Northern Virginia Archive of Black Community Resistance

           In the northwest corner of Northern Virginia lies Loudoun County, a gateway to the Appalachians and West Virginia, and a tie to Northern Virginia’s rural and historic past. As the nation’s wealthiest County by median household income, Loudoun is rapidly developing, welcoming in large data centers, and forever expanding suburbs and shopping centers.[1] Yet, the County still contains wide open spaces and prides itself on its rural sensibilities. This is partly due to its competing landscapes; observing aerial maps of Loudoun County, the stark landscape divide is apparent. Its eastern third, the Dulles Corridor, is in many ways an extension of Fairfax County’s landscape. Comprising the other two-thirds of the County are primarily rural western landscapes, lined with vineyards, villages, and horse country, all hearkening back to what is constructed as a more idyllic and serene period in Northern Virginia’s past.

While Loudoun County’s development generally pales in comparison to its neighboring Fairfax County, Loudoun still experiences and perpetuates the same myth of progress that spans the Northern Virginian landscape. The eastern third of the County, the Dulles Corridor, exemplifies the myth of progress. Washington Dulles International Airport acts as the catalyst for the myth of progress in Loudoun. Beginning its construction in 1958, Dulles required the removal of a Black village that straddled the line between Loudoun and Fairfax County – Willard.[2] Willard’s experience with displacement, and erasure in the name of progress are essential to point out because its fraught experiences with progress directly implicate Loudoun’s eastern Dulles Corridor in the racial capitalist logics of visualization that deem non-white spaces as worthy of removal or invisible.

Charles Poland Jr. highlights the implications of Dulles and the massive developments and planned communities that sprung up around it. “The construction of Chantilly Airport, later officially named Dulles International Airport, not only destroyed the remaining vestiges of many of the bicorporal communities and farming in southeastern Loudoun, but also accelerated the demise of farming in eastern Loudoun to the north of the airport purchases of land by corporations for commercial development.”[3] With this significant lifestyle change, gone were the days of the County's reliance on farming. Suburban living had come to Loudoun. Land speculation by large corporations and companies meant the hyper-development of eastern Loudoun and its blossoming into what has become part of the “Silicon Valley of the East”. Today, the eastern landscape comprises planned communities built around Dulles – many of them once containing small but vibrant Black communities like Willard in the towns that existed prior to Dulles.

Further implicating the myth of progress is the integration of the covert capital into the landscape of Loudoun. Andrew Friedman’s concept of the covert capital in his eponymously named book explores the interconnectedness between past and present spatial politics in northern Virginia. In particular, he juxtaposes the entrenchment of the military complex into the Dulles landscape with the way colonial practices were mapped onto the landscape. These spatial projects were mapped not only in Fairfax County, the main focus of Friedman's work, but also into Loudoun's landscapes. The Dulles Corridor exemplifies this not only in its housing of diplomats deciding the fate of South American nations but also in the colonial landgrabs of large plantations and replication of colonial and plantation lifestyles in subdivisions throughout the County in places such as Middleburg in west Loudoun.[4] These powerbrokers shaped the landscape and ushered in the era of massive expansion throughout the Dulles Corridor, especially in eastern Loudoun.

From the arrival of Dulles International Airport, and in the decades since, the change that it brought was seen as a threat. For many in Loudoun it was a threat both to a lifestyle and to a landscape, particularly in the west. In Poland Jr.’s From Frontier to Suburbia, the author takes a staunch opposition to what was occurring at the time of their writing in 1976, stating the historic shift to lifestyles “benefactors of ‘progress’” brought with them in “usher[ing] in a frontier even more revolutionary in its ecological transformation than that of the colonial era.”[5]  They take care to point out the serious efforts taken by county officials in the years after Dulles’ completion in 1962 to stifle the influx of land speculation, developments, and planned communities.[6] This existential threat to the lifestyle of Loudoun has been seen as a threat by many of the County, as early as Dulles’ completion.

By the turn of the century the debate on how to stop development and expansion was reaching a fever pitch. Between 1990 and 2002, Loudoun’s population grew at a 7.5% annual rate, at that point the second highest in the nation.[7] With this came rising costs of infrastructure, housing, threats to the County’s fiscal soundness, and a call for policy change by many in the County. Thus, there is a recognition of the fallacies of “progress” in Northern Virginia inside of Loudoun County that opens a peculiar framework of opposition. Efforts to curb development have led to measures that try and stifle the expansion of the Dulles Corridors suburban and urban landscapes for decades. 

Due to the pressures brought by massive expansion and increases in population, development, and traffic in the east, Loudoun County has taken a specific approach to contain this. Their understanding of the dramatic and damaging effects of what has occurred led to a response best described as “controlled modernity”. Loudoun’s controlled modernity is an approach to modernizing and development that pays homage or maintains the image of Loudoun’s idyllic past, and the heyday of landed gentry, open spaces, and keeping the horse and hunt country. Controlled modernity, in its implementation, accepts certain forms of the modern Northern Virginia, such as the growth of suburban landscapes, but attempts to keep it from overexpanding and damaging the image, experience, and lifestyle of rural Loudoun.

Controlled modernity’s approach is enacted in two ways, through zoning laws, and the implementation of conservation efforts that seek to maintain open and historic spaces. The zoning laws used by Loudoun County have sought to classify the eastern third and western two-thirds of the County as different districts for zoning purposes. The eastern third has been primarily zoned in unincorporated spaces as residential to try and contain residential development, varying residential density per acre but typically in the range of 1 residence to 1 acre, up to 1 resident to 4 acres.[8] On the other hand, the County has zoned the west for low-density development only to “effectively ‘shut the door’ to new residential development in these areas of the county.”[9] The primary zoning districts are Agricultural Rural 1 in the northwest and Agricultural Rural 2 in the southwest, with varied but sparse zoning regulations ranging from 1 residence to 10 acres up to 1 residence to 50 acres.[10] These also regulate subdivision density heavily, pushing for cluster developments that force subdivided plots to keep small hamlet style developments.[11] In essence, the County has sought to stonewall development the best it can going back as far as the mid-1960s when massive developments were proposed in Middleburg just to the southwest of St. Louis, and after Dulles was built as the east struggled to contain development.[12]

More recently, the County has also sought to mandate farming and open space requirements for developments and lots as well.[13] This work to contain development in the west primarily to cluster developments has created smaller communities while attempting to maintain a more historic rural and farm-based lifestyle lost to the eastern third’s planned landscapes that seamlessly bleed into Fairfax County. Yet, these attempts at zoning the problem away have failed to contain development. Failing farms have become hotspots for land speculators and new families seeking land to buy and homes to own. Subdivisions have still been turned into suburbs in western communities. Places like Purcellville, Aldie, and Middleburg in the west have seen notable change in the previous two decades, sparking a cry for more restrictions and attempts to stop change.

             As the second pathway to anti-development planning, the County has used a system of conservation easements and zoning mandates on large plots to use large landowners as stewards of land. Conservation easements are “a voluntary legal agreement in which a landowner retains ownership, use, and enjoyment of their property while they convey certain rights to a qualified land trust to protect farms, forested areas, historic sites, and natural resources.”[14] Conservation easements have been used extensively in Loudoun to seek to protect open space in the County, yet they also have a massive incentive. Large property owners can pursue private and public conservation easements to gain tax benefits through the County’s program.[15] By using these farmlands as conservation-based tax breaks, the land is still defined in terms of progressive rhetoric by wealthy landholders.

Conservation easements present a potentially problematic structure, then, as conservation can be used to control land, and speculation and as an exclusionary framework of deciding “proper” landownership. In turn, this means inequality in land holdings and benefits because in Virginia “of the $1.8 billion in spending by the four programs, over 95 percent — or more than $1.7 billion — has gone to the tax credits, which the agency found are “the most generous in the country.”[16] Furthering this problem is the fact that, according to former Virginia Deputy Secretary of Natural Resources Joshua Saks, “somewhat in the neighborhood of half of the tax credit deals that are happening in Virginia are happening through some kind of LLC or entity as opposed to an individual directly claiming it,” thus, the main beneficiaries are large – primarily white - landholders.[17] Extending this outside of the south, Corey Lang et al. in their study of Massachusetts’ distribution of capital benefits from conservation found suggestions that “regressive and racially disparate incidence of the wealth benefits of land conservation policy.”[18] Thus, the land becomes monopolized and extracted for financial benefit by those who have the power to conserve it, typically, households that are wealthy and white.

Lang et al.’s analysis points to the fact that this is not just a Virginian problem as well. Turning to similar geographies, some rural southern communities and counties have dealt with the same issues as large white landholders begin to snatch up property under the auspices of conservation. This can often harmfully perpetuating plantation geographies that constrain, control and damage Black lives and communities through regulation, dispossession and control of land and territory through similar methods that are experienced in Northern Virginia’s myth of progress. This is most present in South Carolina’s Lowcountry, where similar conservation easements have been used to subsidize white landowners’ right to exclude by spatially determining who can be stewards of the land, and who is a proper maintainer of the Lowcountry.[19]

Levi Van Sant et al. in their piece “Conserving What? Conservation easements and environmental justice in the coastal US South” point out the way that property regimes in South Carolina are unjustly used to restrict Black access to Lowcountry land. They state that “the Lowcountry’s racial regime of property relies on a politically supported plantation environmental ethic whereby conservation professionals further entrench the public subsidization of elite white landowners’ right to exclude in the name of ecological stewardship.”[20] This reflects Brenda Bhandar’s thesis on property regimes that are central to this project’s myth of progress, where private and public property landownership is defined by white logics of plantation and colonial orders that determine what is proper for land, and Loudoun County’s conservation easement structure reifies this.

While ambitions of controlling significant suburban and urban developments in the west are done with earnestness by many of the local intergenerational farmers, land landholders and speculators turn to conservation systems to gain large landholdings for tax purposes and define access and use of land and space. Further, zoning restrictions and cluster developments have not maintained restrictions as the County maintains growth, and change has still come to the western parts of the County, often utilizing the cluster developments and hamlet developments still allowed by Agricultural Rural and Countryside Residential zoning. This then means that for Black geographies like St. Louis and the Black villages that dot the landscape of western Loudoun County, choices over how land is managed, and livelihoods are potentially restricted. Livelihoods become constrained as waves of new arrivals break through Loudoun’s failed attempts to stifle development.

Ultimately, Loudoun County’s efforts of controlled modernity created to hamper development, urbanizing effects, and loss of idyllic farm spaces have been unsuccessful. Conservation structures end up perpetuating the rhetoric and realities of colonial and plantation structures that are central to the myth of progress, while rising rates of development point to the failure of zoning to control the issue. This means that ultimately, controlled modernity perpetuates the myth of progress and fails as a practice of limiting. Thus, efforts to control development in western Loudoun County have bred slow violence.

As the eastern Dulles Corridor continues to expand and the population maintains steady growth, new and old residents have sought to move out to the more open spaces of the west. In the case of St. Louis, demographics now reflect the arrival of what the Department of Planning and Zoning state as “young families and others looking for rural, smaller, and more affordable housing in a traditional village.”[21] In the Banneker Elementary school population, student composition is 65.5% white, 20.8% Hispanic, while the other percentage identifies as Other.[22] Locations like St. Louis that were formerly Black are now experiencing a dramatic population shifts as the west becomes the frontier of Northern Virginia. Some Northern Virginian residents have become tempted to move westward because of the viable space for acquisition, and those seeking homeownership see the prices in towns such as St. Louis as affordable compared to much of eastern Loudoun, and Northern Virginian cities like Fairfax.[23] This influx has also led to the creation of more significant tax burdens for small rural Black communities, further constraining residents' livelihoods in places like St. Louis.

Thus, even in the case of controlled modernity, an attempt at stifling what occurred in eastern Loudoun, the winners are those who can purchase land. Wealthy landowners can receive extreme tax benefits through the County's conservation programs, often done without the express intention of conservation being the main moral goal. In the case of leading conservationists like Chuck Kuhns of JK Land Holdings who, in the face of reform of zoning that would affect the price of tax benefits, they would walk away from 3600+ acres of conservation contracts.[24]

So, because the County has failed to control development in western communities, despite genuine efforts, they have created an untenable situation for many of the smallest and most appealing spaces like Black communities, such as St. Louis, with historically low land costs, and large plots that can be cluster developed, or bought from long-time-resident families now unable to keep up with taxes. To compound this, places like St. Louis have also dealt with decades of infrastructural inequalities – a factor of displacement in place and slow violence – that has created environmental racism and exclusionary boundaries to accessing clean water.

Therefore, controlled modernity seeks to maintain the rural spaces of Loudoun by controlling development throughout the County and situating suburban and urban landscapes in juxtaposition with rural spaces and conserved lands that act as buffer zones for development.

After decades of growth in the mid-twentieth-century, centering the region of Dulles and its many satellite planned communities, the County and many of its residents sought to tame the wave of expansion, suburbanization, and development for fears of losing an already waning farming lifestyle.

These rural spaces however are still utilized as economic boons, and try as the County might, progress in the form of developments, ambition to settle the available lands, and conservation that can perpetuate exclusion and the structures of the myth of progress. This then means that small communities in Loudoun, particularly small Black ones that have dealt with generations of neglect, are left relatively unable to deal with protecting their community besides conservation, and zoning that is already part of the problem and slow violence, displacement in place run rampant, all the while physical displacement looms. These forces at work in Loudoun County have significantly affected St. Louis. The following section examines how slow violence has created displacement in St. Louis through the intersection of environmental racism, infrastructural neglect comparable to that of Gum Springs, and the rising tide of development and displacement putting incredible pressure on an already shrinking and aging Black community.