Wasting Land is Bad, Actually
Quick food for thought
The desolate parking lot you see below is the optimistically named Rose Hill Plaza in Fairfax. The property owner wants to create a mixed-use development with many new apartment homes. Local residents have united behind this plan. The local elementary school has a teacher shortage, the area is economically weaker than other parts of the region, and diverse local residents are vulnerable to displacement. The need is clear.
Just kidding. Some readers may have detected my sarcasm. I was not joking about the teacher shortage or meager economic investment in the area, which you can see from just driving around. A reactionary group is campaigning to “save Rose Hill shopping plaza.” The local district supervisor, who seems like a good man and seems to genuinely care about affordable housing, now says he would like to see less housing and more retail in the new development. In other words, fewer new residents. Being an elected official is tough, I try not to judge too harshly, but this pattern is how we ended up with a housing shortage and endless sprawl, still metastasizing across local farmland and forests. My YIMBY group’s Fairfax team and local neighbors put together a statement in the article linked above. We are of course concerned.
This episode, along with the ostensibly successful effort to block redevelopment of a decaying local government building in Del Ray, Alexandria, across the street from an elementary school, has struck a chord with me. It is, when you take a step back to absorb it, bizarre that we have ended up in this situation. You might think, in a vacuum, that the average person who hears about a redevelopment plan might react: ‘Cool, I wonder what the new stores will be. The old building there is such an eyesore.’ But instead, a more typical response seems to be closer to, ‘Oh, no, new people living near me.’ There is an implicit question of misanthropy at the heart of these debates.
I am beginning to suspect that this is more corrosive than we realize. Far from “Love thy neighbor,” the default narrative is to hate the idea of new neighbors. The net effect is that we waste land, which is bad for people who need a place to live, and of course bad for the environment. I have been working on another piece for GGWash this week, but had a brainwave and wanted to give you all, my dear subscribers, some food for thought. Hope you are all doing well. Have a good Labor Day. That brings to mind another idle thought. I have learned many things from urbanism, but the most interesting might be that class warfare is real. Just look at Rose Hill Plaza.
If you enjoy this blog or want to work together, do reach out at lucagattonicelli@substack.com. I would love to write about a topic suggested to me by a reader. Visit YIMBYs of Northern Virginia, the grassroots pro-housing organization I founded, at yimbysofnova.org.