Sprawl as a problem farther out
Throughout the Basin where centers of population and industry are on the jump, sprawl is also gnawing away at the countryside. Given our present pace of change, many Basin towns will soon become Basin cities, and around each, if they are left to grow in the rudimentary traditional patterns, the devastation that has taken place around Washington will reproduce itself. In many places it already has a good start.
Some rural counties and small towns have developed a satellitic relationship to the larger centers of population, and even around others that are distant from urban uproar, sprawl is beginning to find a congenial form for itself in vacation colonies of "second homes" in scenic places whose remoteness, together with a smaller and more settled population of Americans, used to be their staunch protection. Under the stimulus of State and Federal encouragement, mainly quite recent and to some extent tied in with this Potomac effort, most counties in the Basin have arrived at some awareness of the need for land-use planning. In many farming communities, the seeds of this awareness were planted long since by the Soil Conservation Service. But rural folk often lack a sense of the urgency of the need, an understanding of dangers and aims under urban or semi-urban conditions, money with which to operate, and the detachment that is requisite for making right decisions.
Planning in most such places ought to be relatively simple and acceptable, for in the long run most people would be better off for it, economically and in terms of the surroundings. But it is still hard to sell to average rural and small-town populations, who have always been able to take trees, views, clean water, and elbow room for granted, and hence can maintain the staunchly individualistic view that anyone ought to be able to do whatever he likes with his land, that growth is good, and that anything that interferes with any manifestation of it is bad. Therefore, too often the planning, if any, that goes into effect before the bulldozers move in like hungry behemoths from another planet is likely to be meager and heavily weighted in favor of the easy, standard, massive sort of development that local governments close to the centers of trouble are beginning to comprehend and, in the face of immensely greater odds, to take measure against.
Though the ugliness and dreary crowded sameness with which standard sprawl replaces decent landscapes are reason enough for opposing it, other good reasons exist as well, perhaps especially in rural counties. It has been customary for local promoters of such development to celebrate the additional tax revenues that new inhabitants are going to pour into the community's coffers. But community services in such areas—things like sewage collection and disposal, water supply, trash collection, roads and streets, schools, libraries—are seldom extensive or elaborate, because they do not need to be in a rural stage of things. If a subdivider erects, however, some 1500 new homes on a patch of countryside, providing them with an inadequate supply of well water and with individual septic tanks, and then shoves along to other fields before things start breaking down and the protests start rising from the 1500 families who came there for lyrical but convenient country living, the ensuing results for the county's finances can be catastrophic.
In some parts of America already, around $17,000 worth of community services are said to be needed for every new family that moves in, a sum which from one viewpoint amounts to a subsidy furnished by taxpayers to land speculators and developers. Even assuming that those services provided by the developer are adequate, and that some aid in providing the rest can be obtained by the community through State and Federal programs—thereby passing on a part of the cost to other taxpayers—a rural county proud of its traditionally low tax valuations and of the Jeffersonian simplicity of its local government, as most are, flatly cannot dig up the remainder without a big revision of its old way of being.
In bad cases, the alternatives to digging it up may be water pollution, health hazards, siltation and perhaps floods, sour public discontent among new elements unsympathetic to Jeffersonian simplicity, and the rapid deterioration of the new suburbs into rural slums—a combination of factors that in itself may bring about drastic change in the community. Thus in one way or another contemporary rural individualism tends to bury itself, but often too late for the salvation of the woods and pastures and clear waters and human dignity it took for granted and placed so little value on.
Vacation colonies are a rather distinct consideration, for they are independent of ordinary and predictable population growth and they tend to spring up in places of special natural beauty and value. There is no reason why they should not be pleasant additions to a community or to a landscape, and a good many are—well planned in terms of both practical details and esthetic values, unobtrusive, and pretty. Unfortunately, though, this kind is not the rule, for in many spots in the Basin such colonies are a sort of haphazard mushroom growth with miserable side effects.
Local forms of this phenomenon have always been around, but have seldom been extensive enough to seem anything but picturesque. A farmer sells off a few riverside lots, for example, because he can't plow that part of his land anyhow, and is happy enough to make a little money and at the same time oblige some county-seat acquaintances who want a place to loaf and fish on weekends. So a few tarpaper shacks go up with privies for sanitation, and perhaps someone hauls in an old school bus and props it on concrete blocks for his own vacation home. Here a jolly time is had by all with full knowledge—since they are locals, aware of how things around them work—that sooner or later the river is going on a rampage and will carry away the whole little community, with small loss to anyone.
Exploitation changes the picture, however, as exploitation is wont to do. If a whole neighborhood of farmers seeks such profits, or if real estate men get into the act, or big development corporations that may be operating from almost anywhere in the country, the scale enlarges and purple prose may appear in the metropolitan newspapers to lure nostalgic suburbans out to examine an assortment of lots sliced fine for maximum yield and priced most often according to their proximity to water. Water is usually involved, for it is the fundamental outdoor attraction, whether it is a mountain creek or a river or a made pond or a deep bay off the lower estuary. Its ultimate pollution is often involved as well, for sanitary arrangements tend to be rudimentary and inadequate for concentrations of people, especially when the "second homes" start turning into permanent homes with the retirement of their owners or their sale to younger locals. This latter process, too, sometimes leads to a future demand for schools and other services whose need was not foreseen by local governments when they permitted the development.
In some places along the estuary and the Potomac main stem and the Shenandoah, the creation of such communities has already led to wholesale, ugly, unsanitary clutter along considerable stretches of once beautiful shoreline. It is beginning to shape up even on remoter waterways like the Cacapon and the South Branch, and in some parts of the mountains. As new interstate highways and other avenue of access are opened from Baltimore, Washington, Pittsburgh, Richmond, and many other cities, the process may be expected to blight most shorelines throughout the Basin unless something is done to control it. And not only the county councils and boards of supervisors but the rest of us as well are going to inherit the problems associated with it, for these waters and shores are of more than local concern, in terms of the loss of amenity, in terms of pollution, and in terms of the quite frequent certainty of future flood damages, a demand for protection at general public expense, and possibly the loss of further amenities and resources at the site of a protective reservoir upstream.
From an abstract point far outside the boundaries of these rural counties, it is easy enough to condemn the frame of mind that lets such things take place. But the fact is that people in rural local governments and those who elect them often have even more respect and love for the landscape around them than the most esthetic of metropolitans. They may take it too much for granted, but they have grown up close to it and they can feel the loss acutely when it deteriorates. Some of the usual obstacles to their doing anything to prevent the deterioration were mentioned earlier—money is short, and so is planning know-how. Probably the greatest obstacle, however, is the matter of personal relationships. Not in terms of outright corruption, which is far more likely in the anonymous atmosphere of great cities, but in terms of the need of people in small communities to get along with one another, combined with traditional profit motives.
Suppose a local planning or zoning board is taking action to determine whether or not a big corporation from elsewhere can buy and subdivide some flood-plain land belonging to a well-liked fellow townsman, a hardware dealer whom all of them have known from childhood and with whom they will be doing business the rest of their lives. Despite the inappropriateness of the land for human occupation and the mess that is going to be established along their pretty river, is it to be reasonably expected that a voting majority of them are going to decree that a friend be deprived of a half-million dollars' profit? The dilemma is a serious one, perhaps the weakest point in the land-use control at this local level, and it may mean that higher levels of government will have to take over some of the responsibility and get local governments off the hook.