Megacounties: The Boom Towns

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."