Kudos to the Post for a surprisingly rational article on the difficulty of growth control. If only more media coverage were of this quality we might see fewer counterproductive control measures that ultimately increase sprawl, and more actually useful ones that address the
disease rather than its symptoms. Some highlights:

To hear some activists and local officials in Virginia tell it, the key to slowing rampant growth is to follow the lead of many Maryland counties: Ban development where roads and schools are crowded.
But here is what that method has accomplished in Anne Arundel County: More than one-third of its school districts are closed to new subdivisions, even in areas intended to absorb construction under the state’s much-touted “slow-growth” laws. As a result, development is being pushed to more rural parts of the state less suited to handle it.
…
The hard truth, say skeptical officials and land-use experts, is that today’s crowded roads and schools are the result of years of decisions and cannot be fixed quickly by clamping down on growth.
“It’s sticking an oar in the water to turn a battleship, ” said Joseph Rutter, who recently retired as Anne Arundel’s planning director. “But it’s very easy to attack the new growth and say that’s what’s causing the problem.”
…
The crux of the problem, said Stafford Supervisor Peter J. Fields (D-George Washington), is that if counties really tried to assess fees on new exurban homes for the full costs of their impact, they would run into the tens of thousands of dollars, beyond what most would consider reasonable.
…
When schools or roads fill up in an area meant to accommodate growth, officials too often let it remain closed to development instead of funding the needed infrastructure, the study said. As a result, developers move to rural areas where roads and schools still have capacity.
“If you have pressure on capacity, do you stop growth or enhance capacity? You enhance capacity, because otherwise, the growth goes out to the rural areas, ” said the center’s director, Gerrit Knaap. Building roads and schools is the key to making smart growth work, Knaap said.

That is the question over the District’s famous building height limit, according to Christopher Leinberger of the Brookings Institution, who recently gave a presentation on the subject at the National Building Museum. Leinberger suggests that downtown Washington is running out of space and that raising the height limit would take redevelopment pressure off downtown-adjacent neighborhoods, make downtown more competitive with the cheaper suburbs, and lead to increased tax revenues for the city. The idea, naturally, was not a popular one.

At BeyondDC we actually like tall buildings. There’s nothing inherently wrong with them; most of the problems frequently cited are either due to other factors (such as width), or merely a form of greedy NIMBYism. That having been said, though, Washington is completely unique among major American cities. The height limit gives our fair city a distinctive and monumental character. Allowing skyscrapers downtown would drastically change what it means to be Washingtonian, and we’re not sure that’s a worthwhile end. Even a minor change downtown of 20 or 30 feet would probably cause a wave of destruction and rebuilding that would utterly transform downtown. Sooner or later we would have a whole new city. That’s a prospect worth thinking twice about.

Downtown ain’t the whole city, though. Is there any reason the same rules need be applied universally all across the District? Tall buildings in Arlington provide a beautiful “frame” for the central city, and help to extend quality urbanism to parts of the suburbs that would otherwise probably be strip malls. If skyscrapers work in Arlington, why shouldn’t they in Anacostia? Could Tenleytown and Brookland one day become uptown districts rivaling or surpassing near-District nodes like Bethesda? Would that really be so bad?

Raising the height limit downtown seems like a no-brainer: The answer is no. But outside the core we think it’s worth discussing, at the very least. Maybe it’s not such a bad idea.