. Regionalists. Go-it-aloners.

Here are a few possible futures for Virginia Beach, my hometown.

“REZONINGS FOR YOUR FRIENDS.”

Dean Block, the resident sage of city hall as well as the director of the city’s office of management and budget, once wrote a history of Virginia Beach that packaged its trajectory into four distinct epochs.

1968 to 1985 was probably the most interesting. This was the era where Virginia Beach grew by several hundred thousand people, often without rhyme or reason. The city’s leadership in that era, Block said, made a deal with voters. “The politicians promised to keep taxes artificially low, if in exchange they would be allowed rezone property for their friends,” Block said.

During this era, the city leaped across Rudee Inlet Bridge, across Holland Road and down to the edge of the municipal center. It left the city with a huge hangover — which voters sought to correct when they elected several anti-growth council members in 1986 that shifted the balance on council.

Starting with that council, the city started playing catch-up — and largely succeeded. Voters approved bond referendums to widen roads, build schools, libraries and recreation centers. The council tastefully renovated the resort strip. The council held the Green Line, and passed the agricultural reserve program, which helps preserve land for farming.

That era, Block said, ended about a few years ago. Now, the city is working out a new trajectory, a path to the future, a path of maturity. Several options exist for this future.

Although Block didn’t say it, one that looms is a return to “rezonings for your friends.” In the past few months, the city staff and council have backed a series of actions that signal the city, armed with Lake Gaston water, may resume fierce outward growth. The council approved the extension of Ferrell Parkway down to Sandbridge, despite environmental objections. City staff considered, and then backed off, from recommending removing the agricultural reserve program from “the transition era,” the land north of Indian River road that many developers are eyeing.

The city has recently elected two council members that are much more friendly to outward residential development, Margaret Eure and Don Weeks. Both recently attended a meeting of rural land owners and developers seeking to develop more property and depose Councilwoman Barbara Henley, whose priority has been protecting farmland.

This could be bad news for the city. More outward growth would eat up farm land, incur more infrastructure costs, make traffic worse by extending sprawl, and push housing values down within the rest of the city. Of course, it would also make a few developers and property owners a lot of money, so we know the vote will be close.

INWARD, NOT OUTWARD.

Contrasting to a return to outward growth is a coalition of sorts, an interesting combination of environmentalists and business leaders, that advocate growing inward. They are also generally the same ones talking about greater regionalism.

Under this path, the city commits money to the light rail system. It not only holds the Green Line, but works for regional growth control. It starts spending its infrastructure dollars where most of the people live, on new sidewalks, parks and other amenities, rather than on new roads and sewers out in Sandbridge and around the courthouse. It starts filling in some of the blank spaces that sit beside perfectly good highways already built. At last estimate, almost 10,000 acres of developed land sat above the city’s Green Line.

Michael Barrett, a city and regional business leader, said growing inward is why the light rail line is such a key question.

“Light rail makes the city look at itself and figure out who it wants to become,” Barrett said. In Barrett’s view, not much opportunity is left for development outward.

“Future development may mean redevelopment,” Barrett said. Light rail would help develop Pembroke, Lynnhaven and the resort into much richer, denser and higher tax-paying areas. He sees “nodes of development” that would pay more taxes and allow for different life styles at the beach.

Such a community, said Jan Eliassen, who recently stepped down from the Planning Commission, would fit with the city’s vision of a place where everyone could live.

“We don’t have as many different communities as the different communities need, from college graduates to empty nesters,” Eliassen said. “The kind of community we ought to design is a place where some of people can walk to work, some can walk to school, some can walk to shopping, and all of them can walk to reliable public transportation.”

The different communities plan would help balance the city’s largely monochromatic lifestyle choice. Some people love Virginia Beach but others hate it.

Andres Duany, the sharp-tongued New Urbanist architect, shocked Virginia Beach leaders a few years back when he called the city “a laboratory of failure for the East Coast.” When people told friends they were moving to Virginia Beach, the immediate response was “Oh, that’s too bad,” Duany said.

The city has never liked admitting this. But for many people, Virginia Beach is the last place on earth they would live. Developing some different types of communities would help change this.

LEAN AND MEAN

The most effective political force in the last half decade in Virginia Beach has been the anti-tax, anti-establishment folk that have pushed for less government, less services and of course, less taxes. This somewhat well organized group, led by former City Councilman Robert Dean and his Citizens Action Coalition, helped kill a bond initiative that would have supported better schools and libraries. They got the council to reverse themselves and kill a tiny new phone tax for a similar purpose.

They are a force to be reckoned with. Although the city’s taxes are some of the lowest in the region, and its services some of the best, they have evidently hit a nerve with their argument to the contrary.

Under their vision, Virginia Beach would become a bare bones, self-service city, where you check your own bags and bus your own tables. No more soccer stadiums, amphitheaters, recreation centers and the like. No more “entertainment.” In their view, Virginia Beach has been buying luxuries before it spent on the basics like schools. The city needs to get its priorities straight.

While there is some truth in this perspective, in my view they would cut flesh as well as fat. They also do not understand that economic success is based on government investment. Things like roads, schools, rail lines and maybe even things like recreation centers and amphitheaters. Dean, for example, voted against the agricultural reserve program, despite his credentials as a long-time environmentalist, because it involved a sales-tax increase.

When I asked Dean whether economic prosperity depended on government investment, he didn’t seem to understand the question.

“Under that scenario, we are breading a whole new type of society that expects government to take care of them from womb to tomb,” Dean said. “You have removed self reliance.”

How is building a road or a train line removing self-reliance?

If he were running the city, Dean said, his priority would be better schools. But he wouldn’t allow for new taxes to fund them. It’s true that more money won’t necessarily improve schools. But at some point, you have to grapple with the fact that public investment in a range of things is necessary to create a prosperous and balanced society.

Dean, for example, excoriated suburbanites who neglected their children in order to be able to afford two nice cars. People should consider living with just one car, he said, like they did back in the 1950s.

Well, would you support the type of public transportation that made living like that possible, I asked him, such as better bus service or the light rail line?

No.

“There is no reason that my gas tax should subsidize people to ride light rail,” Dean said, even though he freely acknowledged that car driving itself was massively subsidized already.

Dean also criticized the new companies the city had brought in, like Geico and Avis, as essentially being low-paying call centers. True enough. But beyond improving education — without new taxes — he had no plan for bringing in better companies. He did advocate eliminating the Economic Development department.

If Dean and his brethren get a majority, I see a not very pleasant future. I see a city that would become a place of haves and haves not, where the wealthy hole up in Bay Colony and Great Neck, send their kids to Norfolk Academy, and leave the increasing chaotic Baysides, Kempsvilles and Lynnhavens to fend for themselves.

EMBRACING THE WHOLE

Virginia Beach’s official vision is its “Community for a Lifetime” statement. It’s a bland, PR-ish statement, full of assertions no one could disagree with. Still, as these things go, it has its merits.

Everyone should be able to live in Virginia Beach, it basically says, for all their lives. It should be a place where one children’s can stick around and get good jobs, and where one’s parents can retire.

“That vision is one of an incredible place — a community where you would want to spend the rest of your life,” said Mayor Meyera Oberndorf in a recent speech. The vision, the mayor said, means making the city safe, prosperous and healthy.

Well, hard to disagree with that.

And “Visionary.” Which means thinking strategically about city growth and priorities, she said. Right on. It means accepting that quality of life costs money in taxes. Double Right on. It means acknowledging you can’t do everything at once.

Right on again.

The problem is, few city leaders, including Oberndorf, acknowledge the steps necessary to complete their vision.

If you want to be a Community for a Lifetime, you need to provide a way for a 70-year-old woman with declining eyesight to get around without a car. Or for a young family to live without two cars. But city leaders have been hostile to light rail, which might do this.

There’s another problem with the city’s vision, as told by the mayor. Oberndorf never mentions the word “Norfolk.”

Why should she, you might ask? Well, perhaps because Virginia Beach’s prosperity depends on it.

What is located in Norfolk? A huge port, with both commercial and military activities. Without it, this whole region would evaporate.

If you depend on something for your life’s blood, shouldn’t you mention it when you are figuring out a vision for your city? Shouldn’t you figure out how to keep it healthy? If you can’t stand to say the word “Norfolk,” at least say the word “port.”

No dice. Virginia Beach is basically embarrassed that it still largely dependent on economic activity outside the city, and doesn’t want to admit it.

Not a good policy.

The mayor’s speech, and the official policy it represents, shows the tension between the city’s desire to be its own master, and the realities of its interconnectedness with everyone else. A coalition has emerged that argue the city should embrace regionalism, but they run up against the city’s long history of seeing little gain from working with anyone else.

If this changed, Virginia Beach might actually to work not only for the health of the port, but to improve the fortunes of Norfolk’s downtown. With a great downtown, a company would be more likely to move to a corporate office park in Virginia Beach.

Look at Portland. All the great new high-tech companies are not moving to the center city. They are moving to the suburban communities out on the fringes, like Beaverton and Hillsboro. But these places have a symbiotic relationship with the Portland downtown.

The great Portland center city makes the area very attractive to workers, which attracts great companies. The companies might locate ON THE LIGHT RAIL LINE in the suburbs, where they can build a low-rise campus-style office park, but their employees enjoy traveling downtown and might even live there.

But here, no dice. Both sides see the other a threat. If we were really smart, we would start rewriting tax laws so taxes from companies would be spread more equitably.

What would the future look like if Virginia Beach realized it had more to gain from regionalism than to fear from it?

Virginia Beach might take the lead in regional growth management because it recognizes that as a mature city, it has an interest in restraining outward sprawl, and pushing development inward. Virginia Beach would help establish a regional vision, where the various regional parts play clear roles. Downtown with its role as regional center, with sports stadium and urban living and cultural resources; the outer suburbs with opportunities for green-lawn living and amenities like soccer stadiums and amphitheaters; the resort, which with light rail would have a symbiotic relationship with downtown; the rural areas, that can provide good vegetables and open vistas to the suburban and urban dwellers.

With almost half the population of the Southside, it’s clear that if Virginia Beach has a lot of weight to throw around.

“I’ve never understood why Virginia Beach wasn’t the leading proponent for regionalism,” said Eliassen. “They would be in the driver’s seat, because they got the votes. I don’t understand what they are afraid of. They are the political gorilla of the region, but they act like the cowardly lion.”

Eliassen is willing to think about what most people won’t even mention: merging the three cities on one side of the water — Chesapeake, Virginia Beach and Norfolk — into one city.

“They are one city in reality, and they ought to be one city politically,” Eliassen said.

GOING IT ALONE

Since its birth, Virginia Beach has insisted that it is a “real city,” not just a bedroom community thank you. It has resented the lack of respect it has gotten from both the region and the rest of the world. When big-name New York Times writer R.W. “Johnny” Apple visited the area recently, he respectfully used the “Hampton Roads” moniker but, in describing the region’s charms, said scarcely a word about Virginia Beach other than a brief mention of its Contemporary Arts Center.

Virginia Beach does not like this. In this scenario, the regionalists fail and Virginia Beach strives to be an independent, self-sufficient city. It drops out of the light rail system. It goes its own way on recycling, jails, schools, social services, housing. At each of these intersections, it goes it alone. It only cooperates on the one thing it needs to keep life going as usual in Virginia Beach: more roads.

This is not such a great vision, either for Virginia Beach or the region. The city of VB will do okay at first, but gradually, the structural inadequacies will start to mount up. Deprived of Virginia Beach’s resources, the region will start to do more poorly, which will eventually pull down Virginia Beach as well. The region will not have a united front on economic development, or a coherent regional strategy on growth, the environment or transportation. Virginia Beach may get its share of the wealthy, but will not get the higher income jobs that lead to a more prosperous city.

The anti-tax folks are big go-it-aloners. Dean talked of cooperating with neighboring cities to get bulk discounts on “computers or textbooks,” but not much cooperation in larger ways.

WHICH WAY?

Some of these paths are mutually exclusive. Some are not.

The present City Council is steering a course between the shoals of the pro-growth councils of the early 1980s, and the no-tax constituents of the present. All this could change. The anti-tax folk, sometimes allied with the powerful Republican party, are banging at the door. Developers and home-builders are pushing to return to rural-area growth.

The future depends on who makes it to the ballot box.

We will see.


Greater Norfolk: Why Not?

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By Alex Marshall
For Port Folio Magazine

Now I’ve just cut my own throat, Mayor Paul Fraim said sheepishly.

The Norfolk leader’s fearful verdict was a good example of the dangers and contradictions associated with endorsing what might be the biggest bugaboo of local political thought: regional government.

Whatever you choose to call it, Hampton Roads, Greater Norfolk, Norfolk-Virginia Beach, what would happen if we actually had an elected regional government? Is that something we could work toward, and if so how?

When I first raised the idea with Fraim, he was firm. Nothing doing, he said. The people weren’t behind it, and “the surest way to kill an idea was to wrap it into a plan for regional government.” No way.

Having said this, he then proceeded to talk about how how the very structure of government in Tidewater hurt us, how if the area was going to compete effectively and operate efficiently, it had to act as one city, deciding where it was going in a coherent fashion.

“We have a truly regional economy, a regional work force, but inside of that region, we have real winners and losers depending on where certain tax producers are located, and where the lines are drawn,” Fraim said.

History has rendered an unfavorable verdict on the state’s policies that keep cities small, divided and humble.

“You have to ask yourself, where are the great cities in Virginia? What public policy has combined to keep cities small and regions fractured? Why wasn’t Norfolk a Baltimore? It should have been. Why wasn’t Richmond one of the great cites of the South?”

If we don’t manage to act as a region to shape important policies, we inevitably are less able to grow coherently, both physically and economically, Fraim said.

“How do you form a strategic agenda for a region that is broken down into 16 different localities? Where are we going, and who is going to take us there. You not only have a number of local governments, but they are completely independent.”

Having thus argued himself into a corner, Fraim found himself saying, “As unpleasant as it seems, consolidation might be the easiest route.” Having just heard himself endorse the very idea he said he could not 15 minutes previously, Fraim then muttered despairingly about “cutting my own throat” and pleaded that his picture not be put on the cover.

Regional government is both the Promised Land and the Vietnam of local politics. Lots and lots of people say the idea make sense. But they also agree it will never happen and avoid the subject like a land-war in Asia.

But if the idea makes sense, why not consider it? The Berlin Wall was toppled. We put a man on the moon. Ended welfare as we know it. Why not start talking about some of elected regional government.

This could take several forms. We could keep the old governments but create a new regional one that took care of some duties, like land-use and transportation. Or we could merge the existing ones, or some of them. The point is to end up a mayor and council that run the region and whom the people elect.

With this in mind, we went around and asked a variety of leaders, mostly elected, to touch this third rail of local politics. Would they support regional government in theory? If so why, and if not, why not?

BIGGER IS BETTER The strongest argument for an elected regional government was that the region needed to act more as one in investment decisions and making strategic choices: where to build roads or rail lines; how to build good universities; setting coherent regional growth policies and economic game plans.

A lot of the region’s leaders supported working toward a kind of government where these decisions could be made and the leaders held accountable.

“That’s why we don’t have a major league franchise, that’s why we don’t have the road connections to the outside world, that’s why we don’t have consensus on light rail,” Norfolk Councilman Randy Wright said. “Until we resolve our minor differerencs, we can’t see the big picture. In theory, I would support” some sort of elected regional government.

Big companies like Ford or IBM have a board of directors that sets overall policy, even as different divisions of the company work on separate projects, noted Chesapeake Councilman Gene Waters. What Hampton Roads might need is an elected board of directors that can set policy on things like road networks, or regional growth policy, Waters said.

“There is no one governing body that makes those decisions,” Waters said. “We have like 102 city councilmen in Hampton Roads, and it’s very difficult to get those to come up with a decision.”

But if it makes sense, it also was a steep slope to climb, even supporters agreed.

“I think it’s the only way, but before that happens, we’ll have to have a lot of funerals,” Norfolk councilman Herbert Collins said. “Everyone likes their own fiefdoms. We would have more clout, more to offer, we could combine some things, and cut down the duplication. But I can’t see a way to get there from here.”

“Personally, I think it’s got to come,” Portsmouth Mayor James Holley said. “It may not be in my time. But we will never experience the growth and development until we are all in lock step and acting in concert.”

SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL The argument that opponents of regional government grabbed most quickly was that, no matter how it we structured, any regional governance would put government another step away from the people, and make it both bigger and more remote.

“If I’m invited to speak at a Kiwanis club now, I can do that,” said Newport News Mayor Joe Frank. “If I were mayor of Hampton Roads, I couldn’t, because there are too many Kiwanis clubs. Most people don’t think that bigger government is better government.”

Mayor Meyera Oberndorf got in a good jab when she hinted that regional government might just make it easier for the Powers That Be to run things their way — without consulting with the people. I heard echoes of Henry Howell: There’s more that goes around in the dark beside Santa Claus.

“To the people who want everything to be run in the fashion that they think is appropriate, it would probably be tidier and easier for them to run things with a regional government,” Oberndorf said.

“Local government is close to the people it serves. Once it gets further and further away, there is this feeling of isolation.”

But you couldn’t you also make a good counter argument: That a regional government would in some ways bring government closer to the people. Right now, a lot of important things are handled by a series of unelected regional bodies: The Hampton Roads Planning District Commission, Tidewater Regional Transit, PENTRAN, SIPSA — the list and acronyms go on.

Right now, if I’m angry at traffic on I-244, or don’t like my bus service, it’s very difficult to find an elected leader I can vote for or against that will in any way influence those things. Bodies like TRT or The Planning District Commission tend to be governed by councils made of representatives from more than a dozen different municipalities. My one or two representatives from my city have a minute voice in the total scheme of things.

With a regional government, these bodies would presumably report to a mayor and his or her council. A regional mayor could campaign on something like ending the HOV lanes. And if he or she didn’t make it happen, we could vote him or her out.

BIGGER IS MORE EFFICIENT If Small is Beautiful, it might also be more expensive, says another line of argument in support of regional government. It costs money to have a dozen municipal repair shops, for example. Del. Bob Purkey of Virginia Beach argues that moving toward a regional government would fit the Republican philosophy of less government and more efficient government. “Each city has their own inventory of very expensive road maintenance equipment,” Purkey said. “Think of the efficiencies that could happen in sharing it, these huge pieces of equipment that must be housed and maintained.”

Purkey enters what is traditionally thought of as dangerous ground politically when he speaks of eliminating the elected constitutional offices, like sheriff, clerk of court, treasurer and commissioner of revenue, Purkey said. Just forcing the merger of treasurer and commissioner of revenue might save $10 million a year, Purkey said, enough for one more new elementary school annually.

While citizens might not jump at the thought of regional governance, they will jump at you when asked for tax increases, Purkey said. Eventually, this reluctance to raise taxes will force government to start merging services.

“I’m suggesting that we are just scratching the surface on a number of cooperative” ventures that could be done, Purkey said. “You have a lot of regional fiefdoms. It really comes down to turf protection.”

Chesapeake Councilman Waters had similar thoughts. Setting a regional growth plan not only builds a more coherent region physically, Waters said, but it would save money. Virginia Beach, Chesapeake and Suffolk have had to build schools while Norfolk and Portsmouth close them down.

“You have old ones rotting away, and new ones being built,” Waters said.

Having many different cities all planning development separately doesn’t work well either, Waters said. For example, you have Virginia Beach planning commercial growth around the proposed Southeastern Expressway corridor while Chesapeake, less active in the policy, plans for residential growth.

Fraim and others buy this argument, but say efficiencies in government are really just a nice extra to the more important goal of gaining more coherent direction, identity and policy as a region.

“Where are we going, and who is going to take us there?” Fraim said. “That’s more important than economies of scale. You can save money with one police chief, but there are a lot of bigger issues that regionalism means.”

Mayor Dana Dickens of Suffolk sounded a similar note. Although as one of the smaller cities, Suffolk would be a smaller voice in a larger whole, Dickens had no qualms considering some sort of regional governance. He told the old tale about the father who instructed his sons on the merits of working together by having them try to break a bunch of sticks lashed together into one bundle. Together, the sticks could not be broken; separately, they broke easily.

“The point of the story is what I feel about the region,” Dickens said. “The more together we are, the stronger we are. If that takes us to a regional government, so be it.”

Dickens had the most concrete example of actual regional action: His city and Portsmouth are close to announcing agreement on joint construction of a library. Although it would be placed in Churchland in Portsmouth, it would also be used heavily by residents in adjacent Suffolk neighborhoods, and so Suffolk may help fund it.

CITIES VERSUS SUBURBS Look at everyone’s comments and you see some trends. Those favoring regional government said the area would be more able to meet the big challenges that determine a region’s fate. Other backers said it would be more efficient. Those opposing said it would add another layer of government and remove government from the people.

But the way the supporters and opponents lined up showed another argument going on underneath the surface, one more about money. In general, supporters of regional governments tended to come from the inner cities. Firm opponents were usually suburban.

Why is this?

Well, whatever else it would do, a regional government would almost certainly share the wealth. Right now, the suburbs get a disproportionate share of the region’s money. Their residents get most of the salaries on the jobs located in the inner cities.

In the short run, that looks like a pretty good deal for the suburbs, so why change? Even though Chesapeake and Virginia Beach have more growth problems, they also have more shopping malls, dentists and other taxpayers that help balance the books.

You can see this imbalance when you compare Virginia Beach and Norfolk. If Virginia Beach raises its real-estate tax one cent, it raises an additional $2 million. But if Norfolk raises its real-estate tax one cent, it raises a little less than $700,000. Virginia Beach has a population less than twice that of Norfolk. But it has a tax base three times as large. That explains why tax rates tend to be higher in the inner cities.

In the long run, this imbalance in wealth hurts the whole region, including Virginia Beach, say many experts. David Rusk has proved pretty conclusively in several books that areas as a whole do better when they spread the common problems and costs over a wider area. Regions that have “inelastic” boundaries and remain divided suffer.

But like a rich woman not wanting to admit that she was having second thoughts about her potential groom’s wallet, that topic went generally unmentioned.

With the exception of Councilman Louis Jones from Virginia Beach. Under my prodding, he had no qualms saying he felt no responsibility for the fate of the inner cities.

“It should not be the responsibility of the suburbs to carry the tax burdens of the inner city,” Jones said. “The inner city needs to handle its affairs in a way that they can handle their own tax burdens.”

GETTING THERE Okay, some leaders are willing to at least entertain the idea of regional governance. Is there any way to get there from here?

Here’s a fantasy scenario: Next year, a bill comes before the General Assembly in Richmond. It merges the governments of Hampton Roads into one entity, or creates a new entity that keeps the old governments but delegates some regional responsibilities to a new one. The House and the Senate pass it. The governor signs it. It’s done.

It might be that simple. Legally, we are creations of the state. Norfolk, Virginia Beach, Newport News and all the other cities exist only because Richmond says they do. Although the actions of the General Assembly are set by the constitution, it’s actually not required for the local governments to endorse the idea of a regional government. If Richmond wanted to thrust a regional government upon us, it probably could.

In Toronto a few years ago, the provincial government merged Toronto with several surrounding suburban localities. Toronto didn’t want to do it. The suburbs didn’t want to do it. But the province, whose conservative leader had campaigned on greater efficiencies in government, said We Don’t Care What You Think, and did it anyway.

For better and for worse, local governments in the United States tend to be more independent and less linked in a clear hierarchy of decision-making and policy to a state or national government.

Del. Tom Moss of Norfolk, and Speaker of The House, said the idea of a regional government has been discussed since he began in politics around 1960. There was even a commission that studied it. But he said politics make it all but impossible.

“If you had one city council, who would be on it?” Moss said. “Would they be elected at large? Who would be the chief of police? The logistics are overwhelming.”

As for sweeping action by the General Assembly, it might require a change in the constitution first, and even if not, would not happen for political reasons, Moss said. The state would not act against the wishes of the localities.

“To say you are going to have one central government is almost impossible politically,” Moss said.

Sen. Ken Stolle of Virginia Beach said there wasn’t much chance of Richmond ever imposing regional government on Hampton Roads.

“Everyone would have to agree that is where they were going,” Stolle said. The General Assembly would not impose a government on the localities.

By the same token, the state also is not hostile to the idea, Stolle said.

“I have heard the argument that the state does not want to give the localities the ability to act like a region because it threatens their authority. I couldn’t disagree more. If Norfolk and Virginia Beach got together and agreed to cooperate in some way, I would probably support it.”

Fraim of Norfolk said he could see a future where two or three governments “with common interests” might decide to consolidate. If this works well, others might clamor to join up. He thought this scenario more likely than the entire region agreeing on a plan for a regional government.

This was an intriguing idea. Imagine if Virginia Beach and Norfolk decided to merge. Think of the powerhouse of a city that would be created. Chesapeake might soon clamor to join up, and then others as well.

Around the country, most defacto regional governments happen either through annexation or by the conversion of county governments into effective city governments.

States with very liberal annexation laws, like North Carolina or Texas, end up with very large cities that swallow large amounts of land area. Houston is technically the fourth largest city because its liberal annexation laws, even though it is the 10th largest metropolitan area.

Of course, Virginia has neither liberal annexation laws, and its counties are legally separate from its cities. The latter doesn’t affect Hampton Roads much because its counties converted themselves into “cities” some time ago.

In the here and now, the best hope for regional governance is for the individual cities to keep cooperating on specific missions and services, said Jimmy Eason, president of The Hampton Roads Partnership and former mayor of Hampton.

Eason shied away like a skittish horse at the mention of actual regional government.

“The idea of consolidated government would be so negative to the majority of people,” said Eason. “There is such an inherent suspicion of big government. And there is a real fear of losing identity.”

What the partnership, which is actually working to address these issues, proposes is that the separate cities work together more on areas of common interests: this could even end up sharing services, like libraries or police. The cities already cooperate on a great number of things, Eason said. The failure of cooperation on things like light rail or the Southeastern Expressway overshadow some very real achievements.

If the merger of Pentran and TRT comes off, Eason said, this will be a real achievement. If consolidation of cities does come, it would only be after already having got most of the way there in smaller steps, he said. Eason’s scenario holds out the hope that we could perhaps get there from here. Say we consolidate libraries. Then maybe police. Then we cooperate on setting growth plans. Maybe eventually, it might not be so hard to actually form a coherent regional government, or for two cities to merge their governments.

Let’s never say never. Change really is possible. The future is unpredictable and exciting. Whether we call it Greater Norfolk or Hampton Roads, it’s pretty clear that we rise and fall together.

No Place Called Home

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Community at the Millennium

[Excerpt From Chapter Eight]

“Another question: what is a community at the end of the 20th century? A focus group, a concentration camp, a chat room on the Internet, an address book, a dance club, all those afflicted with a particular incurable disease, a gender, an age bracket, a waiting room, owners of silver BMW’s, organized crime, everyone who swears by a particular brand of painkiller and a two-block stretch of Manhattan on any weekday at lunch hour.”
–Herbert Muschamp, from “The Miracle in Bilbao,” New York Times Magazine, September 7, 1997.

Coming Home

It’s a Saturday night and my house is filling with people. Some carry musical instruments. Some have sheets of poetry or fiction by their sides. Some carry nothing, but are prepared to stand up before a crowd of people and dance, perform theater, or tell a story.

We call it the Coffeehouse. We’ve been doing it now for seven years. The first Saturday of every month, friends and friends of friends come to our house to entertain and be entertained. Usually about fifty people show up. It’s a great time.

This coffeehouse is the highlight of the month, both for me and many of the people who attend. It’s not just the music, poetry, and other acts that bring people back, although these are good. It’s the chance to meet, connect, and talk with other people during the breaks. Through it, my wife and I have met many of our now good friends, and other people have made similar friendships and bonds. In a city where people come and go, it provides us a mechanism to make new friends as older ones leave town.

Why do I mention it? Because our coffeehouse is a replacement for what does not exist in the outer world. And the fact that it does not exist says a lot about our society at this stage in its history. I would prefer that a corner tavern or bar be down the street, where I could magically meet my friends and make new ones. I would prefer to be held up in a naturally emerging web of friends and family, growing out of the physical place where I live and the work that goes on there.

Our situation is ironic, because if anyone should have community “naturally,” it’s my wife and I. We live in Norfolk, Virginia, a port city on the Elizabeth River, the Chesapeake Bay, and the Atlantic Ocean. Huge carriers make their home here, as do huge cargo ships that freight millions of tons of coal all over the world.

It’s been the home of my family on my father’s side for five generations. My great-grandfather came here before the Civil War. He was the first publisher of the newspaper where I started my career in journalism, The Virginian-Pilot. My father grew up one block from where I write this. My wife is a native of the area as well. My newest niece lives down the street.

Looking at my background, one might think that I live a life rich in contacts with the past and the world that molded me, a place where an intricate and perhaps suffocating web of family and friends who have centuries of combined experience support, argue with, and love each other. Which is not the case. I have no close friends from my childhood or high school years that still live in this town, or even the state. Most of my siblings have scattered themselves around the country, as is the wont of professional people these days. Various relatives–second cousins once removed and so forth–do live near me. I know none of them well. As one commentator remarked about Europeans in contrast to Americans, “They still have cousins.” Americans do not.

Various forces operating in the country and world today have pulled apart my “natural” community and scattered it to the winds. My own more cosmopolitan bent figures into this. I lived in Europe for a few years, attended college and graduate school in Pittsburgh and New York City. I am not able, nor do I desire, to sink back into the old-boy culture that does still exist here to a degree. I have a community around me, but it is one that I created or sought out, more than one I was born into. My community is in my coffeehouse, in the arts organizations I belong to, and in the civic work I do.

Community–the network of formal and informal relationships that binds people together–is a thin, tepid brew in this country. It has declined to the point where improving it, saving it, nurturing it have become slogans of a variety of movements in different, seemingly unrelated fields. In urban planning, New Urbanism promises to revive community through building subdivisions more cohesively. In political theory, Amiti Etzioni hopes to reduce crime and improve social health through his philosophy of Communitarianism. In journalism, the philosophy of Public Journalism, sometimes labeled Community Journalism, promises to rebuild community and a newspaper’s circulation base by having the press foster public dialogue and political participation. Our politics, our places, our press–all of these things run across power lines that jolt us with the message that something is missing in too many of our lives, some sense of cohesion and togetherness.

This desire many people have for richer, more connected lives is a valid one. I believe that a society grows out of its social, religious, and political compacts, on which ultimately even market relationships depend. But like the construction of coherent physical places, the construction of coherent communities is not something to be attempted directly. Rather, one has to understand what produces both places and communities, and what weakens them, and address those forces.

Most of what we call community in the past has been produced as a byproduct of other things: making a living, shopping for food, keeping ourselves and our families well, protecting them and our society from physical harm, educating them. We shopped for groceries, served in the military, and went to a doctor and along the way got to know the butcher, the fellow soldier, and the local doctor. All of these actions have become less communal, and so our society has become less community-minded. We buy our food at the warehouse-style supermarket, do not serve in the military unless we volunteer, and go to the impersonal HMO to get our cholesterol checked. If we want to revive community, then we should look at the trade-offs involved in making some of our decisions more communal again.

Place has something to do with all this as well. Walking to a neighborhood cafe for breakfast is a more communal thing than using the drive-through at a McDonald’s for an Egg McMuffin, although relationships can occur at either place. Driving on the freeway is less likely to generate relationships than riding a streetcar. Living in an older neighborhood fashioned around the foot is more communal than living in a contemporary one fashioned around the car. But the physical makeup of our places is just one factor in this trend.

John Perry Barlow, computer sage and former Grateful Dead lyricist, commented once that community is largely generated by shared adversity. This gets at the notion, true I believe, that our social ties, while beneficial, are not necessarily produced by situations we would choose. Although many of us miss community, we don’t miss poverty, disease, and war, things that produce community with some regularity. The problem for contemporary Americans is that enhancing social cohesion may mean giving up some things we really like, like personal mobility, low taxes, and a footloose economic structure. We have not figured out yet that creating wealth is not the same as creating community.

I speak without any sentimentality or nostalgia for the past. I believe, however, that the generally fragmented lives so many of us lead break up marriages, disturb childhoods, isolate people when they most need help, and make life not as much fun. We live, to speak frankly, in one of the loneliest societies on earth. If we are to change that, then we should look more closely at the various relationships in our society–political, social, economic, and others–and attempt to construct them in more communal ways. Deciding how to structure these relationships comes back to what I increasingly believe is our most fundamental relationship–politics.

Portland and Oregon

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Taming the Forces That Create the Modern Metropolitan Area

[Excerpt From Chapter Seven ]

Let’s take a drive out of Portland, past the suburbs and the highways and the new homes, out past the growth boundary. You’ll find your journey a pleasant one. You’ll drive over rolling hills of farms and forests, until you come to small towns, sitting compactly in the countryside. These small towns, like Yamhill, Dundee, or Forest Grove, will be surrounded by new development that hugs the existing town. You will not be greeted by the usual display of scattered subdivisions, Pizza Huts, and strip centers that now rings most smaller towns in the country. Because of this, the downtowns of these smaller towns are more viable and alive than most.

This landscape is as much a part of Portland, and its success, as its bustling downtown. Because these small towns are limited in their outward growth, there is no way they can pluck the growth off the metro Portland area, by standing just outside of it and feeding off of it, like parasites. A newcomer to Portland cannot buy a house outside a small town in a new development within easy driving distance of Portland, a development that would doubtless be followed by other developments until a sea of sprawl was built up.

This landscape shows that growth can no longer be controlled by a city itself, or even a metropolitan area. It must be done by an entity larger than the city or metro area itself, likely the state. A metropolitan area cannot effectively limit its own growth, because there is no way to get outside of itself. It’s a Zen thing. A tongue cannot taste itself; a metro area cannot limit itself. Wherever it draws a growth boundary, a developer can always go just on the other side and build houses that siphon off the growth pressure. Only a state can limit this kind of parasitic development.

Legally, it makes growth control both more difficult and more simple. If effective growth control must usually come from a state level, then activists have the sometimes more difficult, but conceptually easier, task of persuading the state to manage growth. It’s ironic that states have generally shown little interest in urban management. It’s ironic because legally, states have the rights and powers to do so, if they choose. Legally, towns and cities are creatures of our states. They have their existence only by authority of the state constitution, which usually grants the legislators the right to pass charters which delegate some of the powers of the state to a municipality. Theoretically, the state could revoke these charters and control the actions of cities directly, from school boards to cops.

In Europe, the more controlled nature of growth is due in part to the more clearly subordinate status of cities. Their growth is controlled and ordered by a larger entity, usually the nation-state itself. It seems odd that the states in the United States do not exercise powers that are available to them.

It’s important to realize that the forces that shaped Portland and Oregon were both progressive and reactionary in nature. That is, policy makers did not set out to create great urban places, although some were interested in that. They set out to stop certain things. Mostly, they set out to stop the hills, farms, and forests they love from being turned into shopping malls and freeways.

That, to me, is the ultimate irony of Portland and Oregon. We urbanists from all over the country turn to the area to see how we, too, can fashion great urban places. But those places are largely an afterthought, almost an unintended byproduct. The leaders and people of Oregon set out to protect the streams, rivers, farms, and mountains that they loved.

“They [growth boundaries] were means to an end,” said Ethan Seltzer, director of the Institute of Portland Metropolitan Studies at Portland State University, who often explains the area to visiting journalists. “The point was to call an end to farmland development. The kind of press we’re getting is mostly about what we’re doing, not why. The why is the incredible landscape of the Willamette Valley.

“This is not a city that stands back and looks at its skyline and says, ‘What a great city!’ It’s a city that stands back and says, ‘Look at those mountains!'”

As Seltzer and others explained to me, it was a coalition of farmers and tree huggers that got the state growth control laws passed and have kept them in place. Governor Tom McCall, the progressive Republican governor who led the fight for the statewide planning law in the early 1970s, was a nature lover first and a city lover a distant second. The group that has been so influential, 1,000 Friends of Oregon, is bound together by its members’ deep love of nature. The Friends have become true lovers of urbanism as they have seen how that is a means to their end. They have come to love urbanism, I believe, but it was a discovery, not a goal.

Robert Caldwell, editor of the editorial page for the Portland Oregonian and a native, talks of often seeing “a cowboy” or a blue-collar worker stooping to pick up a piece of litter, or sharply telling someone else to do the same.

To me, this trait is cheering, but it is also saddening, for it suggests Americans are unlikely to unite around an urban vision. Cities are still too misunderstood, still too prone to inspire suspicion, for people to unite around a goal of streetcars, walking streets, and the diverse milieu of urbanism. They may like it once they get there, and even come to love it, but it is unlikely to be a strong enough goal to inspire the necessary work.

It also suggests that place, in the urbanistic sense, cannot be built from scratch, but only preserved, enhanced, or rebuilt. A Greenwich Village or an East Side or even a midtown can evolve, change, building on its essential form of streets and buildings. A Portland can come back, resprouting and reinvigorating its old homes, and building new ones again. But I’m not sure such a place can be built again. Cities may be a dead art form, or a limited one. It may be possible, but I’ve never seen it. I haven’t seen any collection of streets and buildings built after World War II that has a coherent sense of place.

DC Metro: A Record of Reinvigorating a City

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(Taken from the February 2004 issue of Planning Magazine.)

Love (and Hate) That Metro

It’s a mess say some commuters — it’s too expensive and the stations are too far apart. But they ride it all the same.

By Alex Marshall

While he sips an imported beer at Aroma, the elegant bar on Connecticut Avenue near the National Zoo, Jamison Adcock is happy to offer his opinions on “Metro,” the popular name for the D.C. region’s 103-mile transit system, whose pinwheel map is as familiar to residents as the tall spire of the Washington Monument or other local landmarks.

“It’s a horrible mess,” says Adcock, a 33-year-old software engineer. “It’s the lamest metro system I’ve ever seen.” Exhibiting the enthusiasm of someone finally getting a load off his mind, Adcock details Metro’s shortcomings: With its long arms stretching into Maryland and Virginia, and fewer stops within the city proper, “it’s basically built for commuters,” he says.

There’s more: The point-to-point ticketing system, which charges riders according to distance traveled, makes it “incredibly expensive compared to, say, Boston or Philadelphia.” The deep stations mean “you have some of the longest escalators in the free world.” And the open-air escalators lack canopies, making rainy days bad news for riders.

For all his bad-mouthing, it turns out that Adcock actually uses Metro. In fact, that’s how he got to this bar to meet his friends at 7 p.m. on a Friday night. “I can come down here and not worry about parking,” he admits. “And I can drink three or four beers and not worry about driving home.” This prompts Adcock at last to mention a positive about Metro: The management has extended its hours to 3 a.m. on weekends. “They finally did something right,” he says.

Everyone’s a critic

Such criticism from a regular rider illustrates an undeniable fact about Metro. Twenty-seven years after the first line opened in 1976, the system has worked its way into the very fiber of the city and region, transforming both in the process. It’s almost impossible to overstate Metro’s impact. It has revitalized downtown and the closer suburbs, led to population growth within the city proper, priced out less affluent newcomers from once-sleepy suburbs and once-dying urban neighborhoods, and changed the skyline in both suburb and city.

Few people are indifferent to Metro because few people are unaffected by it. Whereas the chief complaint about many transit systems is that they’re inefficient or too costly to taxpayers, the rap against Metro is that it does not go far enough, run long enough hours, or match some other rider expectation of tiptop service. Polls on expanding the system routinely reach support levels in the 70 percent range.

Even critics begin their remarks with praise. “The overall image of the system locally and nationally and worldwide is that it’s a spectacular system,” says Robert J. Smith, a Metro board member who was appointed by Maryland Gov. Robert Ehrlich. Smith has attacked the system’s budget as lavish and wants to see more money put into highways rather than transit. But he is also a regular patron. “I ride it every day,” he says.

Still, coping with success has its own challenges. With the original system now almost complete, the region is faced with deciding whether to embark on a new era of Metro expansion, to put that money into more roads, or to do neither.

Even without expansion, just keeping up with the capital and maintenance costs associated with a steadily growing ridership is a daunting task. It’s a challenge few predicted Metro would have when the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA), the subway’s builder and administrator, was created in 1967.

Corrugated cocoon

If you blindfold a group of Metro riders and lead them into one of the original stations, even after years away, it’s likely to take only seconds before they recognize where they are. The cocoon of corrugated barrel vaulting is absolutely distinctive.

Familiar to every user as well are the round lights at the platform edge, which flash as a train approaches, and the rechargeable paper tickets, which are inserted into the turnstiles. The cars themselves are distinctive. Wider than subway cars in older systems, many still feature the orange seat cushions and carpets that give the trains a vaguely disco feeling, reminiscent of the era in which the system opened. Construction began in 1969, and the first line began operation in 1976, coinciding with the nation’s bicentennial celebration.

Politically, Metro traces back to the Joint Transportation Commission, created by Congress in 1954 to study the problems of getting around in the Washington area. Conceptually, you could say the system harks back to the tiny subway created in 1906 between the U.S. Capitol and the Senate Office Building. A Washington Post headline at the time asked, “Why Not A Real Subway System for Washington?”

Although construction of the system beneath a roughly two-centuries-old city was a tough engineering job, the political hurdles were even higher. Constructing and operating the system required bringing together the District of Columbia and the states of Maryland and Virginia, entities that historically have been in conflict. Throw in the local governments, and the cooperation problems multiply.

The reason these hurdles were cleared is twofold: the leadership of many individuals and the promise of federal dollars. As with the interstate highway system that began in the 1950s, the lure of the federal money got competing states and localities to sit down and talk.

Ultimately, the federal government paid $6.4 billion and local governments $3 billion of the system’s $9.4 billion cost, according to Metro officials. In present-day dollars, $9.4 billion works out to about $22 billion. Although a big number, in context it can seem cheap. For example, New York City’s planned Second Avenue subway line, which will run just 10 miles up the East Side of Manhattan, currently bears a price tag of $16 billion.

Chutzpah at work

The chutzpah of early leaders like Reps. Carlton Sickles (D-Md.), Basil Whitener (D-N.C.), and Joel Broyhill (R-Va.), who managed to build political support for Metro and fund it, can be appreciated clearly in retrospect. The federal government and its partners were proposing a comprehensive heavy rail system at a time when transit use was dropping all over the country and highway construction was seen as the more obvious government investment.

“I tried to understand why Washington built a subway, when every other American city was building highways,” says Zachary Schrag, an historian at Columbia University, who wrote his dissertation on the city’s subway system. “The answer is to see Metro as the embodiment of Great Society liberalism. It was about using the power of the federal government to take American wealth and put it into grand public projects, not designed to serve the poor or the rich, but to serve everyone. Only if we understand it in those terms do we get a sense of what it’s worth.”

And if at times Metro’s station design, by Chicago architect Harry Weese, seems overly grand, it’s because it was meant to be. “Metro was not designed to be the cheapest solution to the problem; it was designed to be the best solution,” says Schrag.”It was designed to do public works right.”

Whatever the expense, the founders’ vision of the system’s overall design was quite sound. The path of the lines and the placement of the stations generally follows the original plan. The system’s five lines — red, orange, blue, yellow, and green — have arms stretching into the surrounding regions and states. The original 100-mile system was completed in 2001. A few heavy construction projects remain. WMATA is at work at the first infill station, New York Avenue, on the Red Line, and is extending the blue line by two stations; the line will terminate at the multi-million-dollar Largo Town Center.

The rail component works with a surface system of buses. Although Metro is what people call the subway, WMATA is also in charge of bus service for the city and much of the region. MetroBus runs almost 1,500 buses, which make about 500,000 trips daily, less than MetroRail’s 650,000 trips. Metro is seamlessly integrated with the city’s main airport, Reagan National Airport, one of the few systems in the country to be so. Tourists use Metro regularly and return home asking why their communities don’t have a transit system like it.

Quirks

The system has its quirks. No eating is allowed on the trains or platforms, a rule the transit police enforce with regular $10 tickets. It is also relatively expensive. A journey of more than a few stations quickly adds up to $3 or more, particularly at rush hour. Metro’s fare box pays about 70 percent of MetroRail’s operating costs, one of the highest percentages in the country.

Adcock, the critic at the bar, is essentially correct in his gripes about the system’s limitations. MetroRail is a hybrid of a traditional subway, which serves people within the city, and a commuter line, which brings people into the city from outlying areas. Even within the city, stations are relatively far apart, as is the custom with commuter rail lines. Some stations within the District are more than a mile apart.

Having fewer stations made Metro less expensive to construct and ensures that trips downtown are faster for commuters. But it makes the train harder to use for everyday travel because you have to walk further to and from the station. By comparison in Manhattan, most stations are five to seven blocks apart. Metro is remedying this some. The New York Avenue station, now under construction, adds a stop between Union Station and the Rhode Island Avenue station, which are 1.7 miles apart on the Red Line.

Another limitation is that the Metro lines have only two tracks. That means a breakdown in one place can back up other trains many stations distant. Unexpected delays are frequent. During a Friday afternoon rush hour recently, passengers waited fruitlessly for a Red Line train to arrive at Metro Center. At one point, the crowd grew so large that it overflowed into the wide hallway that led to the platform. A breakdown had delayed the trains.

“I’m still at Metro Center at 5:30; I’m not going to make the train at Union Station,” said one chagrined rider into her cell phone. “You’re going to have to reschedule my meeting.”

Metro planners look wistfully at New York’s subway, whose lines generally have four tracks, with both express and local service. Despite the advantages of more tracks, it is actually quite rare globally, probably because it increases construction costs enormously. With Metro, there is some talk of adding an express track to the Orange line to limit backups and improve service.

Whatever its shortcomings, many residents regard Metro fondly, probably more than is common with something as utilitarian as a subway. “I think it’s terrific,” said regular rider Joan Wise as she briskly made her way to her morning train at the Cleveland Park station. “It’s half an hour from inside my house to inside my office, and someone else is in charge. I’ve just been to Barcelona and Madrid, and Metro is better.”

It’s not Paris

When people do criticize Metro, they often compare it unfavorably to subways of older, larger cities like New York and Paris, whose systems were founded a century ago and which carry about 10 times the traffic of Washington’s. After all, the Paris subway carries 4.5 million riders daily and its new line, the Meteor, serves more people than Washington’s entire system. What’s amazing is that people are comparing these systems at all. In a sense, it shows how successful Metro is, and its users ambition for it.

About the only other recently built subway that is as vital to a region as Metro is to Washington is Mexico City’s. Its first line opened in 1969, the same year that construction began on Washington’s Metro. Mexico City’s system has 175 stations and 125 miles of track, versus Washington’s 83 stations and just over 100 miles of track, and carries 4.2 million riders a day versus Washington’s 675,000.

Although obviously eclipsed by Paris and Mexico, the D.C. MetroRail system is, by some criteria, the second largest in the U.S., after New York’s. Such inter-city comparisons are difficult, because separating out what is a commuter railroad and what is a subway is difficult.

Yet, whatever Metro’s rank, few foresaw that the Washington rail line would be in the upper tier nationally. Many critics predicted that it would be at best “an expensive toy,” used mostly by tourists, says James Hughes, director of planning and operations for Metro.

Transformation

Unlike the hypothetical blindfolded visitor who would recognize a Metro station or train at a glance once the blindfold was removed, a Washington-area resident who had been away since the 1970s would probably not recognize downtown Arlington, Virginia; Chevy Chase, Maryland; or even downtown D.C. In these places and others, Metro has transformed quiet suburban streets into hybrid urban centers, and once-decaying urban streets into thriving ones.

Friendship Heights along Wisconsin Avenue, which straddles the border between D.C. and Montgomery County, Maryland, is one of these new centers. A generation ago, a long-time resident remembers, a convenience store provided just about the only local shopping. Now, office buildings, department stores, and towering apartment buildings huddle around the subway station. The Mazza Galerie, an enclosed shopping mall linked to the station, includes a Neiman Marcus, Saks, and other exclusive stores.

In many ways, this area is a cross between urban and suburban. The department stores are accessible both from Wisconsin Avenue and from the surface parking lot behind the mall. Thus, the mall sucks customers from two main sources, the rail users and other pedestrians who tend to walk in from the avenue and the suburban drivers who enter from the rear. Office buildings have similar arrangements.

Tom, a blue-jeaned 38-year-old, has come on a Sunday afternoon to visit the Borders bookstore across the street from the mall on Wisconsin Avenue. “I’m going to get some coffee, do some reading,” he says as he emerges from one of the Metro’s typically long escalators. “I own a car, but it doesn’t make sense to use it much, not with the traffic and when you have the Metro,” he says.

At the Ballston Metro stop in Arlington, Virginia, 25-story residential towers and new stores and restaurants face the streets, but the streets are wide, suburban-style boulevards with sweeping curves and gigantic intersections. Crossing one of these intersections, with their multiple turn lanes, is a dangerous activity, despite the brick crosswalks and flashing walk signs.

Overall, though, there is little question that the five Metro stops in Arlington are a model of integration. In part, that’s because Arlington County planners had a hand in siting the Metro line and stations, and then encouraged and designed for development around the stops. The result is a series of dense, tax-paying business districts. Most Metro stations in Arlington have no parking at all. Passengers crowd trains throughout the day and evening, rather than simply at rush hours.

In contrast, elected officials, developers, and civic leaders in neighboring Fairfax County, Virginia, were unable to agree on plans for development around the Orange line. As a result, the stations are surrounded by parking lots and except during rush hours trains run half-empty. This pattern is difficult to reverse now because commuters would protest if their parking were removed and development encouraged.

At the station

In the District, station-area renovation and revitalization has been picking up since the mid-1990s, when the economy revived and the city left behind a series of political scandals and began lowering its crime rate. As much construction as anywhere is taking place near the WMATA headquarters at Fifth and F streets near the Judiciary Square Metro station.

“When I came here seven years ago, there were a whole lot of parking lots around here,” says planning director James Hughes from his office on Metro’s seventh floor. Now he can point to new construction all around, including the MCI sports center.

At 14th and U streets, a largely African-American neighborhood that 20 years ago was written off 20 years ago as hopelessly blighted, hip design stores and trendy Somali restaurants attract upscale shoppers. New apartment buildings are going up, such as the one almost directly across from the Lincoln Theater, which was meticulously restored a decade ago.

Without the subway

It’s quite probable that none of this would have happened without the subway. Certainly in part because of Metro, the District’s population increased in the last census for the first time in decades. The federal government has expanded within the city, rather than outside of it. Without a subway, the gargantuan new Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center on Pennsylvania Avenue could never have been constructed downtown, say Metro officials. The 3.1-million-square-foot complex houses government agencies and private businesses related to trade.

“If we didn’t have Metro, it would have been built in Gaithersburg or somewhere even further out,” says deputy Metro director Wayne Thompson.

Without question, Metro and the federal government depend on one another, which is one reason regional leaders feel justified in asking for heavy federal support for Metro. Forty-seven percent of federal workers and contractors use the trains and buses to get to work, say Metro officials. When Hurricane Isabel swept through Washington in 2003, the federal government had to shut down when Metro announced it was canceling all service.

What’s ahead

Drive out from the city, past Friendship Heights and the other close-in suburbs until you reach the eight-lane I-495 beltway and the sprawling land of edge city office parks and some of the worst traffic on earth. The Texas Transportation Institute regularly rates the Washington region as one of the top three traffic nightmares in the U.S. Despite Metro’s high ridership, this is the daily reality for most of the region’s residents.

All this awful traffic, centered around the D.C. beltway, paradoxically helps and hurts future prospects for the hub-and-spoke Metro system. The traffic is one reason Metro use is so high. It also creates a market for the small, expensive apartments around Metro stops.

The traffic even creates some political support for Metro. Many drivers believe that it keeps congestion in check, even though transit experts will quickly disabuse them of such a notion. Mass transit does not necessarily improve traffic flow, they say, because the density that transit promotes ultimately means less room for cars.

But the suburban-style growth so common in Maryland and Virginia also impedes Metro’s prospects for future growth. It is very difficult to integrate existing suburban areas such as Tysons Corner into a mass transit system.

Way out there

This uneasy balance between freeways and Metro, suburban and urban-style growth, sets the context for the next generation of growth in the D.C. region. The lines of the debate and political divisions are already becoming clear, and at least in recent years have not been favoring transit.

In Virginia, the tiny Herndon town council made headlines in December when it refused to create a special tax district to fund a portion of the proposed $3.5 billion Metro extension to Dulles Airport.

In Maryland, Republican Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich, Jr., an advocate of increased highway spending, has replaced Democrat Parris Glendening, an outspoken mass transit proponent. Ehrlich and his transportation secretary, Robert Flanagan, are backing a $1.7 billion “intercounty connector.” The new road would be a link in an outer, outer beltway, running across the top of the region and connecting I-270 in Rockville in Montgomery County with I-95 near Laurel in Prince George’s County.

The rub is that the connector would run along roughly the same path as a proposed new Metro line — the Bi-County Transitway. The debate over the two nicely frames the region’s priorities and choices about growth: Invest in the transitway, and the region will probably get denser,transit-oriented development closer to the city. Invest in the intercounty connector, and the region will have more suburban, highway-oriented growth farther out.

The transitway, which would be about 20 miles closer in than the connector, would connect four lines in Maryland with an outer loop. It would run from Bethesda to New Carrollton, with stops along the way in Prince George’s County. The firmest proposal is for a light rail line rather than heavy rail. However, Gov. Ehrlich has also asked for a study of bus rapid transit.

If the new line is built, Washington will become one of the very few U.S. cities with true peripheral transit lines. Although convenient, these suburb-to-suburb lines tend to be more costly because they lack the heavy traffic that goes in and out of a core city. New York City has only one such line, the G line between Brooklyn and Queens. Despite its utility, it is constantly in danger of cutbacks in service by cost-cutting administrators.

Whatever the decision about the new line, Metro administrators and planners will have their hands full just keeping pace with growth on the existing system. Many trains are already overcrowded and if capacity is not expanded, officials say, customers will eventually have to be turned away.

The easiest solution is to simply add cars. The Metro stations were built to accommodate eight-car trains, but trains now are either six or four cars. This ability to increase capacity by 25 percent or more is fortuitous and shows the foresight of Metro planners. But adding cars is not cheap. At $2 million each, adding 120 cars would take about $250 million. In addition, money would be needed to upgrade electrical equipment to move the longer, heavier trains.

In coming years, Metro also needs to overhaul the system’s more than 550 escalators, some of them over 200 feet long. MetroBus needs to upgrade its fleet more regularly. The total price tag for long-term capital maintenance is more than $12 billion between now and 2025.

The three jurisdictions involved — Virginia, Maryland, and D.C. — are attempting to come up with the money. Although they have pledged billions on their own, they are looking to the federal government to supply about a third of the $12 billion total.

Obviously, given the region’s and the nation’s budget woes, Metro faces uncertainties. But it’s impossible to imagine a future for the Washington region without it. Hordes of commuters, tourists, and shoppers will continue to board its multicolored trains daily. The only question is at what rate Metro will continue to transform life in the nation’s capital.

Alex Marshall is a journalist in New York and the author of How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl and The Roads Not Taken (2001; University of Texas Press). He is a member of citistates.com, an association of speakers on urban affairs.

Images: Top — The system’s deep stations mean long escalator rides. Bottom — In the heart of the city: the Gallery Place-Chinatown station. its three levels provide access to the red, Green and Yellow lines. Photos by WMATA.