Megacounties: The Boom Towns

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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.