In March 1961, as the futuristic main terminal of Dulles International Airport was being built, Robert E. Simon, Jr. bought 6,750 acres way out in the Virginia countryside that once belonged to a physician name Wiehle – whose 19th century dreams including establishing a utopia on the spot. Simon, whose father co-owned New York s Carnegie Hall, had embraced the New Towns movement which, unlike the strictly zoned suburbs of the 1950s, offered residential, commercial, industrial and cultural activities all in the same place. Today it s called mixed-use development. Borrowing ideas from experimental Radburn, NJ, Simon built Reston, the first planned community in the Washington region. Its many features included a lake and the widely copied Reston Town Center. Simon believed nobody would ever want to leave his little paradise. It hasn t quite worked out that way. In 1990, Reston had a nice mix of age groups: 21 percent under 18, 10 percent over 65, and the rest in the taxpaying 18-64 bracket. A decade later, however, there were 28 percent less retirees (who require less local resources) and 4 percent more children (who require more). In contrast, the retired population in unplanned Vienna skyrocketed 122 percent during the same two decades, while the number of youngsters declined 1 percent. Older people were staying put in Vienna, not Reston. And Reston couldn’t keep South Lakes H.S. even close to capacity, even though other nearby schools were overcrowded. It s been easy for backers of the Fairfax School Board s recent redistricting debacle to describe their opponents as racists because South Lakes has a higher percentage of low-income minority students. What hasn t been reported is the fact that much of the opposition to redistricting came from legal immigrants, many of them professionals who bought homes in certain neighborhoods specifically so that their children could attend some of the highest-ranked schools in the nation, including Madison H.S in Vienna. South Lakes is not on the list. After choosing where to live based on the quality of the school district, they understandably felt betrayed when the boundaries shifted right under their feet. So in just 50 years, Reston went from a planned utopia to a place where even discerning newcomers to America don t want to live or educate their children. Meanwhile, unplanned Vienna is, by all accounts, prospering. The story of Reston is important because the Tysons Corner Task Force is now trying to do the same kind of thing to Tysons that Simon tried in Reston almost a half century ago. But planning doesn t always work out the way it s advertised. Fairfax County is forgetting once again that real communities are the result of slow, organic growth as residents gradually get to know each other through voluntary association, not a fast-buck developer s dream or a socially-engineered utopia that never quite lives up to the hype.
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