The articles ""Notes From Tysons Corner; A Suburb All Grown Up and Paved Over" by David Plotz and "Misplacing the Blame for Our Troubles on 'Flat, Not Tall' Spaces" by Vivian Postrel both focus on the issue of suburban growth. In Plotz's article about Fairfax, he writes: "Earlier this month the county council passed a law forbidding homeowners from paving over their front yards to create extra parking spaces." Since Fairfax, once a lily-white enclave, has become more integrated with immigrant families, people in some Fairfax neighborhoods have paved their front yards to allow more room for parking, destroying (as opponents to this practice argue) some of the remaining rural beauty of Fairfax. Plotz implies that the success of Fairfax is owed, ironically, to the personal automobile, which families must use to get to work, although those who object to the practice of paving front yards to allow more parking would likely argue that this represents something like a "citifying" effect of this expensive suburb.

             In Vivian Postrel's article "Misplacing the Blame for Our Troubles on 'Flat, Not Tall' Spaces", she argues that, rather than become crowded into big cities, middle-class baby boomers have headed for the suburbs, thus creating what she quotes Al Gore referring to as "sprawl". The author, however, defends such "sprawl" as baby boomers' wanting single-family residences and "elbow room" instead of sharing common walls with their neighbors. Postrel also implies that since detached suburban single family homes use more electricity and other resources, anti-sprawl groups like the Sierra Club are promoting the idea of sharing common walls among families more and more, since this saves electricity and other resources. As she quotes the Sierra Club, for example:.

             "Sharing walls shares and saves heat. . . . single-family houses consume four .

             times as much land for streets and roads and 10 times as much for the .