Washington’s Future, a History

We picked some of the best brains in town to write an account of the next 17 years

THINK BACK TO JANUARY 1991: The Web, e-mail, cellphones — all virtually unknown. The three networks still mattered. The Soviet Union still existed. Downtown Bethesda was barely worthy of the name. There was no Dulles Town Center, no Verizon Center, no Green Line. The Redskins played at RFK. A lot can change in 17 years. On the other hand, the Washington area road system was largely identical to what it is today. Madonna was already Madonna. The Wizards — okay, the Bullets — were already cursed. We had long since passed Orwell’s dystopia date but hadn’t yet partied like it was 1999. It hadn’t yet occurred to us to panic about a Y2K disaster.


So, looking 17 years into the future is a daunting task. We studied reams of reports on the region’s future, convened two panels of experts on everything from shopping to energy policy, and we found unanimity on only one point: In 2025, the haves will have more. The have-nots won’t. As for everything else about the next phase of history, we reached enough consensus to spin out two separate, even conflicting, fictional scenarios — views of life as it might be 17 years hence from the perspective of two Washington area families, one thriving and the other struggling. See the linked footnotes for some of the reporting behind the fiction.

[Scenario One]

VIVIAN AND VICTOR VERVER IN MANY WAYS EPITOMIZED THE CAPITAL REGION’S “YO-YO GENERATION.” After 9/11 and the next wave of terrorist attacks, motivated at least in part by fear, they moved from their apartment in Crystal City out to the edge of sprawl, to a new townhouse in Stafford County. Then, more than a decade later, they found themselves moving back to the city’s core.

Late in the 21st century’s second decade, the Ververs settled in Stafford along with many other refugees from Fairfax, Arlington and other close-in suburbs. After years of nationwide economic decline, energy crises and sporadic small-scale terrorist hits, Vivian and Victor’s townhouse community filled with people inspired to follow President Heath Shuler’s “New Pioneers” call in 2017 for Americans to decentralize, to leave behind the congested and crumbling 1960s suburbs and embark on a massive resettlement of the land beyond the exurbs. Shuler’s lure was the great open spaces that were now finally fully linked to AmeriWeb, the wireless information network that extended into every community in the land, the result of the most massive public works project since the construction of the interstate highway system.

Washington Post