Two years ago, politicians in Northern Virginia were running on platforms that promised to slow the rate of growth and restrict residential development. Heck, Corey Stewart’s first campaign for Prince William BOCS Chairman concentrated not on illegal immigration but on controlling growth and restricting development.
Throughout the Washington suburbs, the economic downturn has accomplished what the slow-growth movement could not: It has slowed growth significantly.
Once the dominant topic in regional politics, taming residential development has largely been eclipsed by the fiscal woes created by the slowdown. Rising construction costs, plummeting property assessments, soaring foreclosures and high gas prices have local officials debating how to craft budgets with limited resources instead of arguing over new subdivisions.
Growth “was the most salient issue and politically sensitive issue between the late 1990s and up through as late as 2006,” said Corey A. Stewart (R-At Large), chairman of the Prince William Board of County Supervisors. Now, “people just aren’t concerned about it because there’s no residential development to be concerned about. We don’t hear about it much at all.”
And now that we actually have slow growth, we’ll all get to see the consequences of it and of a construction downturn.
Something tells me we’ll realize the old days weren’t so bad at all.
