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Growth OK when it's family

Date published: 3/1/2003

EVERYBODY IS screaming about growth these days.

Spotsylvania County is exploding. Stafford is getting out of hand. Houses are going up everywhere in Culpeper. Where will it all end?

These cries come from almost every mouth. Everybody, it seems, is against growth.

Everybody except the developers. The developers are the bad guys. They build houses just to spite those of us who oppose growth and, worst of all, they are getting rich doing it. What kind of people would go out and try to make a dollar by building houses? To hear many people talk, making money--at least when developers do it--is anti-American.

Now I am not a developer and I certainly am not rich, but I don't begrudge anyone who wants to make a buck by building a house. And I am smart enough to know that no matter how hard we try, we are not going to stop growth. It is a fact of life along the Eastern Seaboard and we'd better get used to it.

Houses, like any other commodity, are built on a supply-and-demand basis and there must be a great demand for homes right now because I don't see any new ones sitting empty. In fact, most are sold before they are even finished.

The argument here is that people from Northern Virginia are swooping down and scooping up houses right and left. This is absolutely true. Still, if everyone from the Washington suburbs is moving to Stafford, Spotsylvania and Culpeper counties, then there should be a ton of empty houses in Fairfax, Prince William and Arlington counties.

Of course, there is not. The housing crunch is just as bad in Northern Virginia as it is here. Apparently there is a need for new homes. So much for the developers-are-building-here-for-spite theory.

The truth is, if not another single soul moved into the area we would need to construct a ton of houses just to keep up with local population growth. There are now 18 public and private high schools within the circulation boundaries of The Free Lance-Star and each one of those institutions graduates an average of 300 young men and women every June.

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Date published: 3/1/2003