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The
city of the future?
The Shenandoah Valley may hold
clues to new trends in urban growth?
by Holly M. Rodriguez
Picture yourself atop a photo reconnaissance
satellite at night, zipping along at 17,000 miles per
hour about 40,000 miles above earth. As you pass over
the eastern U.S., you look down upon the Shenandoah
Valley. You see lights stretching like a string of pearls
along Interstates 81 and 64. The brighter ones are the
cities of Harrisonburg, Staunton and Waynesboro.
Squinting, you see something else: The
spaces between the brighter spots are filled with smaller
points of light. That's recent development - mostly
gas stations, strip malls, subdivisions and industrial
parks - in places like Fishersville, Stuarts Draft,
Verona and Bridgewater, smaller communities just off
the interstates. Stare a bit longer and the dots merge
into a single blur with a strange shape, something new
in the history of urban development - a string city.
A new metropolis is emerging from the quaint towns and
farmlands of the Shenandoah Valley, and it's unlike
anything Virginia has seen before. For decades, growth
emanated from a traditional urban core, much like concentric
circles moving away from a bull's eye. Now, suburban-style
development follows Interstate corridors like oil along
a wick, joining communities that once were distinct.
You can see the pattern in the growth following I-95
from Washington to Fredericksburg and, with shrinking
gaps, to Richmond and along I-64 to Hampton Roads. You
can see it along I-85 in North Carolina, where everything
between Charlotte and the Raleigh/Durham area has fused
into an indistinguishable mass.
But the central Shenandoah Valley is the first place,
in Virginia at least, where a predominantly rural region
has crossed the urban threshold in the form of a string
city. Rockingham and Augusta counties, along with the
independent cities of Harrisonburg, Staunton and Waynesboro
now count 217,000 citizens between them, according to
the 2000 census. That's larger than the Charlottesville,
Lynchburg and Danville Metropolitan Statistical Areas,
and it's closing in on the Roanoke MSA. Meanwhile, Roanoke,
through a similar process is fast becoming indistinguishable
from the Blacksburg-Christiansburg area; if combined,
the two regions would exceed 300,000 in population.
Urbanization offers many advantages.
MSA status puts a community on the radar screen of national
retailers, restaurants and service providers who would
never consider locating there otherwise. It also makes
a region more attractive to corporations looking for
new industrial and commercial site locations; many site-location
consultants won't consider recommending an area outside
of an MSA. But the sprawling, low-density development
also poses dangers. It threatens to increase traffic
congestion along the Interstate arteries, drive up the
cost of local government services and desecrate the
stunning rural vistas that its residents value so highly.
"There needs to be a clear edge between town and
county, or urbanside and countryside," warns E.M.
Risse, a Northern Virginia urban planner and University
of Virginia adjunct professor who has watched suburban
sprawl lay waste to swaths of Fairfax and Loudoun counties.
"The pearls need sharp, not fuzzy, edges."
The federal Office of Management and Budget is in charge
of identifying and classifying those pearls. The two
most important criteria for MSA status are a population
of at least 100,000 and a population density of at least
500 persons per square mile. The urbanized area must
include a core city and at least some parts of the county,
but does not have to include the entire county. OMB
will apply the latest criteria to the 2000 census data
to determine if any new regions qualify as MSAs. Results
should be announced in mid-2003, according to Paul Mackun,
geographer for the Census Bureau.
OMB goes strictly by the numbers, but it does consult
local opinion on whether or not to combine neighboring
regions that qualify as MSAs - as could be the case
with Rockingham/Harrisonburg and Augusta/Staunton/ Waynes-boro
- and what to name the consolidated entity. OMB consults
the local congressman, who collects input from community
leaders. Only recently have planners and economic developers
in the central Shenandoah area focused on the impending
questions. "That's a new issue for us," says
Robin Sullenberger, economic development director for
the Shenandoah Valley Partnership. "We're aware
of it, but it's not been thoroughly discussed."
Local opinion proved decisive in 1990
when the Hampton-Newport News and Norfolk-Virginia Beach
MSAs combined to create a single metro area under the
banner of Hampton Roads. The impetus came largely from
local marketers, says Arthur Collins, executive director
of the Hampton Roads Planning District Commission. Knowing
that national accounts often restrict their advertising
to the top 25 or top 50 markets, media companies on
both sides of the James River clamored to combine their
respective MSAs in the hope of attracting national advertising
dollars. The combination created a new MSA that ranked
among the 50 largest in the country.
That kind of thinking won't come into play in the Shenandoah
Valley, which has no prospect of becoming a Top 50 market
this century. The MSA designation, however, may force
valley leaders to address issues related to regional
identity, growth and development with an urgency they've
never faced before. Valley communities have a history
of being pro-business and pro-development; yet they
also value their small-town way of life. Do they want
the national visibility and faster growth that MSA status
might bring?
By many measures, the central Shenandoah has the strongest
economy of any region in Virginia outside Richmond,
Charlottesville and the Washington suburbs. During the
1990s, the population of Augusta, Rockingham and their
three cities increased 15 percent - hardly a blistering
rate of growth, but a strong performance for a non-metropolitan
area. Unemployment throughout the region is less than
3 percent - less than 2 percent in Harrisonburg and
Rockingham. Although the pace of income increases has
lagged state averages in Augusta through the 1990s,
Rockingham and Harrisonburg managed to keep up. During
a decade in which income growth heavily favored the
big metro areas, it was a respectable performance. All
things considered, central Shenandoah offers a business
climate and quality of life that many rural areas would
envy.
Unfortunately, many of the problems associated with
urban scale and suburban sprawl are asserting themselves.
Most visible is the assault on the legendary Shenandoah
landscape of manicured farms and rolling hills set between
the imposing Blue Ridge and Allegheny mountain ranges.
Every interchange along the interstate now hosts the
usual cluster of gas stations and fast food restaurants,
which act as magnets for strip-style shopping development.
Leon Bouvier, a demographer from Old Dominion University
in Norfolk, worries that the architecture of suburban
sprawl that characterizes I-95 from Atlanta to Raleigh,
from Washington to Norfolk, will predominate in the
valley as well. "It's a Domino affect - when you
bring in a McDonald's, then you have to bring in a Burger
King and that's how it starts," Bouvier says. "The
greed for growth, I believe, is a stronger force than
the need to preserve the landscape."
Meanwhile, traffic along Interstate
81 is developing big-city congestion, aggravated by
a surge in tractor-trailer traffic along what has become
one of the major industrial arteries of the East Coast.
In 1990, I-81 near the U.S. 250 interchange at Staunton
recorded a daily average of 28,600 vehicles going both
ways, according to Virginia Department of Transportation
figures. By last year, the number had climbed to 42,000
- a 76 percent increase. A quarter of the vehicles consisted
of tractor-trailers, which makes travel a nerve-wracking,
even dangerous experience for motorists. But auto traffic,
much of it generated locally, rose 66 percent as well.
Local officials can't control the truck traffic, but
their land use policies do affect local traffic counts
observes Risse, the Fairfax planner and consultant for
the Piedmont Environmental Council, who worries that
the Shenandoah Valley will follow the same path to traffic-congestion
hell as Northern Virginia. The root of the problem is
scattered, low-density development in which residential,
retail and office/industrial activities are segregated.
Forced into their cars for every trip, people overload
a handful of highways and other connector roads - including
I-81.
Scattered development also is more expensive for local
government to serve, notes Risse. The number of people
served by one mile of power line - or water line, sewer
line, cable line, telephone line, for that matter -
is far less than the number of people served by a mile
of power line in the city because city residents live
closer together and country residents are more dispersed.
Sprawl-style development also makes it more expensive
to deliver other services such as police protection,
fire protection and school-bus transportation. Besides
high costs, Risse is concerned about quality of life.
Scattered development increases the length of commutes,
not to mention driving time to the grocery store, to
visit friends or to the soccer field.
Risse's warnings, however, seem to be falling on deaf
ears. Central Shenandoah leaders, many of whom appear
determined to preserve the region's rural, small-town
character, value the kind of low-density development
that Risse criticizes. Call it "rural sprawl"
- 40-acre farmettes and a pick-up for every homesteader.
Valley residents are attracted to the countryside because
of the region's agricultural roots, says Bill Boyd,
senior executive for Transprints USA in Rockingham County.
"An individual's desire for space is more important
than the mind or logistics when examining development."
Quality of life is a very subjective measure, adds John
Noftsinger, associate vice president for academic affairs
at James Madison University in Harrisonburg. Coming
at Valley folk with a big-city-style regime of controls
would offend their sense of individual property rights
and likely be doomed to failure, he says.
What's more, planning initiatives already
in place emphasize reviving town centers rather than
encouraging cookie-cutter sprawl along the superhighway.
Staunton's economic development efforts, for example,
are geared heavily towards renovating its bounty of
historical 19th century buildings rather than building
new mega-projects. Augusta County emphasizes service
to existing industry rather than aggressive industrial
recruitment. "Agricultural preservation is woven
into the fabric and culture of the region, and growth
is being carefully watched," says Sullenberger,
the regional economic development director. "In
every community, there is a threat of scattered development,
but opportunities are being created to centralize services
and development."
Meanwhile, a regional sense of identity is emerging
that will help communities deal with growth-related
problems. Central Shenandoah is dealing with economic
development, work force development and technology issues
on a regional basis, while cities and counties have
forged a number of cooperative agreements for municipal
services. Also, the Shenandoah Valley Planning District
Commission outlined a plan of 14 specific initiatives
to acknowledge the scattered growth pattern and what
to do about it.
Should such measures work, they might
help mitigate the current pattern in a beneficial way.
Risse hopes that a future satellite shot of the Central
Shenandoah Valley region will reveal brighter points
of light on the "string of pearls" along I-81,
absorbing the smaller, more scattered ones. Risse insists
this is the only protective measure that exists to preserve
the region's countryside. "If you continue with
scattered development, you may as will live in an area
like Manassas [which is more heavily developed], because
that is what is slowly happening," he says. "When
something grows out of control, we call it cancer,"
he notes.
Yet what neither Risse nor the Valley leaders can tell
is just how powerful and unwieldy this new "string
city" is. Bill Strider, executive director of the
Central Shenandoah Planning District Commission, for
example, doesn't see the MSA designation as happening
for several years. He says growth will come at a slower
pace. On the other hand, should the forces of interstate
highway traffic flows, national marketing and unfettered
commerce continue to come to bear, these new cities
might keep growing no matter what controls are employed
to contain them. Should that happen, many more strings
of light will start glowing at night throughout Virginia
and the U.S.
Return
to Virginia Business - November 2001
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