FOR PORT FOLIO MAGAZINE
THURSDAY, JULY 1, 1999
BY ALEX MARSHALL

Virginia Beach. The promised land.

It glistens in the sun, a shimmering mecca of backyards, beaches, prosperity and space. A wide open terrain where schools are good and crime is low, a destination, a place to start a life or fulfill one.

It still has that reputation to many, even as the city enters its 37th year and faces trend lines that dispute much of what I just said.

But looking out over the city’s many square miles, that easy optimistic view still has the ring of truth. You see the old grid of streets and homes on the North End, basking in the ocean air and sun, with their gentle, Nantucket-like charm. You see the prosperous resort, hauling in the bucks even while it nicely segregates its often tacky guests and attractions. You see Bob Dylan boogieing at the amphitheater, and kids bowling and swimming at recreation centers that resemble public country clubs. You see Kempsville, a land easy to make fun of as epitomizing suburban vapidity, but fundamentally a place where Filipinos, African-Americans, whites, Jews and Gentiles can all make a life.

But focus the telescope on different places, and you see a different city and future. In this view, you see simple suburban ranch houses around Green Run, Lynnhaven, Hilltop, Bayside and Princess Anne Plaza, their paint fading, the vinyl siding getting moldy, the homeowners converting to renters, and the property values flat or in decline. You see more people leaving the city then moving into it. You see neighborhoods resembling those of Los Angeles, in that they are purely suburban, yet problem ridden and dangerous. You see places where the mother will not walk half-block to the 7-Eleven by herself after dark for fear of being robbed. You see areas where kids with little adult supervision roam across yards, parking lots and roads like marauding tribes. You see a city that is very much part of a region where incomes lag well behind the national average.

Where is Virginia Beach going? The city is on the cusp, at the point of either heading down hill or working out some new trajectory that will keep it, and perhaps the region, a nice place to live.

For most of its life, the city’s biggest appeal has been what it is not: It was not Norfolk, with its declining schools, racial problems, high crime and sagging tax base. Not Portsmouth or Newport News.

The era of Virginia Beach exceptionalism is ending. It has roughly 440,000 people — roughly equal to Norfolk and Chesapeake put together. About 40 percent of the population of the Southside. There is no way something that big can be vastly different than the average.

Virginia Beach used to be richer and whiter than the rest of the region. It is much less so now.

“It used to be different, from demographic to social to economic,” said one planner. “But because it has matured, it has become more like the regional whole.”

It is still the same old Virginia Beach in one respect: It is a gigantic bedroom community, something city leaders loathe to admit. Of the 213,000 Virginia Beach residents who work, almost 100,000 do so outside city borders, according to stats from the Hampton Roads Planning District Commission.

This is a huge number. It’s even bigger in significance when you realize that these people are mostly traveling to the Naval Base, to downtown, to the shipyards in Portsmouth — jobs that drive the rest of economy. These jobs bring in money from outside that can be then spent on lawyers, doctors, newspapers, department stores, homes and all the other commercial and business activity. Without them, the rest of us are out of luck.

What this means is that Virginia Beach is still largely dependent on events outside its own borders. It’s only independent tax base is the resort, which is a good one, but not enough to support 400,000 people.

Virginia Beach’s future is deeply linked with the rest of the region. Even if the city attempts to “go it alone,” it will have deep implications for its neighbors.

As we approach 2000, I see Virginia Beach juggling a collection of political factions, any of which might manage to grab the wheel of the city and steer for awhile: Anti-tax folks. Pro-sprawlers. Light rail advocates. Regionalists. Go-it-aloners.

Here are a few possible futures for Virginia Beach, my hometown.

“REZONINGS FOR YOUR FRIENDS.”

Dean Block, the resident sage of city hall as well as the director of the city’s office of management and budget, once wrote a history of Virginia Beach that packaged its trajectory into four distinct epochs.

1968 to 1985 was probably the most interesting. This was the era where Virginia Beach grew by several hundred thousand people, often without rhyme or reason. The city’s leadership in that era, Block said, made a deal with voters. “The politicians promised to keep taxes artificially low, if in exchange they would be allowed rezone property for their friends,” Block said.

During this era, the city leaped across Rudee Inlet Bridge, across Holland Road and down to the edge of the municipal center. It left the city with a huge hangover — which voters sought to correct when they elected several anti-growth council members in 1986 that shifted the balance on council.

Starting with that council, the city started playing catch-up — and largely succeeded. Voters approved bond referendums to widen roads, build schools, libraries and recreation centers. The council tastefully renovated the resort strip. The council held the Green Line, and passed the agricultural reserve program, which helps preserve land for farming.

That era, Block said, ended about a few years ago. Now, the city is working out a new trajectory, a path to the future, a path of maturity. Several options exist for this future.

Although Block didn’t say it, one that looms is a return to “rezonings for your friends.” In the past few months, the city staff and council have backed a series of actions that signal the city, armed with Lake Gaston water, may resume fierce outward growth. The council approved the extension of Ferrell Parkway down to Sandbridge, despite environmental objections. City staff considered, and then backed off, from recommending removing the agricultural reserve program from “the transition era,” the land north of Indian River road that many developers are eyeing.

The city has recently elected two council members that are much more friendly to outward residential development, Margaret Eure and Don Weeks. Both recently attended a meeting of rural land owners and developers seeking to develop more property and depose Councilwoman Barbara Henley, whose priority has been protecting farmland.

This could be bad news for the city. More outward growth would eat up farm land, incur more infrastructure costs, make traffic worse by extending sprawl, and push housing values down within the rest of the city. Of course, it would also make a few developers and property owners a lot of money, so we know the vote will be close.

INWARD, NOT OUTWARD.

Contrasting to a return to outward growth is a coalition of sorts, an interesting combination of environmentalists and business leaders, that advocate growing inward. They are also generally the same ones talking about greater regionalism.

Under this path, the city commits money to the light rail system. It not only holds the Green Line, but works for regional growth control. It starts spending its infrastructure dollars where most of the people live, on new sidewalks, parks and other amenities, rather than on new roads and sewers out in Sandbridge and around the courthouse. It starts filling in some of the blank spaces that sit beside perfectly good highways already built. At last estimate, almost 10,000 acres of developed land sat above the city’s Green Line.

Michael Barrett, a city and regional business leader, said growing inward is why the light rail line is such a key question.

“Light rail makes the city look at itself and figure out who it wants to become,” Barrett said. In Barrett’s view, not much opportunity is left for development outward.

“Future development may mean redevelopment,” Barrett said. Light rail would help develop Pembroke, Lynnhaven and the resort into much richer, denser and higher tax-paying areas. He sees “nodes of development” that would pay more taxes and allow for different life styles at the beach.

Such a community, said Jan Eliassen, who recently stepped down from the Planning Commission, would fit with the city’s vision of a place where everyone could live.

“We don’t have as many different communities as the different communities need, from college graduates to empty nesters,” Eliassen said. “The kind of community we ought to design is a place where some of people can walk to work, some can walk to school, some can walk to shopping, and all of them can walk to reliable public transportation.”

The different communities plan would help balance the city’s largely monochromatic lifestyle choice. Some people love Virginia Beach but others hate it.

Andres Duany, the sharp-tongued New Urbanist architect, shocked Virginia Beach leaders a few years back when he called the city “a laboratory of failure for the East Coast.” When people told friends they were moving to Virginia Beach, the immediate response was “Oh, that’s too bad,” Duany said.

The city has never liked admitting this. But for many people, Virginia Beach is the last place on earth they would live. Developing some different types of communities would help change this.

LEAN AND MEAN

The most effective political force in the last half decade in Virginia Beach has been the anti-tax, anti-establishment folk that have pushed for less government, less services and of course, less taxes. This somewhat well organized group, led by former City Councilman Robert Dean and his Citizens Action Coalition, helped kill a bond initiative that would have supported better schools and libraries. They got the council to reverse themselves and kill a tiny new phone tax for a similar purpose.

They are a force to be reckoned with. Although the city’s taxes are some of the lowest in the region, and its services some of the best, they have evidently hit a nerve with their argument to the contrary.

Under their vision, Virginia Beach would become a bare bones, self-service city, where you check your own bags and bus your own tables. No more soccer stadiums, amphitheaters, recreation centers and the like. No more “entertainment.” In their view, Virginia Beach has been buying luxuries before it spent on the basics like schools. The city needs to get its priorities straight.

While there is some truth in this perspective, in my view they would cut flesh as well as fat. They also do not understand that economic success is based on government investment. Things like roads, schools, rail lines and maybe even things like recreation centers and amphitheaters. Dean, for example, voted against the agricultural reserve program, despite his credentials as a long-time environmentalist, because it involved a sales-tax increase.

When I asked Dean whether economic prosperity depended on government investment, he didn’t seem to understand the question.

“Under that scenario, we are breading a whole new type of society that expects government to take care of them from womb to tomb,” Dean said. “You have removed self reliance.”

How is building a road or a train line removing self-reliance?

If he were running the city, Dean said, his priority would be better schools. But he wouldn’t allow for new taxes to fund them. It’s true that more money won’t necessarily improve schools. But at some point, you have to grapple with the fact that public investment in a range of things is necessary to create a prosperous and balanced society.

Dean, for example, excoriated suburbanites who neglected their children in order to be able to afford two nice cars. People should consider living with just one car, he said, like they did back in the 1950s.

Well, would you support the type of public transportation that made living like that possible, I asked him, such as better bus service or the light rail line?

No.

“There is no reason that my gas tax should subsidize people to ride light rail,” Dean said, even though he freely acknowledged that car driving itself was massively subsidized already.

Dean also criticized the new companies the city had brought in, like Geico and Avis, as essentially being low-paying call centers. True enough. But beyond improving education — without new taxes — he had no plan for bringing in better companies. He did advocate eliminating the Economic Development department.

If Dean and his brethren get a majority, I see a not very pleasant future. I see a city that would become a place of haves and haves not, where the wealthy hole up in Bay Colony and Great Neck, send their kids to Norfolk Academy, and leave the increasing chaotic Baysides, Kempsvilles and Lynnhavens to fend for themselves.

EMBRACING THE WHOLE

Virginia Beach’s official vision is its “Community for a Lifetime” statement. It’s a bland, PR-ish statement, full of assertions no one could disagree with. Still, as these things go, it has its merits.

Everyone should be able to live in Virginia Beach, it basically says, for all their lives. It should be a place where one children’s can stick around and get good jobs, and where one’s parents can retire.

“That vision is one of an incredible place — a community where you would want to spend the rest of your life,” said Mayor Meyera Oberndorf in a recent speech. The vision, the mayor said, means making the city safe, prosperous and healthy.

Well, hard to disagree with that.

And “Visionary.” Which means thinking strategically about city growth and priorities, she said. Right on. It means accepting that quality of life costs money in taxes. Double Right on. It means acknowledging you can’t do everything at once.

Right on again.

The problem is, few city leaders, including Oberndorf, acknowledge the steps necessary to complete their vision.

If you want to be a Community for a Lifetime, you need to provide a way for a 70-year-old woman with declining eyesight to get around without a car. Or for a young family to live without two cars. But city leaders have been hostile to light rail, which might do this.

There’s another problem with the city’s vision, as told by the mayor. Oberndorf never mentions the word “Norfolk.”

Why should she, you might ask? Well, perhaps because Virginia Beach’s prosperity depends on it.

What is located in Norfolk? A huge port, with both commercial and military activities. Without it, this whole region would evaporate.

If you depend on something for your life’s blood, shouldn’t you mention it when you are figuring out a vision for your city? Shouldn’t you figure out how to keep it healthy? If you can’t stand to say the word “Norfolk,” at least say the word “port.”

No dice. Virginia Beach is basically embarrassed that it still largely dependent on economic activity outside the city, and doesn’t want to admit it.

Not a good policy.

The mayor’s speech, and the official policy it represents, shows the tension between the city’s desire to be its own master, and the realities of its interconnectedness with everyone else. A coalition has emerged that argue the city should embrace regionalism, but they run up against the city’s long history of seeing little gain from working with anyone else.

If this changed, Virginia Beach might actually to work not only for the health of the port, but to improve the fortunes of Norfolk’s downtown. With a great downtown, a company would be more likely to move to a corporate office park in Virginia Beach.

Look at Portland. All the great new high-tech companies are not moving to the center city. They are moving to the suburban communities out on the fringes, like Beaverton and Hillsboro. But these places have a symbiotic relationship with the Portland downtown.

The great Portland center city makes the area very attractive to workers, which attracts great companies. The companies might locate ON THE LIGHT RAIL LINE in the suburbs, where they can build a low-rise campus-style office park, but their employees enjoy traveling downtown and might even live there.

But here, no dice. Both sides see the other a threat. If we were really smart, we would start rewriting tax laws so taxes from companies would be spread more equitably.

What would the future look like if Virginia Beach realized it had more to gain from regionalism than to fear from it?

Virginia Beach might take the lead in regional growth management because it recognizes that as a mature city, it has an interest in restraining outward sprawl, and pushing development inward. Virginia Beach would help establish a regional vision, where the various regional parts play clear roles. Downtown with its role as regional center, with sports stadium and urban living and cultural resources; the outer suburbs with opportunities for green-lawn living and amenities like soccer stadiums and amphitheaters; the resort, which with light rail would have a symbiotic relationship with downtown; the rural areas, that can provide good vegetables and open vistas to the suburban and urban dwellers.

With almost half the population of the Southside, it’s clear that if Virginia Beach has a lot of weight to throw around.

“I’ve never understood why Virginia Beach wasn’t the leading proponent for regionalism,” said Eliassen. “They would be in the driver’s seat, because they got the votes. I don’t understand what they are afraid of. They are the political gorilla of the region, but they act like the cowardly lion.”

Eliassen is willing to think about what most people won’t even mention: merging the three cities on one side of the water — Chesapeake, Virginia Beach and Norfolk — into one city.

“They are one city in reality, and they ought to be one city politically,” Eliassen said.

GOING IT ALONE

Since its birth, Virginia Beach has insisted that it is a “real city,” not just a bedroom community thank you. It has resented the lack of respect it has gotten from both the region and the rest of the world. When big-name New York Times writer R.W. “Johnny” Apple visited the area recently, he respectfully used the “Hampton Roads” moniker but, in describing the region’s charms, said scarcely a word about Virginia Beach other than a brief mention of its Contemporary Arts Center.

Virginia Beach does not like this. In this scenario, the regionalists fail and Virginia Beach strives to be an independent, self-sufficient city. It drops out of the light rail system. It goes its own way on recycling, jails, schools, social services, housing. At each of these intersections, it goes it alone. It only cooperates on the one thing it needs to keep life going as usual in Virginia Beach: more roads.

This is not such a great vision, either for Virginia Beach or the region. The city of VB will do okay at first, but gradually, the structural inadequacies will start to mount up. Deprived of Virginia Beach’s resources, the region will start to do more poorly, which will eventually pull down Virginia Beach as well. The region will not have a united front on economic development, or a coherent regional strategy on growth, the environment or transportation. Virginia Beach may get its share of the wealthy, but will not get the higher income jobs that lead to a more prosperous city.

The anti-tax folks are big go-it-aloners. Dean talked of cooperating with neighboring cities to get bulk discounts on “computers or textbooks,” but not much cooperation in larger ways.

WHICH WAY?

Some of these paths are mutually exclusive. Some are not.

The present City Council is steering a course between the shoals of the pro-growth councils of the early 1980s, and the no-tax constituents of the present. All this could change. The anti-tax folk, sometimes allied with the powerful Republican party, are banging at the door. Developers and home-builders are pushing to return to rural-area growth.

The future depends on who makes it to the ballot box.

We will see.