The Boom Towns

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

Insurance Underwriter Joann Murphy moved to Oak Brook, Ill., 25 years ago "for the quiet and the country." But now her home in Du Page County is bracketed by office buildings and a huge shopping mall. A 31-story tower obliterates the view of trees and grass from her windows; its construction, still in progress, has sent clouds of dust and bursts of noise into her home. Laments Murphy: "This is like living in downtown Chicago."

Well, not exactly. If Du Page and dozens of other fast-growing counties all over the U.S. are beginning to look like spread-out cities, most of their residents can still loll in a hammock in a spacious backyard on a late-spring evening. But these counties are hardly suburbs anymore, at least in the traditional sense of being bedroom communities for nearby cities. Not only jobs but also gourmet restaurants and chic stores are close at hand. As a result, people like Engineer Daniel Nee, a resident of Gwinnett County, Ga., 18 miles from Atlanta, commonly go six months or more without feeling any necessity to take their families downtown.

What are these places then? They are a form of urban organization -- or, sometimes, disorganization -- so new that demographers have not yet coined an accepted name for them. But outside almost every major American city, one or more counties are developing the characteristics of Du Page or Gwinnett or Fairfax County, Va., across the Potomac from Washington, or Orange County, between Los Angeles and San Diego, or Johnson County, Kans., next to Kansas City. These sprawling, increasingly dense suburbs might be called megacounties.

Nowadays they are where the growth is -- in population, construction, jobs, incomes. Gwinnett County's population has almost quadrupled, from 72,300 in 1970 to 250,000 today; since 1984 it has been the fastest-growing county in the nation. Oakland County, near Detroit, has got 40% of all jobs created in Michigan since the 1982 recession. Tysons Corner, an unincorporated area of Fairfax County 13 miles from Washington, was once a sleepy crossroads with little more than a gas station; today it contains more office space than either Baltimore or downtown Miami. The Corporate Woods office complex in Overland Park, Kans., boasts 275 businesses and 5,000 jobs; built on 300 acres, it has room for more. "Corporate Woods is the fastest-growing commercial area in either state, Kansas or Missouri," says Planning Consultant Myles Schachter.

$ It is less sheer growth than the type of growth, however, that has given the megacounties their distinguishing mark of self-sufficiency. The first great wave of American suburbanization that began right after World War II was a migration of the middle class from the cities to newly created bedroom communities. But for the past dozen years or so, that movement has been immensely reinforced by a flight of jobs following the people. It is being powered by some of the mightiest currents in modern life: the communications revolution and the switch from a manufacturing to a service economy. Says George Sternlieb, professor of city planning at Rutgers University: "Changes in technology and in our economy are making possible a life-style that could only be dreamt about a few years ago."

Thanks to computers and low-cost telephone hookups, a company no longer needs to cluster its headquarters, billing operations, advertising, accounting and legal departments near the mill or factory; they can be plumped down in cubist buildings scattered around a suburban "campus." Even warehouses do not have to sit near city railroad yards; open land from which trucks can swing onto the interstate highways is often a more efficient as well as a much cheaper location. Offices can be moved near the plush, tree-shaded communities where a firm's top executives often live, and companies can tap into a well- educated work force of middle managers and skilled technicians who have grown tired of the grinding commute into the central city.

In 1975 the nation passed a little-noticed landmark: for the first time suburban office construction slightly exceeded office construction in the central cities. Now the ratio is about 60% suburban, 40% city. The Corporetum, a 130-acre development along the East-West Tollway in Du Page County, will eventually include 16 buildings -- a commercial space "about the size of the Standard Oil Building in downtown Chicago," says Developer John Colnon, "only we're building it horizontally rather than vertically."

The long-distance commuter, meanwhile, is becoming as passe as the 1955 novel, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, that memorialized him. As early as 1980, almost twice as many Americans were commuting from one suburb to another (27 million) as were still making a daily trek into a central city (14 million). Since then the proportions have undoubtedly grown even more lopsided.

Along with the offices, warehouses and electronics plants have come many of the other conveniences of city life. Orange County residents eager to dress for success have no need to journey to Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. They can load up on fashionable gowns and designer attache cases at any number of swank shops in the giant South Coast Plaza retail center. Sports fans can get their fill of split-finger fastballs and blindside blocks at Anaheim Stadium, home to both the California Angels and the team that still calls itself the Los Angeles Rams. Expensive restaurants are mushrooming in the counties around Washington. "You don't have to go downtown to get a nice piece of veal anymore," says Mike Gorsage, a real estate executive in Tysons Corner. "That was something the suburbs really lacked, but it's changing." Salesmen calling on the many new or expanding businesses in those suburbs can bypass Washington and put up overnight in any of 6,760 Fairfax County hotel rooms; 1,452 have been added just in the past two years, and another 1,532 are scheduled to open in 1987.

Some other amenities are still sadly lacking. Multiplex movie theaters are shooting up almost as rapidly as offices, banks and stores, but many megacounty residents still have to drive into the city for a play or ballet or symphony. Indeed, social life often revolves around the shopping mall. "The mall is the center of the county," says Sara Strelitz, a Gwinnett housewife. "People go there to meet and shop." Growth and corporate transfers mean new neighbors almost every year, and some megacounty residents complain that they lack the camaraderie found in the old bedroom suburbs.

Still, many people flocking into the megacounties consider them a close-to- ideal blend of city and suburb. "There are few things you can't do here within an hour," says Orange County Teacher Greg Hickman. "You can head to the mountains, the desert, the water or a shopping center." Agrees Gemma Turi, a public relations consultant who switched from commuting into Los Angeles to a new job in Irvine, near her home in Newport: "It's like being on vacation except you get to live here."

But other aspects of suburban life are not in the least like being on vacation, and some burgeoning problems could even put a stop to the phenomenal growth. Among the worst:

CONGESTION. Traffic snarls are the No. 1 gripe everywhere. Offices and beaches may be close by, but getting to them can be as time consuming and nerve jangling as making the haul between suburb and city. During a stifling spring heat wave two weeks ago, one couple in Long Island's fast-growing Suffolk County took 1 hr. 15 min. to sweat through 15 miles of bumper-to-bumper traffic between their home and the ocean beachfront of Robert Moses State Park. Du Page County's Morton Arboretum, a popular spot for local outings, is becoming a walled fortress. Managers are erecting a series of 40-ft.-high earth berms to protect the trees and shrubs from the lethal effect of de-icing salt splashed up by heavy traffic on the neighboring tollway. Mark Baldassare, a sociologist at the University of California at Irvine, predicts that by the 21st century Orange County traffic will become so hopelessly jammed that "the people in Irvine, for example, will rarely decide to go to another village. They will stay in their own small areas."

LABOR SHORTAGES. Unemployment rates in the megacounties are phenomenally low: less than 3% in Fairfield County, Conn., for instance. Middle managers and computer programmers can be enticed by high salaries, but where to find the laborers to build the new offices, the clerks to staff the stores, the pump jockeys to keep the cars running? Not from the local working class; in many communities there is none. Manual and low-paid clerical workers cannot afford the housing prices (Orange County median price for a new home: $125,000); indeed, many of the children who grow up in those houses must move elsewhere when they start their own families. And residents fearing still greater congestion fight bitterly and usually successfully against construction of low-cost, high-density apartments.

Labor shortages are so acute in Fairfax County that the new hotels are recruiting at local senior citizen centers. The American Automobile Association has announced that it will move its national headquarters from Fairfax County to Orlando in 1989. The reasons, said the AAA, were the difficulty of finding enough clerical workers in Fairfax and, of all things, traffic congestion.

Some employers are attempting to import workers from the central cities, where unemployment rates can be triple those of the suburban counties. AT&T uses a fleet of buses to pick up mostly black manual workers at a subway station on the edge of Atlanta and ferry them to its plants and offices in Gwinnett County. But not many city workers can afford to drive to low-paying suburban jobs, and public transportation in most of the megacounties ranges from poor to nonexistent. In Fairfield County, traveling the 20 miles from Shelton to Norwalk means taking seven different buses and paying 75 cents on each; besides that, the schedules rarely mesh.

MIXED-UP GOVERNMENT. The power structure of megacounties is a kind of elective feudalism: a series of petty neighboring baronies lacking the authority and, frequently, the will to police development. "Essentially, we're a city without municipal governance," complains Jack Knuepfer, chairman of the Du Page County board. "We're a city with 35 municipalities, nine townships and only the Lord knows how many special districts: fire districts, sanitary districts, school districts." The county government has been unable to prevent its component communities from following what Knuepfer describes as a "beggar thy neighbor" policy.

Standout example: the village of Oak Brook does not like the glitzy 31-story office tower designed by Architect Helmut Jahn any more than Joann Murphy does. But neighboring Oakbrook Terrace gladly let a developer put it up -- right on the border between the two communities. Then Oak Brook refused to widen a road running to one side of the building, even though the developer offered to pay for the work. Its argument: Oakbrook Terrace would get all the tax advantages of the new building, so let Oakbrook Terrace widen one of its own roads and choke on the ensuing traffic. Says Oak Brook Village President Wence Cerne: "By turning residential streets into arterials, you're denigrating the quality of life. Some of these communities keep approving and approving and approving, and by the time the traffic effects are seen, it's too late."

In Orange County, Community Activist Russ Burkett grouses about inadequate funding for such basic services as police protection and sewage systems in addition to transportation. Says he: "The landholders have such powerful control that they dictate policy for the entire county. They got rich by developing the land, but now they don't want to pay for all the services we need." Burkett has formed a group, Orange County Tomorrow, that plans to initiate a ballot proposal to stop growth in areas where traffic does not move freely.

The most disturbing trend in the rise of the megacounties, however, may be the increasing racial polarization it brings to American society. Says Gary Orfield, a political scientist at the University of Chicago: "We've got these enormously affluent outer suburban areas that are almost 100% white growing at a tremendous rate. They are drawing not only the upper-income jobs but other jobs -- in construction, for example -- that might be available to people without high levels of education. These jobs are becoming completely inaccessible to the black and Hispanic people in our metropolitan areas; they are in another world." In their own way, Orfield adds, the megacounty whites are isolated too: "A great many people who will be leaders will have grown up in these suburbs. They are going to have no skills in relating to or communicating with minorities."

Unhealthy or not, the trend to suburbanization appears unstoppable. Pierre deVise, professor of public administration at Roosevelt University in Chicago, has this message for megacounty residents: You are already living in "the future white community of the U.S." Twenty years after the Kerner Commission report predicted that the U.S. was resegregating itself into two separate and unequal societies, megacounties are threatening to confirm that disturbing thesis.

With reporting by Steven Holmes/Fairfax County and J. Madeleine Nash/Du Page County