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growth issues


Retaining a Unique Sense of Place at
the Edges of Metropolitan Growth
Proceedings from the 2005 Regional Summit of
Virginia Main Street Communities
By Courtney Anderson
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retail business climate; and transportation. Prior to the summit, each community convened a delegation including: city and county elected officials; planning commission members; zoning board of appeals members; preservation commission mem-
bers; zoning administrator; the local Main Street organization executive director; local Main Street organization board members; city/town managers and county administrators. By consensus, each of the six delegations offered up its two most critical issues to discuss at the summit. As a followup to this summit of local leaders, this article builds on the conversation by highlighting key local and state policy tools to address growth. The proceedings, which may accessed in full at www.dhcd.virginia.gov/mainstreet present a starting point for further discussion within each community and among neighboring historic market towns within the Washington, DC commuting shed.
GROWTH TRENDS AND TOOLS FOR CHANGE
As indicated in Figure 1, the robust growth of the Washington, DC metropolitan area over the past 50 years has been expanding its urban envelope to include previously rural areas, including the historic market towns which served them. A brief but comprehensive overview of growth in the Washington, DC metropolitan area is available from the Urban Land Institute at www.realitycheck
washington.org/guidebook.php. According to this report, current growth trends for the Washington, DC metropolitan area show that the region will generate an additional 1.6 million jobs and two million new residents by 2030, requiring an estimated 833,000 new housing units. At present, three of the six communities participating in the summit lie outside the Washington, DC metropolitan area as defined by the Unites States Census
The author is the community development administrator for the Virginia Main Street Program. She is a past contributor to the Virginia Review.
On March 30, 2005, forty local leaders and decision makers from six northern Virginia communities in the exurban [rural communities behond suburbs that act as dormitory communities for an urban area] Washington, DC commuting, shed convened a summit in Warrenton, Virginia. During this summit, the participants discussed their experiences stemming from the rapid growth of the Washington, DC metropolitan area as well as policy tools and techniques to address some of the impacts of that growth. All six communities represented - town of Berryville (population 3,000), town of Culpeper (population 9,875), city of Manassas (population 35,100), town of Orange (4,000), town of Warrenton (population 6,500), and city of Winchester (population 23,600) - are designated Virginia Main Street communities with collectively almost 100 years of downtown revitalization experience.
At this summit, Doug Loescher, director of the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s National Main Street Center, led a team of facilitators and policy specialists in guiding the diverse community representatives in an open discussion about local policy tools and techniques that might allow them to retain the unique character of their respective communities while accommodating growth. Their ideas about best practices and solutions centered on three primary issues of concern derived from a pre summit survey: property development; changes in the