I’ve written before about a phenomenon here in my home region, the Washington, DC, area, that you might call an “inverted density curve.” The “normal” density curve would look like one of those Missing Middle Housing charts: Starting with an urban core or downtown, with density gradually decreasing as you get further out. At the very edge, you’d expect to see larger, detached houses on relatively large lots, in an area that was recently countryside but is now exurban. Whether or not it actually makes sense to build that far away from transit or jobs, on a fragile, spread-out, infrastructure-heavy pattern (it doesn’t), that has been the pattern for a long time, and it’s a pretty familiar one.

An “inverted density curve,” on the other hand, proceeds mostly normally until you reach that exurban edge, or maybe the “middle” suburbs, where instead of the density tapering off, you’ll find a lot of new, dense, mixed-use construction going up. The common idea that you live near the city for people and energy and you move far away for large houses and privacy is breaking down, in my region and in other high-growth regions where jobs and population growth have outstripped housing supply.

This phenomenon is no doubt complicated and multifaceted, but it also obviously has a lot to do with the fact that inner suburbs—once the former countryside themselves—were built at relatively low densities, and now most of their land area is locked up under rigid zoning codes. Such codes, along with the attitude that nothing should ever change (or, in Strong Towns language, that suburbs are meant to be built all at once and then left in that exact state), do not really stop growth.

But they do two things: force new development further out than the market would naturally put it, and create sky-high home prices by inducing a mismatch between the “real” land value and the intensity of what’s allowed on that land. What happens is that apartments, townhomes, and mixed-use centers end up sprouting up in former fields way out at the metro edge, and that those who want something approaching dense, urban living have relatively few choices in between the urban core and the exurban edge.

I’ve written about this mostly in Maryland’s DC suburbs—here, for example, looking at a new town-center development along the I-270 corridor northwest of DC—and I’ve seen it in middle or outer suburbs in both Maryland and Virginia, such as Rockville or Fairfax.

Gainesville: A Case Study

All of this to introduce one of the most dramatic examples I’ve seen yet, out in Gainesville, Virginia. Gainesville is southwest of DC on Interstate 66, along a corridor seeing major new construction. It is not in Fairfax or Loudoun, but in Prince William County. Parts of this county, like Manassass and Woodbridge, have been heavily developed for a long time. But most of the development in the Gainesville area is relatively recent (and further stimulated by a major expansion of I-66).

First of all, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen such a dramatic juxtaposition of the immediate land use and the surrounding area. I’ll start with the surrounding area. Here is the satellite view of the area I explored, with the three developments I visited roughly in the middle, along U.S. Route 29:

And here is the largest of the developments I visited. (All of them are right along U.S. 29.)

This development, Madison Crescent, mixes four-story and three-story brick townhomes with detached houses, with a little park in the middle, all immediately adjacent to a strip plaza. From the main parking lot, it looks like any old strip plaza. The smaller stores have back entrances, however, and that side of the strip resembles a Main Street. It’s a small cosmetic detail that doesn’t really change the land use, but does somewhat enhance the strip-plaza form.

The development also includes a supermarket (Harris Teeter) which is a one- or two-minute walk from most of the homes. That’s great, because it means that despite the car-centric location of Madison Crescent, residents can at least grocery shop without driving. That was obviously one of the perks of moving out here, given its far-flung location. But the supermarket looks like this now:

If anybody does want to do grocery shopping, or much of anything else—school, daycare, cultural activities, eating out (beyond the small handful of restaurants in the strip plaza)—they not only have to drive, but they’ll most likely be getting onto U.S. 29. I was standing in the driveway to Madison Crescent when I took this photo:

Traffic lights every few hundred feet? Check. Multiple lanes of fast traffic in each direction? Check. Lack of sidewalks? Check. Lots of turning lanes and commercial driveways? Check and check. This is a classic stroad, and it underlines how discordant the reality of a completely car-dependent, walkable, mixed-use development is. There are other roads you can use to get places, but most of the new traffic coming out of the new development here is funneled through this sort of landscape.

The next development I visited, two and a half miles down, is similar. It features a complex of low-rise apartment buildings attached by walking paths to an adjacent strip plaza (the apartments were actually built a couple of years before the retail). This one also has a supermarket. The aesthetics here aren’t as pleasant, but the form is basically the same. In front and on my right are the apartments. On my left is the back of the strip plaza, and the path to the supermarket is straight ahead.

And here I am, with the apartments behind me, on the walking trail to the supermarket, part of the budget-oriented Shoppers chain.

But, in a turn of events that is now feeling familiar, this is the state of the supermarket building. This time, I’ll show you an interior shot taken through the door:

Luckily, however, at the third development I visited, there’s a massive Wegmans supermarket, along with a lot of other large stores. This is only a shopping center, with no immediately adjacent housing. Wegmans looks like this, if you’re not familiar with it, this is just the fresh produce department:

I dug up the rough opening and closing dates for these three supermarkets along a two-and-a-half mile stretch of exurban highway, and this is what I found. Shoppers, the smallest and most budget-oriented supermarket, opened around 2005 and closed around 2011. Harris Teeter opened around 2008 and closed in 2020. And Wegmans, the only one still in business, opened in late 2008.

Despite the notion that the two defunct supermarkets were part of walkable, mixed-use communities, they did not survive very long (and there was only a three-year period when all three were operating). Each larger and newer one out-competed the preceding one. With a couple of other supermarkets a few miles to the east, it’s not at all certain that these vacant stores will ever host another supermarket. There’s a rise-and-fall arc here, yet this all happened in just a few years.

One of the lessons here is that it’s very difficult to replicate the idea of a neighborhood supermarket—or of a neighborhood at all, as these mixed-use centers try to do—without altering the scale and economics of big-box retail. These supermarkets are simply too large to serve only their immediate communities; they compete with each other across the whole area, regardless of what that means for people who live in the adjacent developments. Without business at a more fine-grained scale and able to sustain itself with smaller trade areas, you can’t ensure that these mixed-use developments will retain a grocery store on site over the long term.

Maybe that doesn’t matter—these islands of apparent urbanism out in the countryside are not cities or towns at all, and car-free or car-lite living is not possible here, despite the layout of the developments themselves, and the forms of the residential buildings.

But on the other hand, plowing over farm fields, putting up big-box retail, and abandoning it in the space of a decade or two is—like the inverted density curve, and four-story townhomes fronting a U.S. Highway 40 miles from the urban core—a sign that we’re doing something very, very wrong.

(All images for this piece were provided by the author.)

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Gainesville: A Case Study

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