The attractiveness of such places to people disillusioned with standard sprawl is attested by the fact that other developers, having incorporated some of the Reston techniques—some recreational water, some clustering of dwellings with communal open space between, some amenities like underground wiring—are tending to call their latest subdivisions "new towns" too. Many of them want to do things right, and if it can be proved that doing things right will pay off as well as doing them wrong, a certain amount of automatic improvement in the quality of suburbanization can be expected. However, it must be noted that the scale on which most developers can afford to operate, and the market scarcity of suitable large tracts of land even when major capital is available and the aims are noble ones, do not often give them control of adequate natural units of territory in which whole planning can mean what it should. Most such planning is going to have to continue to come from governmental bodies, and the main hope must be that it will keep improving, find stronger tools, and be reinforced and stimulated by laws and programs from higher up.
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.