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 On February 2, 2005, 300 government, business, and civic leaders from the Greater Washington, D.C. region gathered to address the increasingly critical issue of growth in the region.
Using maps and colored Legos® representing jobs and housing, 300 decision-makers from 21 jurisdictions in the Washington, D.C. region recently played ?Reality Check,? a one-day exercise sponsored by the ULI Washington, the Washington area district council of the Urban Land Institute. The unique program, first offered by ULI Los Angeles, is designed to foster collective visioning about community growth.
The Washington event brought together a diverse group of stakeholders, including politicians, developers, environmentalists, and business and civic leaders, all of whom worked together to create scenarios to accommodate the 2 million additional residents and 1.6 million new jobs anticipated for the region by 2025.
?Our number one goal is to get a sense of ownership as to the outcome of the region,? said Leonard Forkas, Jr., chairman of ULI Washington and a partner with Milestone Communities, Inc., in Reston,Va. ?This exercise allows everyone at the table to gain a sense of accountability for the local decisions they make, and consider how each decision fits in the puzzle of the context of the region. Washington, D.C., is like a stepchild with 22 parents, and each parent has their own view on how the child should be raised.?
 The local leaders brought together for ?Reality Check? were asked to createa set of principles governing growth in the region and to develop scenarios for where that growth should go. For three hours, the 300 participants worked together to determine locations for projected growth. There were 30 tables, each with 10 players representing what would presumably be warring factions. Each table was responsible for several different jurisdictions, to force participants to think about the ?big-picture,? long-term consequences of growth.
Montgomery County, Md., Executive Doug Duncan, Washington Mayor Anthony A. Williams and Fairfax County, Va., Board of Supervisors Chair Gerry Connolly were among the elected officials who played ?Reality Check.? Each sat at a different table but all learned a common lesson: It?s valuable to look at a common challenge from a regional perspective.
The ULI-sponsored exercise ?is going to have an impact,? Mayor Williams predicted, ?because it?s a very ingenious way of using a map and physically demonstrating these issues of densities, land use and how we feel about ourselves, politically and economically. I think there was a joint recognition that the success of the city is really important to the success of the region.
?One of the things I?ve been hearing at the tables today is, ?it?s great to look at these things but how do you close that gap between local planning and regional needs?? We have the mechanisms ULI is an example, and the Council of Governments is another example.?
Connolly noted, ?It?s easy to put a Lego on a map but the policy implications of putting that Lego there as opposed to somewhere else are very profound. As a region and as individual jurisdictions, we?ve got our work cut out for us.? The exercise proved quite valuable in moving toward a coherent strategy to deal with the influx of people who will be moving into the area during the next 20 years, Connolly observed.
In the outer-ring suburbs of Fairfax County, where he is chief executive, Connolly said the ?pressure for us to go toward more urban-like densities will be resisted vigorously by many of our neighborhoods and communities, and that?s quite understandable.? He said there may be pockets where higher densities could be acceptable, ?but even that will be politically a difficult sell.?
Duncan of Montgomery County said the challenge is going to be ?how you translate that [?Reality Check? experience] into reality and actually get things built and get the densities you need to accommodate growth.?
Following the invitation-only exercise in the morning, a public session drew another 500 people who came to hear the key findings of the group. Gerrit Knaap, executive director of the National Center for Smart Growth at the University of Maryland, said the morning session reached a consensus on four principles for guiding growth:
- Preserve and protect natural areas and green space;
- Create new development near transit;
- Maintain a balance of jobs and housing; and
- Focus new development back into the urban core.
Mick Staton, a member of the Board of Supervisors in Loudoun County, Va., among the fastest growing counties in the nation, said, ?What I don?t want to happen is have the work that was done in this room be totally visionary with a lot of high-density developments in the areas that aren?t going to want it and when this hits the street, people look at it and instantly reject it as a nonstarter. You can?t be completely restrained by political realities, but you can?t ignore them at the same time.?
One of the region?s developers, Thomas Bozzuto, president and chief executive officer of The Bozzuto Group in Greenbelt, Md., found the exercise ?fascinating on two grounds: It got a bunch of people with very disparate views sitting at the same table, and everybody sitting around the table was looking at the issue regionally.? Bozzutto said his table had ?heated discussions over the principles? but far less difficulty actually deciding where the growth should go. ?The more we can do something like this with local decision-makers, the better off we will be.?
The combined results of the mock land-use decisions at the 30 tables resulted in several scenarios for the Washington region?s future growth, including:
- An increase in development near transit;
- An increase in jobs near transit;
- The percentage of households inside the urban core remaining stable; and
- A decrease in the percentage of jobs in the outer-ring neighborhoods.
A complete report on the ?Reality Check? exercise will be presented April 19 at ULI Washington?s trends conference in downtown Washington.
?The question was whether the time was right to do it here, and I think today?s exercise proved that it was,? concluded Laura Cole, executive director of ULI Washington. ?What we need to figure out are the type of resources we will need to take this to the next level.?
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