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Normie, if you are 100% in complete support of private land owners being permitted to do whatever they want, whenever they want, then I hope someone develops something adjacent to Cascades that will severely detrimentally impact YOUR quality-of-life, whether it be something as benign as a new subdivision of single-family homes that will further stress outdated roadways or something as ominous as a stinky wastewater treatment plant.
Ah, but you disregard the beauty of living in a large HOA. Instead of trying to enforce rules on people who already own property, an HOA buys a piece of property themselves (which is the same approach I suggested you and your friends could do). This gives them the right to establish an HOA and set certain conditions for anyone wishing to buy pieces of the property from them.
Getting a bit histrionic, dontcha think? People are going to hit deer whether or not a neighborhood has highrises or single family homes.
The more and more we encroach upon the exurban frontier with our development, the more and more common animal/vehicle collisions are destined to become. Generally speaking as an area is developed the wildlife, after a period of confusion, moves further and further out into the wilderness away from human activity. However, at some point we're just destroying their habitats more quickly than they can adapt. In the 1960s Reston was largely a natural area. Now in 2009 it is the largest census designated place in Fairfax County, with a population of 65,000 and growing. I have not seen a deer here and likely won't because they have since moved further north and west to areas that were once rural and are now themselves similarly being plowed over. Now we have places like Leesburg, Purcellville, Hamilton, etc. in Central Loudoun County that are quickly sprawling outwards and destroying more and more woodlands for tract-housing where deer once roamed.
It's amazing how poorly people here in NoVA tend to "coexist" with nature. Do any of you remember the major flap in Great Falls over the man who was preparing to gun down deer because they were eating his flowers around his newer McMansion? Even BOB BARKER got involved in a major legal battle over as to whether it is more appropriate to leave the deer alone, as they were there long before that area was destroyed for people, or whether someone's right to "show off" their pretentious landscaping trumped the lives of animals. I had never before heard of a case of people supporting the slaughtering of animals to "protect their landscaping investment" before until I moved here. I just couldn't fathom that people thought it was appropriate for someone to gun down animals in their backyards for such a lame reason as "I want people to look at the pretty flowers I (my landscaper) planted and compliment me on them."
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Originally Posted by normie
Ah, but you disregard the beauty of living in a large HOA. Instead of trying to enforce rules on people who already own property, an HOA buys a piece of property themselves (which is the same approach I suggested you and your friends could do). This gives them the right to establish an HOA and set certain conditions for anyone wishing to buy pieces of the property from them.
I'm 22 and earn $42,000. I can barely afford a 1-BR rental, and you're encouraging me and my "friends" (who are generally 22-26 and similarly earn $40,000-$60,000) to pool our resources to purchase land to preserve it from shady developers? I have $1,000 to my name right now. Perhaps if the people in NoVA who DID have the $100,000+ incomes, the fancy European vehicles, and correspondingly the spare cash to burn generally cared about long-range urban planning as those of us who are nearly impoverished your idea would make sense. How do you suggest I go about buying up tens of thousands of acres of land in Loudoun County for hundreds of millions of dollars to designate as natural preservation areas? More importantly, does Lodoun County have a master plan that it strictly adheres to (with "adheres" being the key word) that DOES have areas permanently designated solely for conservation?
I'm generally not a fan of HOAs. In theory I understand they were devised to protect people's investments from being ruined by neighbors, but most I'm familiar with are much too restrictive. For example, thanks to Reston's aggressive design review board we have an entire town...err..."census designated place"...that looks mostly mauve, taupe, sepia, or other "earthy" colors because anything else might be "offensive." Give me a break! A spattering of color here and there wouldn't cause Reston to cave in on itself overnight. I'm not saying turn Reston into the next South Beach, but people need more options to be allowed to express their individuality. It's one thing for an HOA to tell you that you can't burn trash in your backyard due to concerns over the fumes irritating neighbors who may have asthma. It's another thing entirely to tell people they can't have above-ground pools or clothes lines because they are "unsightly." Well heaven forbid some of us can't afford $15,000 for an inground pool or wish to let our clothes air dry instead of wasting energy running the dryer all the time.
There's a lot of deer in Reston. You have to get out of your car. I see them all the time. There's often deer grazing behind Lake Anne Elementary as well as other more wooded places around Reston and Vienna.
I think you could make a better case that the area around the Beltway is underdeveloped and that's causing the high-density development to move to the outer suburbs like Reston and Herndon first. Annandale, Fairfax, Vienna, Southern Falls Church, and North Springfield are all 10-15 miles closer to DC than Reston/Herndon. They're not getting much of the developer interest in high-rises because they lack proximity to the Metro.
In the 1960s Reston was largely a natural area. Now in 2009 it is the largest census designated place in Fairfax County, with a population of 65,000 and growing. I have not seen a deer here and likely won't because they have since moved further north and west to areas that were once rural and are now themselves similarly being plowed over.
Well, you're not looking very hard, dude. I have a HERD of deer that visit my property in ANNANDALE almost daily. Maybe you need to rise earlier...deer are mostly nocturnal and you have the best chance of seeing them right after sunrise.
Deer are spotted occasionally in DC! They are everywhere because we have driven the predators away, and caused the deer population to explode beyond any natural limits. The motor vehicle is their only predator around here...
Well, you're not looking very hard, dude. I have a HERD of deer that visit my property in ANNANDALE almost daily. Maybe you need to rise earlier...deer are mostly nocturnal and you have the best chance of seeing them right after sunrise.
Deer are spotted occasionally in DC! They are everywhere because we have driven the predators away, and caused the deer population to explode beyond any natural limits. The motor vehicle is their only predator around here...
We see deer, foxes, rabbits, chipmunks, squirrels, turtles and birds in Vienna. And that's just what I see on our street. They seem to like our sprawling suburbs better than ScranBarre!
PS - to Car54, the one thing I will grant ScranBarre as the 22-year-old in this debate is the right to use the term "dude." We are both too old. Sorry.
Actually, I wouldn't mind that at all. In fact, I think it would be great. I lived in suburban LA for more than 20 years and loved it. People sneer at LA for being "a hundred suburbs with no real downtown" but IMO that was a very liveable design. Urban sprawl is ok by me, it meant commercial/business areas popped up all over the place instead of being confined to a humongous downtown. Because of this, my commute was always short no matter how many times I changed jobs.
I have lived in LA and in NOVA and, although I prefer LA a million times more than NOVA, the sprawl in LA is the source of excessive use of gas and pollution. I agree with the idea of building up more than out because it creates less of an environmental impact. True, LA does have alot of commercial areas as opposed to 1 giant downtown which does have its benefits. But what happens if you live in Long Beach and you have to commute to te SF valley for work? Your gonna be stuck on the 405 in bumper to bumper traffic for ever. What I think is the best idea for NOVA is to extend the Metro and build up in the areas close to the Metro and keep the rural areas rural. While you are focusing so much on landowners rights, I feel that you are missing and important point; many people in Northern Virginia's rural areas don't want to live in suburbia. I actually remember reading a story in a local paper about a group of people in Loudoun County fighting suburban sprawl the last time that I visited my mom, who lives in Reston. As to you Scran, I like what you said in some of your other posts about lack of sidewalks in Reston; I would also recommend saying something about the lack of streetlights as well the next time you're in one of those meetings.
Not only do we have a gajillion deer in eastern Loudoun, recent years have brought us bears and coyotes. So, no, development isn't pushing the wildlife out permanently.
I'm generally not a fan of HOAs. In theory I understand they were devised to protect people's investments from being ruined by neighbors, but most I'm familiar with are much too restrictive.
But you know the rules of the game before you move into a particular HOA zone. It kills me that people complain ex post facto about their HOAs when, in Virginia, either by law or by contract, you must receive and agree to the HOA terms/covenants before closing on property (I mean, I'll grumble about certain things that I dislike and chose to live with, but I'm not going to to rail against the whole system).
I'm looking for houses in the area, and some of the HOAs are definitely to restrictive (and expensive), but that's what the residents of the HOA want; if they didn't, they'd amend the rules or not move there in the first place. It's not as if HOAs are so huge that you have no choice but to live in a particular neighborhood - in the Herndon/Reston area, multiple HOAs are present in every zip code area. You get your pick. And if not, there's always Sterling, Centreville, Leesburg, etc.
Just because you (and I) would be unable to compete in terms of money to buy up tracts of land for whatever reason, does not mean it's right to deprive other people who do have the resources. I won't speak for normie, but that's what I think he's saying, and what I believe as well. There's a lot of things I can't afford, but that doesn't mean I should legally be able to deprive other people of those things, just because it galls me that they can afford it and I can't.
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Originally Posted by jfields
While you are focusing so much on landowners rights, I feel that you are missing [an] important point; many people in Northern Virginia's rural areas don't want to live in suburbia.
That's all well and good. If that's the case, then those rural landowners should not sell their plots of land to the "evil" developers; or if they do sell, sell with restrictive covenants preventing the land from becoming something they don't want.
I don't know what other "rights" there are beyond the rights of a property owner. The "right" to enjoy the scenery of another person's farm? The "right" to control land that doesn't belong to you? Who doesn't want more control than they actually have? It doesn't mean it's right, however.
If a farmer has land and wants to sell it to another farmer, there's no reason he can't do so. If he wants to repurpose his land for tract housing it is fully within the purvue of the government to make a decision on whether to rezone his property. This is a good thing - it keeps your neighbor from turning their residential property into a hog farm or building a shanty-town on it.
Rezoning is always an option. But it can backfire. Pcity brought up a great example:
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Originally Posted by pcity
Growth boundaries don't work anyway. Stop growth in Loudon? It'll just leap over Loudon and go to West Virginia. It already has!
The current regulations in Western Loudon are the worst. They limit you to like one house per 10 acres or something like that. It doesn't preserve farmland or meadows; it just encourages mansions with 10 acre yards.
This is a perfect example of unintended consequences from zoning. The idea was to block development from spreading west of Purcellville as a way of cutting down on the traffic congestion. They thought for sure that a 10-acre zoning rule would create a "development barrier". Instead, the developments hopscotched right over the county and sprung up in WV. Making even more traffic driving through from WV.
Did this zoning extreme stop farms from being turned into housing developments? No. As pcity noted,we simply got a bunch of ten-acre yards for multi-million dollar properties.
Which led to further unintended consequences. Local kids who lived in the western towns grew up, wanted to buy a home of their own, but couldn't possibly afford to buy a 10-acre spread. So instead of being able to live in their own town they had to move to West Virginia. Which made the traffic congestion even worse.
Plus, the reality of having 10-acre spreads is that the buyers are mostly people buying from out-of-state, often from out of the country buying second homes. And many of the buyers got subprime loans because that's what they had to do to afford 10-acre properties. Guess what, when the economy when sour those second homes and subprime loans began having foreclosure problems. And there were no buyers for properties that large, so places that foreclosed remained foreclosed.
None of these consequences were intended... but all sorts of unintended things can happen when you play around with zoning restrictions.
BTW, another problem with playing with zoning laws is that it can ruin your political career. Almost every politician who's tried it in the last decade has kissed his re-election goodbye. And the zoning changes get reversed anyway, just as soon as another election takes place.
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