Developers of two proposed mixed-use projects in Stafford County have withdrawn their rezoning applications. I shudder for the county’s long-term future. We could be witnessing the formation of what will evolve in 30 to 40 years’ time, into one of Virginia’s worst suburban slums.
Rob Gollahon, project developer of Stafford Town Station, had envisioned a town center-style community with clustered buildings, narrow streets and a blend of commercial and residential uses. The 1,600-home project would have provided Stafford County with $50 million in proffers toward road improvements, a library and other amenities. Now it’s being planned as a routine subdivision of 144 single-family houses on three-acre lots. Gollahon would not comment on his decision, reports the Free Lance-Star.
Meanwhile, the developer of Leeland Station, a proposed mixed-use project built around a Virginia Railway Express station, also has withdrawn his zoning application, writes Kafia Hosh. Bacon’s Rebellion had profiled Leeland Station in “Curse of the ‘D’ Word” a year ago. Only a single mixed-use project, The Towne Center of Aquia, is working its way through the Stafford planning department.
In an ideal world, Stafford wouldn’t have to deal with development pressure. Increased housing along with the retail and commercial space to support it, would be built closer to the urban core of the Washington New Urban Region, closer to where most of the jobs and existing infrastructure are located. In an ideal world, Stafford wouldn’t have to deal with surging population and traffic and attendant strain on public finances, and its citizens wouldn’t have to confront the tough choices they never asked to make.
But in the world that is, Stafford lies squarely in the path of growth. The Northern Virginia real estate crash or a slowdown in technology-driven employment growth might relieve the pressure for a few years, but there is no escaping the inevitable. Stafford citizens need to to visualize what their county will look like when developed from end to end via by-right development as low-density, cul-de-sac subdivisions and strip shopping centers, all strung along country roads in disconnected pods — with no nucleus, no community center, and no financial contribution from developers whatsoever.
Fairfax, Loudoun and Prince William Counties, as dysfunctional as they are in a regional context, at least have patches of territory that work well on a micro level. But Stafford may well emerge as Virginia’s poster child for dysfunctional human settlement patterns: an entire county that evolved as an amorphous, auto-centric blob. When the newness of today’s construction wears off in 30 to 40 years, Stafford will be saddled with a high cost of public services, inadequate and aging infrastructure, and a paucity of districts worth preserving, removating or reinvesting in.
The only people who will choose to live in such a place will be people who lack the means to live anywhere else.