Developers Told to Watch Orange County Initiative Vote : Slow-Growth Sentiment Reaches From Coast to Coast

A dozen miles from here, James Todd’s company is helping to build a new urban village expected to eventually rival Tysons Corner, already the nation’s 15th-largest central business district.

That news hasn’t thrilled some of the 700,000 citizens of Fairfax County, home of both Tysons Corner and the new Fairfax Center development where Todd is building office and retail buildings.

Many residents of Fairfax County, across the Potomac River from Washington, already complain of traffic that has become a rush-hour ordeal.

And Fairfax County isn’t alone in its anti-growth sentiment, according to an expert on urban villages who spoke before government officials and developers attending an Urban Land Institute conference here.

“We’re at the end of an era of relatively little government interference in the development process,” said Christopher B. Leinberger, managing partner of real estate consultant Robert Charles Lesser & Co. in Beverly Hills and author of an influential 1986 article on urban villages in Atlantic magazine.

Fairfax County voters last November threw out of office several pro-growth members of the Board of Supervisors and elected as chairman another supervisor who has long been a slow-growth advocate.

In Orange County, Calif., residents are preparing to vote on a slow-growth initiative that would require developers to widen roads and make other improvements linked to traffic flow before they could build.

In suburban Princeton, N.J., residents are also considering measures to curb developers.

And at the Perimeter Center urban village in suburban Atlanta, Ga., the growth issue has local government at odds. Dekalb County has sued neighboring Fulton County, alleging that the intense development allowed by Fulton has overburdened Dekalb roads and public services.

Turning to California, Leinberger said that continuing office and commercial development in communities such as Costa Mesa, Newport Beach and Irvine tends to be “the most controversial” because residents in nearby affluent neighborhoods are often dismayed by increasing congestion.

“You should all be looking closely at that (Orange County) ballot in June,” Leinberger told participants in the ULI conference.

But residents of greater Atlanta are not quite ready to reject the city’s pro-development stance, said Truman Hartshorn, a geographer at Georgia State University in Atlanta. He added that growth has yet to become a hot political issue.

But the governor of Georgia has appointed a commission to study growth in the state, and developers will be “working in a more regulated environment in the future,” Hartshorn said.

All four of these new suburban downtowns have much in common, Leinberger said in an interview.

All were preceded by suburban housing tracts and then shopping malls, which eventually began attracting office buildings.

The first office buildings were low-rises that housed unassuming businesses such as the back-office clerical departments of banks and insurance companies, which were drawn by low rents.

But eventually, some of the affluent executives who had bought homes in these suburbs brought their companies with them. New office buildings were taller and filled with more prestigious users: corporate headquarters staff, law firms and the like.

“These are people who wanted the resort existence of places like Newport Beach with an urban-sized paycheck,” Leinberger said. “Now the wives of the same people who moved their offices there in the first place are up in arms over what their husbands created.”

The boxy, glass-encased office buildings looming over suburbs such as Costa Mesa, Newport Beach and Irvine have become symbols of growing frustration with traffic and rapid growth, he said. As late as 1963, Tysons Corner was a country store amid the cow pastures.

“But the issue is not growth,” Leinberger said. “It’s this changed structure of our cities. Growth just exacerbates it.”

In fact, many developers speaking at the conference proposed even denser development as a solution. The reasoning goes like this: the urban villages need to replace their sprawling parking lots, for example, with parking decks and build more apartments and condominiums on the uncovered land, closer to jobs and the malls and the office buildings.

The new urban villages--none of them older than 25 years, and most considerably younger--are at a midpoint in their development, planning consultant E.M. Risse told the ULI conference.

As the urban villages redevelop in coming years, they will be better able to use mass transit systems such as buses or light rail to alleviate the traffic problem, said Risse, a principal in Synergy/Planning, a consulting firm in Fairfax, Va.

“Once you get past the middle ground into high density, mass transit can work,” Risse said.

Meanwhile the traffic around Tysons Corner is often stalled, even at noon.

But James Todd, the developer whose Hazel/Peterson Co. is building offices in stores at Fairfax Center a few miles away, professes to be unworried.

“Fairfax Center and Tysons Corner are going to have similar square footage in office and commercial space, and similar densities,” he said.

“The only difference is Fairfax Center was planned.”