A hundred years ago, nobody planned today’s eastern Sussex County. It evolved.

In the early 1900s, Rehoboth was largely a seasonal resort of cottages, boarding houses and hotels, surrounded by a Sussex County of farms and small towns. The railroad made the beach accessible.

Then came paved roads and automobiles. Suddenly, families could drive to Rehoboth. Post-war prosperity brought more vacation homes, campgrounds and trailer parks. Mobile and manufactured-home communities offered working- and middle-class families an affordable place near the coast.

Each generation brought another change.

Vacationers became second-home owners. Second homes became retirement homes. Condominiums and townhouses expanded ownership. Manufactured and modular construction provided additional choices. As coastal land became more expensive, subdivisions moved westward. Developers began selling not just proximity to the ocean, but the coastal lifestyle.

Eastern Sussex gradually changed from a place people visited into a place hundreds of thousands of people live, work, retire and vacation.

Looking backward, the progression seems logical. Transportation opened new territory, housing followed, businesses and services followed the housing, and another wave of growth began.

But 20/20 hindsight is not a strategy for the next 25 years.

The infrastructure that enabled yesterday’s growth was primarily transportation. Tomorrow’s infrastructure must be broader: roads and bridges, water and wastewater, schools, healthcare and emergency services, drainage and flood protection, electricity and communications, along with housing that the people who work here can afford.

Even DelDOT’s Sussex long-range transportation planning now calls for an “integrated land-use and transportation approach.” That is an important concept. We cannot continue deciding where thousands of homes should go independently from deciding how those residents will move and how their communities will be served.

Sussex will continue to change. The question is whether the next chapter simply happens to us, as much of the last century did, or whether we deliberately shape it.

The 2028 Comprehensive Plan gives us that opportunity.

Some choices will be difficult. Not every place suitable for yesterday’s development pattern will be suitable for tomorrow’s. Growth may need to be directed toward places where infrastructure exists or can realistically be provided, and restrained where it cannot.

For 100 years, infrastructure helped determine Sussex County’s housing destiny.

It still should.

This time, however, we should build the infrastructure and make the plan before we need another generation of hindsight.