West of Leesburg now? Man. I lived up in Nova twenty years ago for a couple years (Fairfax proper, then Vienna, then Herndon, finally Oakton) and back then, Leesburg was the edge of the universe for all the city types. You might as well have printed Loudoun County street maps with “HERE BE DRAGONS” on the western half and just have 7 end at its intersection with US 15. To them, western Loudoun was the home of the Great Unwashed. The extension on 267 west of Dulles didn’t exist, and Sterling was the “hot” place to live.
I remember the first time I ever drove through Franklin Farms in Fairfax County. It was nothing but four-bedroom McMiniMansions on half-acre postage-stamp lots. THOUSANDS of them, it seemed like, and no trees to break the view of endless crap houses to the horizon. As somebody who grew up on 75 acres of woods and fields in rural Virginia, to see an endless expanse of sterile suburbia like that just felt...well, weird and wrong, actually. But this was the late ‘80s, where developers in Fairfax and Loudoun never saw a hillside they didn’t want to strip, grade off, and plant a bunch of townhouses on.
}:-)4
lots of good comments here