Last weekend, we visited a friend who recently bought a condo in Ballston. Zachary Schrag highlights the Rosslyn-Ballston corridor as the region’s biggest success from Metro’s original construction, creating a new transit-oriented Smart Growth development around the subway, and it’s true: there were people and shops and other signs of life everywhere, and much of Wilson Boulevard was clearly designed with pedestrians in mind. This area is a great reminder that suburban areas can be so much more than what they usually are.

At the same time, everything still feels a little disjointedly spread out. Rob Goodspeed uses his urban planning knowledge to explain the “structure of voids” that has emerged due to disjointed open spaces that “has not created a coherent urban space.” The end product has many qualities of urbanism, but also a certain feel that someone jumbled up a bunch of cities and some suburban areas at random.

Our friend enjoys living in Ballston, but also lamented the lack of real independent restaurants. Almost all restaurants are chains, either regional chains that operate across Virginia and Maryland, or a national chain. One of their favorite places in Clarendon had recently closed, supposedly due to high rents that only the chains can afford. It’s important to preserve and encourage the eclectic mix of small, independent shops and restaurants in neighborhoods. Planners and economists have been looking for the best strategies; here’s a presentation about it from the Pratt Center in New York.

Areas like Ballston are a reminder that it’s not just preservation, but active expansion, so that newer areas develop into something more than yet another mall. (A good place to start is not to build an actual mall, like Ballston or Columbia have.) One big part of encouraging smaller businesses is to have smaller actual spaces for the businesses; developers like to sign a big contract with a huge restaurant or retailer to fill a big ground-floor space in one swoop, but the mix is much more eclectic in older areas with more, narrower buildings, perfect for a little pizzeria or a boutique store (or a bank, which is another challenge).

David Alpert created Greater Greater Washington in 2008 and was its executive director until 2020. He formerly worked in tech and has lived in the Boston, San Francisco Bay, and New York metro areas in addition to Washington, DC. He lives with his wife and two children in Dupont Circle.