The Fairfax Extra edition of the Post runs a great package on development in that county

Last week's Fairfax Extra reported on the results of a Fairfax County study, Anticipating the Future: A Discussion of Trends in Fairfax County, published in March 2006, with a main article and a set of supplementary data tables. It relates to the old saws (1) "if you don't know where you've been you don't know where you're going" and (2) if you don't have a map, how do you know where you're going?

--Not Quite the Conventional View: Some Surprising Details About the County's Growth and Diversity Emerge in a Report on Trends. The basic outline of Fairfax County's transformation is well known: The county's job base has exploded in size, its population has grown far more diverse and its housing market has boomed. From the article:

In ways big and small, some of the report's data and projections challenge commonly held assumptions about the county and where it's headed.... The report, compiled by county staff members from multiple sources, offers these considerations:

· Reports of the county's urbanization are slightly exaggerated.
· Fairfax may be full of new Americans, but huddled masses is hardly the way to describe them.
· Despite what its boosters say, the county may have passed the days of its most robust growth.

Much has been said about how Fairfax is rapidly urbanizing, changing from a traditional suburb to a place that has some of the characteristics of a city. The county has grown much more crowded -- one-third of the vacant land that existed in 1980 remains -- and it is more densely populated than cities such as Virginia Beach, Lynchburg and Roanoke.

But as the report indicates, what is being built doesn't look much like a city. High-rise apartments are going up here and there, in Reston, at the Vienna Metro station and at Tysons Corner, but the bulk of the growth is in the form of traditional suburban housing. ****

--Women In the Labor Force
1970 43.4% 1980 61.7% 1990 70.7% 2000 66.1% 2004 65.8%
-- Vacant Land, In Acres
1980 75,550 1990 45,042 2000 29,529 2004 24,093
-- Yes, It Really Is Much More Crowded (population density per acre; school enrollments)
-- An Era of Vigorous Economic Growth (job statistics)

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**** Speaking of the academic disciplines of sociology and history and definitions, the traditional definition of "urbanization" refers more to density rather than the "morphologoical" characteristics of what makes a city "urban". Hence "what is being built [in Fairfax] doesn't look much like a city" while Washington, DC clearly has a much different pattern of development compared to Fairfax County as a whole.

Index Keywords: Fairfax-County; civic-journalism