Can Lancaster County Preserve Its Distinct Identity?

Lancaster, Pennsylvania isn’t your grandfather’s Amish Country anymore. Actually, your grandfather probably had no memories of Amish Country, at least not as a child – the area’s iconic, tourist-oriented businesses mostly date from the late 1950s and 1960s, such as its family-style Amish restaurants (now mostly gone) and the theme park Dutch Wonderland (still kicking). What most tourists fondly think of as “Amish Country” was a sort of Goldilocks state: enough motels and amenities to make travel easy, enough local culture to make the place feel unique.

As metro boundaries expand and exurban growth creeps into the Lancaster area, is Amish Country, as locals and tourists have known it, at risk?

It might look that way. The ever-increasing construction along Lincoln Highway is some of the most noticeable in the region. But David High, a local architect, is not interested in trying to remediate it. “Let that area go,” he says, “and let’s look at other areas that might be salvaged.” In fact, he argues, the concentration of development along Lincoln Highway might be slowing the spread of sprawl elsewhere.

Tom Daniels doesn’t think so. The county’s farmland preservation program, which he ran from 1989 to 1998, is one of the nation’s most stringent and, in his telling, most successful. One thing to remember is just how big Lancaster County is. “We lose about 1,200 acres a year of farmland,” says Daniels, a planning professor at the University of Pennsylvania. The figure sounds alarming. “But,” he adds, “we put more than that under conservation easement every year.” The county now has 120,000 acres permanently preserved – roughly one-fifth of its entire land area, and nearly one-third of its farmland. Lancaster has more preserved farmland, he says, than any other county in the United States.

Daniels acknowledges rising farmland prices but argues that Lancaster remains the economic and emotional core of Amish Country. Nonetheless, some Amish have left the lifestyle (as some always have done) while others have migrated. Ohio and New York are already known as Amish population centers, and the Amish have also formed communities as far from their ancestral home as Kentucky and Indiana, where land is much cheaper. High notes that many Amish are no longer farmers; in addition to traditional professions like furniture-making, many now work in construction and real estate, and that’s a good business to be in these days in Lancaster County.

It’s a good business in Lancaster City, too. If your only knowledge of the area comes from a long weekend visit, you could be forgiven for not knowing that there is a Lancaster City. But with a large indoor market, a classic urban downtown, and nearly 60,000 people, Lancaster City is increasingly an attraction all its own. (On a recent visit, I met a man with an East Coast job, looking to work remotely from Lancaster. He had just visited a condo downtown priced at $2 million.)

With its rail connection to Philadelphia and Harrisburg, Lancaster City is a place where a family might get by with one car, and development in the city has helped preserve the still largely intact countryside. High is hopeful that more housing can be built, despite the typical opposition to new projects, or “NIMBYism.” He points to a new apartment building within walkable distance to the Amtrak station. Daniels is hopeful, too. He suggests that more construction is coming, and notes that the county is trying to guide development toward already-urbanized land: building up, rather than out.

The county expects 100,000 new residents over the next 20 years. “We need compact development,” Daniels says. He believes that even more land must be zoned for multifamily structures. Affordable housing has become an issue in recent years. Large-lot zoning and single-family sprawl will make the county’s problems worse, from traffic congestion to air pollution to affordability to farmland preservation.

But the Lancaster area nonetheless retains a pleasant balance between traditional city and working countryside, with a relatively thin ring of suburban sprawl in between. Today, the county has a historic opportunity. It has the geographic space to keep the distinct character of its city and country sections, and it has the consumer demand and economic growth that many comparably remote places can only wish for. In the future, Lancaster can permit the horizontal growth and suburbanization that it has so far largely avoided – or it can remain committed to its city/country balance, its history, and its strong sense of place, and prove that density and rural preservation can work together.

Addison Del Mastro writes on urbanism and cultural history. He writes daily at Substack. Follow him on Twitter @ad_mastro.