Peter Whoriskey on how

The war on sprawl around Washington has made a profound impact on the metropolitan landscape.

...many of these anti-sprawl measures have accelerated the consumption of woods and fields and pushed developers outward in their search for home sites. The side effects -- rarely noted in crusades for more "open space" but widely recognized by regional planners -- are twofold. First, limiting construction to one house per three acres, or five or even 25, doesn't necessarily stop development. It just spreads it out, creating enclaves of estates in "rural" preserves...

Second, even when restrictions are severe enough to halt residential development in one place, Washington's burgeoning population continues to demand new houses, so builders simply go elsewhere, usually farther out...

Despite the emergence of growth restrictions, however, key indicators of sprawl -- auto travel per capita and land consumption rates -- show few signs of abating, according to transportation and land planning experts....

It's supposed to work like

Portland, Ore., which maintains an urban growth boundary, outside of which building is sharply limited. Unlike Portland, however, the Washington area has little regional land planning. More than a dozen counties independently draw growth boundaries, and the result is a regulatory patchwork.

So some will argue the answer is more regulation. But one planner argues

What those restrictions really do is encourage development in a land-hungry manner.

And another points out that while people seem to like the idea of farmland, there aren't enough farmers.

"These are pastoral landscapes that have more of an emotional than a practical meaning," said Marya Morris, a senior researcher at the American Planning Association. "But if you can't make money farming them, people have a right to ask 'What's the point?' "

As a matter of fact, the love of farmland is a kind of conservatism--"keep things the way they are". But farmland itself is after all unnatural. Another problem: despite all this planning, there's still a housing shortage. (surprise, surprise)

The home-building limits have contributed to the shortage and are driving up housing costs, economists say. "If you restrict supply in the face of growing demand, and if the supply is less than demand, you are going to have higher housing prices," said Chris Nelson, a planning professor at Virginia Tech and co-author of a study on the subject.