There’s No Such Thing as Too Much Love

So goes the popular Country song. At a recent meeting of the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors, the question of too much mixed-use development was raised. In my opinion “mixed-use” can be added to the list of things we can not get too much of.

Mixed-use development is not new. Downtown Leesburg is as mixed as it comes. Residences are built over shops. Leesburg was planned and built before the automobile during a time when you walked to work. Horse dung was the pollutant du jour, not exhaust fumes. As our country industrialized and the automobile replaced the horse tract housing development became the norm. The demand for housing and roads accelerated at a phenomenal rate after World War II when 16 million veterans returned home. The baby and housing boom was on. Bill Levitt understood the tidal wave of demand for housing and the market for large low cost housing developments. Roosevelt talked about the dream of a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage. Eisenhower introduced the Interstate Highway System. The idea of walking to shop and work was lost on everyone except those living in very dense urban cities like New York where a car just does not work very well.

In the mid 1960s developers began to see that the old mixed-use model could actually work in the modern world of mass transit and the automobile. Employees were attracted to companies with offices close to where they could work and shop. Robert E. Simon was one of the early visionaries and his dream took shape in the form of RESTON. Others like Jim Rouse conceived Columbia, Maryland, a self-contained planned community. Columbia, which in the 1960s was almost entirely rural farm land, has a population of over 90,000. Reston’s population exceeds 56,000. Reston Town Center has become the focal point for retail and commercial businesses as well as a cultural center hosting summer concerts and recreation, like ice skating, in the heart of the project.

The Peterson Company watched this happen and developed Fairfax Corner at Fair Lakes, the Washingtonian Center in Gaithersburg, and has given rebirth to downtown Silver Spring. The newest Peterson project, National Harbor, is attracting literally Olympic fame.

So why aren’t our leaders more receptive when mixed-use projects like Village at Leesburg, One Loudoun, and Crosstrail are proposed? We should stop treating developers as devils. They have done more to improve our quality of life than government – local, state or federal. These developers deserve our support and encouragement not the negativism that they are confronted with at every turn.