As I’ve written many times before I grew up in Northern Virginia.  My family moved there in ’72 when I was in first grade and I lived there until we moved here in ’04.  Celeste’s family moved to Northern Virginia in ’79 and she lived there until we moved.  We both went to college at George Mason University in the heart of Fairfax County so we didn’t even leave the area for school. (Well I spent my freshman year in Nebraska at Concordia College-Seward, but that was really like an extended vacation).

We had several reasons for moving, but probably the most prominent was that we just couldn’t stomach the craziness anymore.  What had once been semi-rural suburbs had been fully developed and it seemed that just about every open space had been paved over and rush hour had grown to an all-day affair.  Hell, there were even traffic jams on Saturday.  If Northern Virginia had remained as it was when we first got out of college we probably would have stayed, but we just couldn’t take what it had become.  We could see first hand that growth in the area was out of control, and each year it seemed the NoVa counties were announcing astounding population growth.  So we got out.

Today I came across this article on WashingtonPost.com that makes me even happier that we left when we did.  Let me give you some numbers and excerpts from the article:

• Loudoun County has added more than 100,000 people since 2000, increasing its population by 59 percent
• Prince William County, where Celeste and I lived from ’96-’04 has added 88,000 people since 2000
• "Fairfax County, the state’s largest jurisdiction, has packed in nearly
  47,000 more residents. The next fastest-growing counties — Stafford,
  Spotsylvania and Culpeper — are on the edges of the expanding region."
• Overall, the state’s population has grown by 560,000 since 2000
• "The study also found that 33 cities and counties have lost residents in
  the past six years — older urban areas such as Richmond, Petersburg
  and Roanoke, as well as rural counties in Southside and southwestern
  Virginia. Many of those residents seem to have migrated north, along
  with workers from other parts of the United States and the world who
  have been lured by the Washington job market."

That last item doesn’t surprise me.  Southwestern Virginia, along with northwestern NC, is actually served by many of the media outlets here in Winston-Salem and they are suffering the same economic fate as the rest of the region, with huge chunks of jobs in the furniture and textile industries going overseas.  It shouldn’t surprise anyone that they’re heading to places like Northern Virginia for jobs.

Speaking of jobs, here’s another tidbit from the article:

No other region in the country, however, has created as many jobs in
recent years as the Washington metropolitan area. Between 2000 and
2005, the region added 359,000 new jobs, said Stephen S. Fuller,
director of the Center for Regional Analysis at George Mason
University, citing Labor Department statistics. That was 75,000 more
jobs than the nation’s No. 2 job engine, Miami.

"We’ve been
adding jobs faster than we’ve been able to add resident workers," he
said. "Had we been able to produce more housing, we could have added
more people." The Washington region is the eighth most-populous in the
United States, Fuller said, but is fourth in the number of total jobs,
trailing only New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.

The imbalance
probably means more congestion on Northern Virginia’s already-choked
roads. "The downside [to growth] is pretty clear," said Corey A.
Stewart (R-Occoquan), chairman of the Prince William Board of County
Supervisors, who was elected last year on a pledge to curb residential
development. "Increased tax bills. Crowded schools. Public services
stretched and overwhelmed."

I can’t argue that the job market in the DC area is great.  The problem is that housing is so expensive that all but the highest earners end up moving to the outer counties in order to afford a decent place to live.  Public transportation is expanding, but it can’t keep up with the pace of growth so that puts more people on the road and makes an already bad traffic situation almost impossible.

Now that things are getting ugly in places like Prince William and Loudoun the local politicians are starting to tighten up on development.  Unfortunately they didn’t listen to their constituents who were shouting for limits ten years ago.  Instead they gave the developers free reign and now they’ve got a mess.

The leaders here in the Piedmont Triad are pushing hard for more economic development, and in the wake of the exodus of all the textile and furniture business it’s hard to blame them.  I hope, though, that they take a long hard look at what happened in Northern Virginia and control growth from the beginning with a comprehensive growth plan.

I’ve always loved tilting at windmills.