Rural America is vanishing. This tiny county is fighting back.

Opinion

Tensions between development and rural character are playing out across the country.

Sarah Parmelee of the Piedmont Environmental Council calculates that Culpeper has approved 12 million square feet of data centers, or the equivalent of 66 Walmart Supercenters. (The one in Brandy Station would add another 25 Supercenters.) When completed, the sites already approved will suck up 2.5 gigawatts of power — more than 10 times the entire county’s current electricity usage of 240 megawatts — and put an incalculable strain on the area’s water supply to cool the plants. Powering them would require some 25,000 acres of solar fields, and the construction of miles of high-voltage transmission lines across the countryside.

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This anything-goes approach to development isn’t limited to data centers. At the northern end of the county, a developer is deforesting upward of 500 acres in an area known as Clevenger’s Corner. The cookie-cutter development of more than 700 single-family homes and townhouses is miles from any town; the only nearby amenity to speak of is an Exxon station. But residents have already begun moving into this “beautifully designed masterplan community,” where you can buy a nearly 4,900-square-foot home with golf-course views and a three-car garage for “mid $800K.”

Given such frenetic development, the rural county’s population has exploded, rising more than 50 percent from 2000 to 2020. New arrivals need schools and roads and fire departments, and so Culpeper hungers after additional tax revenue — but never seems to seek them from the residents themselves. Data centers could provide more than $100 million a year in taxes, equivalent to a third of the county’s current budget. Culpeper’s economic development director, Bryan Rothamel, tells me that “overall, we like the picturesqueness of Culpeper.” But he says Culpeper needs to “evolve to what is needed in the 21st century,” which means still more development. “We’re going to see a lot of construction” related to the data centers, he says. “We’re going to see a lot of small businesses that are created in support of that — places to eat, places to shop.”

It’s the latest chapter in the story of how the internet ate Northern Virginia. The insatiable need for computing infrastructure, first for the cloud and now for artificial intelligence, has already consumed suburban counties such as Loudoun and Prince William in Northern Virginia. Now it is threatening to devour rural counties such as Culpeper. Back in 1749, a 17-year-old George Washington served as surveyor for what was then the frontier county of Culpeper. Now, after nearly three centuries as a rural community, Culpeper is on the frontier of rural destruction.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Culpeper’s neighbor, Rappahannock County, has gone in the opposite direction. Its board of supervisors has for years rejected almost all development, and its population hasn’t grown at all. With 7,348 residents in the 2020 census, Rappahannock has roughly the same population it had in 2000 — and in 1920, for that matter. Rappahannock fends off development with its 25-acre minimum zoning requirement, and resists construction of cellular towers to protect its “view shed,” content to leave most of the county in a dead zone. “I don’t even want to talk about growth. It’s not a word that should be in our active vocabulary,” Keir Whitson, vice chairman of the board of supervisors, tells me.

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Whitson even torpedoed a local philanthropist’s plan to build three dozen affordable housing units in the town of Washington, Va., the county seat. He forced the already modest development to reduce its size to 18 apartments and townhouses, all but two offered below market rate. It was a tough decision to reject what was, for the county, a gift of free affordable housing. It followed an easier decision to reject a 53-unit rental property on the approach to Shenandoah National Park.

I think Whitson went too far in rejecting the affordable housing gift, but I respect his reason. “I was speaking on behalf of my 1,500 constituents who, generally speaking, don’t really see the need for upending the way Rappahannock County looks and feels,” he says. “And of those 1,500 constituents, at least half of them, if not more, are people whose families have been here for multiple generations. They carry a lot of weight with me when they say, ‘Hey, we don’t need this, and we don’t want change.’”

Anti-development thinking comes at a cost, driving up property prices and leaving Rappahannock County with a shortage of affordable housing and a shoestring county budget that funds only bare-bones services. But that’s a trade-off Rappahannock is willing to make. While Culpeper and other nearby counties surrender to development, tiny Rappahannock has built a firewall to preserve its rural way of life.

“We’re not chasing additional revenues,” Whitson says flatly. “Nobody wants housing developments.” And data centers? Fuhgeddaboudit. “We don’t want Rappahannock to be Anywhere USA, and we do not need to give up its unique rural character.”

Similar tensions between development and rural character are playing out across the country. The American Farmland Trust reports that the United States lost more than 11 million acres of farmland and ranchland between 2001 to 2016 to urbanization, low-density residences and other development. An apparent trend toward dense urban living lit hopes in the world of land-use planners, but those hopes are guttering out. The growing popularity of urban living has been offset by the rise of remote work. “Even though we were on a good trajectory for a while to have less cookie-cutter development and less suburban sprawl, I think we’re back in a place where it is almost as worrisome as it might have been 15 or 20 years ago,” says John Piotti, president of the trust.

Industrial development and Amazon-style warehouses jeopardize rural life on the edges of America’s metropolitan areas. Solar fields to help power these energy gluttons are expected to gobble up 10 million acres of rural land over the next 10 years. What might be lost? “Some of the absolute best farmland we have,” Piotti says, “is also the land that’s most threatened.” The county seats of Culpeper and Rappahannock are both about 90 minutes from downtown Washington.

Northern Virginia — by far the nation’s largest data center market — had 51 million square feet of data centers at the end of 2023, the real estate giant JLL reported, with another 58.6 million planned. Some 70 percent of the world’s internet traffic reportedly goes through six square miles in Ashburn, Va., called “Data Center Alley.” Prince William County last year approved what would be the world’s largest data center, at 23 million square feet — and data center mania has pushed further out, to Fauquier, Caroline, Louisa, Spotsylvania, Orange and Henrico counties, in addition to........

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