Mayberry, according to some.

In my opinion there are few things local zoning departments waste more time and energy on than sign regulations. Our cities have bigger fish to fry than what sort of font a local deli uses for its advertising. In fact, I think generally speaking our cities could do with more color and variety in the streetscape rather than less, so overzealous sign regs aren’t just pointless, they’re downright counterproductive. Not that I don’t think we need them at all (this is legitimately terrible), just that too often our city planners spend far too much time on them.

So in reading about one Arlington man’s life-long quest to rid the county of real estate signs, I had to chuckle a little at the pointlessness of it all. That’s how you spend your weekends? Really? Oooo kay. Good on Arlington for not wasting taxpayer money by hiring a squad of sign-taker-downers.

But whatever. Never mind all that. Pointlessness is pointlessness. The real kicker of that article, the reason I bring it up at all, is this quote from the anti-sign crusader, a Mr. Robert Lauderdale:

“I’ve lived in this charming small town of 204, 000 people for 40 years and when I saw a plastic real estate directional sign in Four Mile Run, in my creek, I thought, ‘How could I make this go away?'”

Wait, what? Charming small town of 204, 000? I realize small towns have a mythic place in the minds of American suburbanites, but Arlington is NOT a small town. No place with a population of two hundred freaking thousand is a small town, least of all Arlington, a core jurisdiction in one of the largest metropolitan regions on this continent.

If people who live in cities with hundreds of thousands of residents (that’s hundreds, as in plural) are deluding themselves into thinking they live in small towns, what does that say about the quality of our living arrangements? And, to get back to Mr. Lauderdale’s pet issue, is making our communities even more suburban by removing what color and variety remains really the answer to our woes?

Maybe the answer is to stop building pass-through “communities” meant to be briefly experienced at 45 mph from behind the wheel of a car, and then forgotten about behind the walls of a McMansion. Maybe the answer is to actually start living in real cities and towns again, rather than insisting on the certifiably crazy notion that places like Arlington, Fairfax or Gaithersburg bear any resemblance at all to small towns.