Once a Reston resident: January 2008

There is little doubt that the Reston area is a shopping mecca. Yet there are advantages to having small local stores.

The market pictured to the left is the Coastal Community Market which sells organic produce and foods in Beaufort, NC.

It is the first of its kind in Carteret County.

It also sells one of my favorite foods, Marmite. There is something special about going into a place where the choices are limited, but the food is as local as possible.

You can actually have a conversation at the cash register instead of just anonymously sliding your card through the card machine.

In my case the owner was pleased to find that I liked Marmite since most area people know nothing about it.

I have always been a sucker for small community run grocery stores. First there was Beaver Fruit Cooperative in Lawrencetown, Nova Scotia. Then there was an organic foods shop in Fredericton, NB.

After we moved from Columbia, MD, we were excited to find the Roanoke Natural Foods Coop.

In Reston, I loved to shop at Whole Foods where I could get Icelandic Salmon. I often visited Trader Joes just for a change of pace.

I wonder if higher energy costs and continuing food safety problems will eventually create a renaissance in local food?

Time will tell.

I recently caught the Washington Post article, Shadow over Reston, which poses this question.

"Is the Reston dream dying?"

As a veteran of both Columbia, MD and Reston, I have to wonder if it possible to even have realistic dreams when government driven by growth and dreams of great places to live are not on the same team.

One of the reasons we moved to Columbia was their neighborhood concept. The idea was that you lived in small neighborhoods with services and schools which were within walking distance.

Unfortunately Howard County controlled the schools. We were only in Columbia for a couple of years, and we quickly found that few kids went to schools in their own neighborhoods and that choices of services including restaurants were very limited by Columbia's rules.

Reston always seemed a more realistic approach to me. There was a real town center instead of the mall which was the defacto town center in Columbia. Reston had plenty of services.

Yet all those services in Reston may have become the problem. The commercial part of Reston might be such a success that it is eating away at the neighborhood concept.

There are no easy solutions. Reston, unfortunately, is no blank slate like Cannonsgate, a coastal subdivision near us on Bogue Sound not far from Emerald Isle.

You can do all the planning in the world and sometimes things change just as in the picture in this post where some homes at the Point on Emerald Isle are exposed while some new currents take time to migrate a beach towards them.

While it is the forces of nature changing things on the Southern Outer Banks, I think it might be the equally strong forces of commercial success that are changing Reston.

Reston has become a very successful community. It has grown beyond what many believed could be possible. Some parts of the original dream haven't made it. There obviously needs to some work done on the Lake Anne area, but I suspect Fairfax County with pressure from the Reston community can fix it.

What worries be more is the recent death of the Giant on North Shore. The neighborhood grocery store is one of the things that defines a neighborhood. I think Columbia has been very successful in keeping those alive. I understand the Giant on North Shore was too small, but once you let the basic services get sucked into commercial centers, you lose the neighborhood concept which has been a key element of Reston being such a nice place to live.

Could it be that commercial success in Reston is no longer tied to providing services to the neighborhoods? I would love to see town planning done more intelligently. It someone wants to build a grocery store in a large county strip mall, they have to maintain X number of small neighborhood grocery stores.

While I hate to see government defining where stores are, I also hate to see the concept of neighborhoods dealt a fatal blow in Reston.