The problem with Poolesville

Blue America needs to want to grow

Poolesville, Maryland is a small town of about 6,000 people that lies 33 miles northwest of Washington, DC, just east of the Potomac River. Leesburg, Virginia is a larger town of 45,000 people located 39 miles northwest of Washington, DC, just west of the Potomac River. As the crow flies, the towns are about six miles apart, but if you want to drive from Poolesville to Leesburg, the route is a roundabout 27-mile trip that takes over 40 minutes.

Back in the annus horribilis of 2020, I spent most Saturdays taking our kid on some kind of outdoor hike or excursion. That often meant exploring the Civil War battlefields of the Mid-Atlantic, and there’s a relatively minor battlefield right outside of Leesburg on the banks of the river at a place called Ball’s Bluff. Obviously, the easiest way to get there from DC is to take the direct route to Leesburg. But this was Covid and the point was to find ways to kill time, so what I did instead was drive to Poolesville and cross the river to Leesburg using White’s Ferry.

The Ferry, founded in the 1780s, uses a cross-river cable to tow a big flat barge across the river. It can carry people, cars, bikes, whatever. There used to be 100 ferries across the Potomac, but they’ve gone out of business as more bridges have been constructed over the years. Except for White’s Ferry, which even though it’s kinda slow, was still less slow than the roundabout drive via Point of Rock.

But shortly after I rode it, the Ferry closed due to a dispute between the owners of the Ferry and the owners of the land on the Virginia side of the river. The Ferry itself is worthless without the right to land on the Virginia side. And the Virginia side landowner, I assume, wanted more money. At first this seemed like this might just be a blip, but the dispute has now dragged on for over three years, and it seems increasingly likely that ferry service may never be restored. This has become a problem for people in the Poolesville area who now face a much more inconvenient trip to Dulles airport or the big shopping malls of Tyson’s Corner. Even more so, Poolesville-area businesses got used to weekend leisure visitors from the more populous Virginia side of the river, many of whom would come to Poolesville to ride bikes or whatever and then end up getting a meal in Maryland. So officials from the Maryland side have been asking Virginia to use the state’s power of eminent domain to force a solution that would reopen the ferry.

Virginia hasn’t done this, in part because eminent domain is a sensitive subject in general. But beyond that, Virginia has its own longstanding preferred solution to this problem: build a goddamn bridge because it’s 2024 and not 1783. Maryland has been resisting this, though.

And that’s what makes this Poolesville situation fascinating.

On an abstract level, almost every politician in the United States would tell you that they want a growing economy with rising living standards, that they want kids to grow up to have better lives than their parents. That they want America to continue to be a shining city on a hill that, in some sense or other, leads the world. But people not only have sincere disagreements about which policies will generate those outcomes, on another, less abstract level, many disputes are in fact driven by people like those who hold the power in Poolesville and truly do not want to see the economy grow.

Poolesville’s case against the bridge

A lot of the local coverage of this has been driven by the Fair Access for Western Montgomery County Committee, a pro-ferry advocacy group. The whole story is not a big deal, substantively — it’s taking place in peripheral suburban areas, and local media has been taking it in the chin economically. So I don’t blame anyone for mostly covering this as a low-effort story where you quote a local advocacy group and don’t push deeper.

But this piece Martin Austermuhle did for DCist (which has tragically since been shut down by the local NPR affiliate which owns it) in spring of 2023 revealed the much more profound truth of the situation, which is that this is not really an argument about a ferry at all. It’s an argument about land use in Montgomery County:

“We’ve done some analysis because when we were having the discussion about eminent domain, it’s like, ‘Well, how many people are traveling that road for the purposes of business versus pleasure?’ That was a question from our side of the of the river. Not enough to to to even come close to [justify] eminent domain. Are we losing money on our side of the river? We are not. I know they are in Montgomery County,” says Phyllis Randall, chair of the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors.

Randall says the situation could be resolved by simply replacing the ferry with a bridge, something Virginia has been pushing for years. (The closest bridges are the American Legion Bridge far to the south, and Point of Rocks 17 miles to the north.) But the idea of a bridge has long been a non-starter in Maryland, and [Poolesville Area Chamber of Commerce President Tom] Kettler says it remains so.

“If you bring a bridge across, that would just basically blow up the agricultural reserve,” he says. “You’re not going to be able to bring a bridge across without just fundamentally changing the land use out here.”

Montgomery County and Loudoun County both have Democratic majorities on their respective county boards. They are both primarily suburban/exurban jurisdictions, though Montgomery stretches all the way to the DC line and has some pockets of urbanism around Silver Spring and Downtown Bethesda. But they’ve also adopted very different attitudes toward growth. Loudoun has more than doubled in population over the last 20 years, while growth in Montgomery has been a lot slower.

And a key reason for that is the Agricultural Reserve.

What’s that? Well, if you look at the official documents, there’s a lot of talk about the need to “strengthen agriculture” and “the preservation of agriculture.” And the ag reserve does, in fact, have a bunch of farms and farm-like places in it. I’ve enjoyed pick-your-own apple outings many times at different Ag Reserve properties. I’ve been to two different farmhouse weddings at Ag Reserve venues. Butler’s Orchard operates what’s basically a giant farm-themed playground that’s fun for kids. But it’s clearly not true that the farmland of Montgomery County is somehow providing food security to the DC metro area, and of course, it would not be desirable for a major metropolitan area to be trying to engage in food autarky of some kind. The Montgomery County planning body says the ongoing presence of these farm- and farm-like uses “is a notable achievement in an area so close to the nation’s capital, where development pressure remains perpetual and intense.”

And it is notable. But is it good?

At the end of the day, the core of the Ag Reserve is a mix of financial subsidies to operating farms (fine, if perhaps a little wasteful) and obscene large lot zoning whereby “the Agricultural Reserve (AR zone) limits development to one house per 25 acres.” This policy is obviously not single-handedly responsible for housing scarcity in Maryland or the DC suburbs. But not only does it not help, it is explicitly designed to contribute to housing scarcity. That’s what the talk about “development pressure” means. People would really like to build more houses in this area, and they are not allowed to. Loudoun County, Virginia, meanwhile, would really like to make it easier for people to get from Poolesville to Leesburg. But Montgomery County doesn’t want to do that, because if you improved Poolesville’s transportation connections, you might get even more “development pressure.”

Many roads to housing abundance

One way YIMBY ideas have made their way into the progressive bloodstream is via the argument that upzoning already developed areas is an alternative to sprawl. Upzoning the Ag Reserve, by contrast, would just be sprawl.

It’s fine by me if a person wants to be a really fanatical anti-sprawler. But I would challenge anyone who puts that down as their case for this large lot zoning to ask what themselves else they’re doing to divert the development pressure. The town of Poolesville itself is an island surrounded by the Ag Reserve, but zoning inside the town itself is also incredibly restrictive. It’s not just that multifamily housing is restricted to two tiny swathes downtown: Much larger portions of the town itself still have the 25+ acre super-mansion zoning, and a majority of it has a minimum lot size of at least half an acre (a bit more than 20,000 square feet).

The whole Agriculture Reserve idea strikes me as dumb. If you want to invest public money in buying up swathes of open land and turning them into parks, that’s great. But there’s a difference between a park — a publicly owned facility for recreation and nature conservation — and mandatorily underdeveloped private land. There are, in fact, several parks in or adjacent to the Ag Reserve. Maryland should allow the private land to suburbanize and should make provision for using the resulting property tax windfall to create a Park Expansion Fund that would buy up parcels from willing sellers to expand the area’s parks.

But if you truly are dedicated to the anti-sprawl cause, you should be going to town on things like Poolesville’s restrictive zoning. This is a nice small town with a radius of about 1.5 miles in any direction from downtown, the kind of place where kids could easily ride their bikes to school from anywhere in town. Why shouldn’t you be allowed to build a house with a small yard anywhere in this town? If people want to live in townhouses and apartments in Poolesville, why should it be illegal? How come Rockville, MD (the town from the REM song) elsewhere in the county zones for excessively detached houses (that’s the orange) within a few blocks of a MARC station?

Of course, you can find some reason for any of this. But the point is that, to an extent that progressive intellectuals neglect to appreciate, a totalizing anti-growth mindset has taken hold across huge swathes of the country.

If not here, where?

Montana Governor Greg Gianforte was a featured speaker at the recent YIMBYtown conference in Austin. That struck me as a good idea on two levels. One is that the land use reforms Montana has enacted are genuinely very consequential. The other is that the housing abundance movement needs some conservative champions. Something we recently learned in New York is that even in a state that blue, it hasn’t been possible to get the legislature to act on the basis of an all-Dem coalition. In part, that’s a simple question of counting the votes. But it’s also a question of a political safety blanket. Most members of the Democratic majority will be more comfortable acting more boldly if it can be a bipartisan initiative. That means welcoming high-profile conservatives into the tent, and also trying to learn from them about what ideas would help build coalitions.

Of course, Gianforte does lots of other terrible right-wing stuff. He’s the Republican governor of a very conservative state!

Dan Reed from our local group, Greater Greater Washington, objected to his elevation, arguing that “abundant housing means an inclusive, pluralistic society, period. Making an example of folks like Greg Gianforte not only undermines that, but feeds the perception (unfair as it may be) that the movement is the province of white libertarian bros.”

This strikes me as the wrong complaint to make about the fact that such a large share of America’s housing is being produced in places with anti-abortion, anti-trans leadership.

When I was a kid and New York City was dramatically cheaper than it is today, it was a real refuge for LGBT people and others who didn’t fit in wherever they came from. The city has only become even more progressive in its official stances and attitudes since then, but successful efforts to hold off “development pressure” have made it dramatically less accessible in practice. I’m glad to see Maryland’s governor Wes Moore talking a good game about economic growth and housing production, but the actual policies he’s embracing are pretty modest in their impact. Some of that is political caution and prudence on his part, so fair enough. But some of it seems to be the ongoing influence of progressive dogma and hangups and fear of market mechanisms.

What happens in a world where Maryland refuses to build bridges, refuses to allow apartments in its build up areas, and refuses to allow “sprawl” into highly valuable rural areas? The state’s economy stagnates. And to an extent, the national economy stagnates. But people do move to Texas or Utah or Montana or North Carolina or Florida or wherever it is that policy welcomes growth and dynamism, even if many of their other social policies are incredibly regressive. Taking these criticisms of Gianforte seriously should mean challenging the most progressive legislators in the safest seats to welcome more neighbors into their backyards, in very large quantities, with minimal strings attached, rather than insisting on only the most artfully bespoke, transit-oriented mid-rise projects with just the right amount of affordable set-asides. Notably, Texas and Florida build more (and larger) apartments than New York and California so it’s not just about sprawl.

I don’t think there’s any state in the union that has housing policies I would describe as “good.” But there are definitely some states — mostly red ones but also Virginia and Colorado and to an extent DC — that have a broadly pro-growth housing dynamic. And then there are the ones like Maryland, whose leaders would deny that they are deliberately strangling growth, but where if you peek under the hood for even a minute, you see how hard they are working to hold back the tide of development. I think this is socially and economically corrosive, and ultimately it’s going to be politically corrosive if the places most associated with Democratic governance are producing slow growth and steady out-migration. Build a damn bridge!