Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, March 4, 1995 TAG: 9503060005
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JAN VERTEFEUILLE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BLUE RIDGE LENGTH: Long
Postmaster Mabel Swanson recalls a customer who came into her Botetourt County post office to say she was moving back to Roanoke because Blue Ridge was just too far removed for her liking.
"She wanted peace and quiet," Swanson said. "But she said now it was just too quiet."
Of course, if she had stayed long enough, the comforts she missed probably would catch up with her: strip malls, convenience stores, video outlets - all are headed out to serve Roanoke's burgeoning, and increasingly far-flung, suburbs.
Some are already there.
For Swanson, the best thing about rural living is the same thing her postal customer was seeking - "the quiet."
Yet almost everything Swanson says she needs now exists on the fringes of the Roanoke metro area - churches, grocery stores, fire stations and other services. Everything, that is, but "a little mall." If she had that nearby, she says, she wouldn't need Roanoke at all for services.
The irony of life on the fringes is that, when too many people move out for the rural experience, they wind up bringing the city - or at least parts of it - with them.
"They love the beauty of our area," lifelong Cloverdale farmer Mike Beahm says. "Well, the very thing they love about it, they destroyed when they moved."
Planners and other local government officials say that, increasingly, what rural residents demand for good quality of life overlaps with what used to be considered urban conveniences. Many people expect metro services in the countryside: garbage pickup, public water and sewer, nearby shopping, cable TV.
For many people moving to rural areas, the lifestyle is similar to suburban living: They're in the same kind of subdivisions, only with bigger lots. In the process, the countryside gets dissected into 1- or 3- or 5-acre lots, and local governments are stretched to provide services to far-flung growth pockets.
What's happening in the countryside outside Roanoke isn't unique.
"The general attitude [in environmental circles] concerning this kind of growth sprawl is that it's socially harmful," says Richard Collins, director of the Institute for Environmental Negotiation at the University of Virginia. "It eats up a lot of land and resources that could be better used as open space."
Across the country, Collins says, "the patterns tend to be the same, while the magnitude of the problems can be quite different. No one's been very successful in stopping that process anywhere in America."
In Roanoke, no one's even tried to stop it. Development is considered vital, and, while planners worry about the problems that sprawling suburbia brings, elected officials generally embrace it.
Life on the edge
Odd juxtapositions exist on the edge of suburbia.
Strip malls sprout in fields beside grazing cows. Grocery stores are plunked down along sparsely populated roadways. Cookie-cutter subdivisions surround older farms trying to hang on.
The development likely will win, at the expense of the rural landscape. At least it will the way most local governments operate.
Some localities around Roanoke have tried to slow the pace of development - and preserve their rural character - by requiring larger lot sizes to reduce the number of houses built in rural areas. Roanoke County even toyed with the idea of 5-acre minimum lots in Catawba a few years ago, before residents railed against the idea as an infringement on their property rights - and property values.
In Botetourt County, the minimum lot size for houses with public water and sewer is 10,000 square feet, compared to 7,000 feet in Roanoke County and just 4,500 in densely populated Virginia Beach. The thinking is twofold: The county wants to keep down cluttered development. And, by keeping lot sizes bigger, it pumps up the value of each home built there.
In agricultural areas of Roanoke County, 3-acre lots are required.
But large-lot zoning is coming under fire from another school of thought. Some planners and environmentalists argue that large lots devour more land and carve agricultural and forested land into house lots "too big to mow, too small to plow."
So before the Roanoke Valley has even come to accept larger lots as a growth tool, the idea is becoming outdated elsewhere, replaced by clustering.
Clustering groups new homes in subdivisions onto part of the parcel, with the rest preserved as open space. Because the number of houses allowed in a clustered development is the same as the number that would be allowed in a traditional, "cookie-cutter" development, builders are not penalized economically for keeping open space. They may benefit, in fact, because there are less roads to build and shorter water and sewer lines to lay.
A study by the Center for Rural Massachusetts found that houses in open-space developments enjoyed higher appreciation rates than those in traditional subdivisions. Homeowners also don't have to worry about what's going to be built in the field or woods next to them - the open space typically is protected by a conservation easement.
But people like their 1-acre lots in rural subdivisions, one Western Virginia developer contends. That's why those lots sell.
"People don't want to give up their three cars. They don't want to give up the serene 15-minute drive home to unwind rather than just walk across the street, up an elevator six stories and into their condo," says David Reemsnyder, a Blacksburg builder.
"It's a tough one. Intellectually, we can design better systems. But just because we can design them doesn't mean they'll play in Peoria. Or Rocky Mount, or Blacksburg, or anyplace else."
Andy Kelderhouse, vice president of the Roanoke development firm Fralin & Waldron Inc., is at a loss to explain the attraction of some of the subdivisions his company builds.
"We've got people who will spend $350,000, drive to a rural setting into a curb-and-gutter subdivision," he says. "They'll go six miles down a road to end up in a subdivision with a third of a gallon per minute of water, so they can complain in six years to bring them water. That is literally happening in the Roanoke Valley. That wouldn't be for me. If I'm going to drive six miles, I want 4 acres.
"Lifestyles are very different. I've built developments that I wouldn't choose to live in. They're fine houses, but I wouldn't choose to live that way."
What's the future hold?
Whose job is it to protect a locality's rural character?
Don't necessarily look to local government.
"A lot of governments have made rural growth quite attractive," says Collins, at the Institute for Environmental Negotiation at UVa.
Often, the value of rural property is viewed mainly as being a catalog of developable land, and not as having any intrinsic value just by being rural.
Roanoke County Supervisor Ed Kohinke's district contains 15 percent to 20 percent of the developable land left in Roanoke County. It's far out, but eventually more people will find it.
"Probably, Catawba will be the last place in Roanoke County to get developed," he says.
Kohinke's not sympathetic to some city dwellers' attitude, which he characterizes as "I live in the city but I want a place in the country so I can come out on Sunday afternoon and drive around."
If urban folks want to preserve rural land, "maybe we're talking about parks and preserves," he says. "But does the public want to pay for that?
"Ultimately, I think the marketplace ought to decide" what gets developed, Kohinke says. "I look at it through the eyes of a private landowner."
It's hard to argue with the reasons people give for moving out - more land, lower taxes, what they see as better schools, newer houses. They want wide lawns, no urban noise, suburban homes, says Collins from UVa.
"Only now are people seeing they can't run away from these problems - the public costs, the environmental costs - so there is the movement in public opinion trying to help direct public policy."
David Hunt, an anesthesiologist who lives in the city and owns property in Roanoke County, says the city must be made more attractive to people.
"Many who move out think it's great for a little while until they realize how inconvenient it is," Hunt says. "There are a lot of things you take with you when you go out there - the same problems: the bad air, the traffic, the noises, the dogs. The usual stuff. It's not much better six miles up the road in the subdivision."
Southwest Virginia believes itself to be a slow-growth area. Builders and planners point out that growth here is small-time compared to Northern Virginia, and it is. But a blueprint of how residents want their communities to look when they're fully developed needs to be drawn before that happens, planners argue.
Others figure topography will control development, so governments don't need to worry about its getting out of control.
"You know how many acres of developable land we have left in the entire valley? Less than 60,000. Sixty thousand acres," says Bob Johnson, a Roanoke County supervisor. "So when everybody gets so bent out of shape over this development stuff - we're not going to build up the side of a mountain because VDOT will not permit the road. So, there's only so much that can be done. And we're already there.
"My job as an elected official will be measured on what happens to that 60,000 acres."
by CNB