GREEN SPACE: NOT AN EMPTY NEED

GREEN SPACE: NOT AN EMPTY NEED

Steve Twomey   
Column: STEVE TWOMEY
March 27, 1997; Page D1Didn't go straight to work yesterday. Went for a drive in the country. True country still lies within the boundaries of my county, Montgomery, and in no time I was parked on the shoulder of a one-lane road called Sugarland. Of the 809,500 people who inhabit Montgomery, I saw all of two, walking way off near the western horizon. Under a big sky, farms dotted the undulating earth in every direction. I had passed a sign a couple of miles back: Agricultural Produce: The Pride of Montgomery County.

I turned onto Montevideo Road, which dipped into the wooded valley of Dry Seneca Creek, which was anything but dry. An elegant farm manse appeared, an older building of brick constructed in the Federal style. The barn that went with it was actually red. With the creek in the foreground, the setting was a painting.
By then, I had an answer.
The question was Til Hazel's.
John T. "Til" Hazel Jr., the area's best-known developer, posed it in Sunday's paper, in the opening segment of a fascinating three-part series on growth by Stephen C. Fehr, Glenn Frankel and Peter Pae. Told that the Washington area converts an average of 28 acres of open space to residential, commercial or industrial use every day, Hazel replied:
"So what?"
Hazel went on: "The land is a resource for people to use, and the issue is whether you use it well. . . . Is the goal to save green space so the other guy can look at it? How about job growth? How about the tax base? How about the ability to get to work? How about the ability to find a place for your kid to work?"
He seemed to suggest, in other words, that if the landscape is giving way to what we need, the daily total of evaporation isn't very important. Twenty-eight acres a day? So what, they're being well used.
So what?
Because who wants to go for a drive amid subdivisions?
Urban/suburban people like me over-romanticize the rural. Many years ago, I went to Denio Junction, essentially a service station-cum-restaurant surrounded by ranches in the most remote corner of Nevada. The idea was to chronicle how satellite dishes were changing backwater ways, and I expected to find grave fear that the tube was chipping away at old bonds and injecting too much of the modern. What I found was joy. Rural life was boring as hell, residents said, and they loved having TV.
But it's not being overly romantic to say that having the countryside within an easy drive is one of life's needs. Not as much as a job is, certainly, or a roof over your head or food on the table, but there is something unquantifiably beneficial about being able to wash your eyes in green, inhale the aroma of a plowed field and feel -- for a while, anyway --less boxed, more alone. It beats the office.
Who doesn't crave wide-open spaces? I bet even Til Hazel does. But each day's bite of 28 acres makes the open spaces a little less wide, a little harder to find, a little farther away. The daily total does matter.
There's just one tiny obstacle to reducing it.
"We keep having babies every day," Gus Bauman said by phone.
Bauman, the former head of Montgomery County's Planning Board, meant that growthis neither good nor bad, but inevitable. People happen. A no-growth stance is pointless. Moreover, because the District has all but collapsed as a place for the middle class, thegrowth will head for the frontier because people want "cheaper housing, safer neighborhoods and better schools," Bauman said.
"And that is the American dream," he said, "and there's nothing wrong with it."
There is not.
It is elitist to deny a lifestyle to the next family. If it wants a single-family detached home on a little piece of land, it ought to be able to get it. The issue is whether it's really necessary to gobble up 28 acres of landscape every day to provide such housing and to provide the roads, schools, malls, restaurants, offices, parking lots, libraries and recreation centers that go with it, so much of it so unattractive.
I doubt it is necessary. One look at any subdivision suggests it isn't. There's usually no place to walk, because destinations are spread far and wide over the landscape. Jobs aren't nearby. Entertainment isn't nearby, nor retail. Everything requires a car.
Government could nudge developers into creating more communities geared toward feet. And government could use public dollars to channel growth to older areas already touched by roads, utilities and other public facilities but perhaps now underutilized because the development action has moved outward.
And maybe, if we all live long enough -- by which I mean a century or two -- the District will be nudged into becoming a place people flock to instead of flee, because it'll have great jobs, safe streets and good schools for all. That would save some land out there on the margins.
The daily loss of acreage matters for another reason. Even if you hate green space, you probably like green money, and it costs millions for government to provide the infrastructure of sprawl. A garbage route that serves 10 houses on five acres each is going to be longer than one that serves 10 houses on a half-acre each.
"Government should guide {growth} for fiscal reasons, if no other," Bauman said.
Myself, I remain fond of the convenient country-drive reason for saving open space. I need the peace.
Incidentally, there go 28 more acres.