Former Editor-in-Chief Ryan Avent writes a weekly column about neighborhood and development issues.

"Has a second core emerged?" asked a Bureau of Labor Statistics report this week, drawing the metropolitan area's attention to the remarkable growth in business and professional employment in Virginia's Fairfax County. Headline after headline emphasized the county's new status as second pole in a newly bipolar metropolis, after we learned that Fairfax had pulled to within 100,000 jobs of the District itself. The government report went on to dub Fairfax the regional leader in private sector employment, the end result of 15 years of explosive growth fueled in no small part by extensive government outsourcing and contracting.

The BLS report highlighted what has been a remarkable series of years for all of greater Washington. While our population growth hasn't quite kept up with some of the sunbelt's most energetic boomtowns, the Washington region's job explosion has left all other challengers in the dust. No other area of the country has managed to keep up with the capital's employment growth since 1990, and the role of Washington's suburban counties cannot be overstated as part of that change.

As cores go, however, the old center and its challenger look quite a bit different. Fairfax County contains within its 400 square miles approximately 1 million people and 800,000 jobs. The old core, on the other hand (taken to contain the District, Arlington, and Alexandria) squeezes the same number of people and one third more jobs into a quarter of the area. Perhaps more telling, the old core is home to 54 Metro stations while Fairfax has a mere 6--even the completion of the planned Silver Line will add only 8 more to Fairfax's total. Commuting patterns reflect the infrastructure gap between the two hubs. Of those working in the District, only 8% come from outside the city and its inner suburbs (the border jurisdictions and Fairfax). Of those working in Fairfax County, by contrast, 22 percent come from exurban jurisdictions. Nearly 75 percent of metropolitan commuters from Loudoun and Prince William Counties go to work in Fairfax. Practically all of them drive.

Fairfax is working hard to overhaul its status as one large low density traffic jam. In addition to the reworking of Tyson's Corner and the construction of the Silver Line, Fairfax has given the green light to the high density MetroWest project at the Vienna Metro station, and has begun to look at reinventing the land around the Springfield-Franconia station as another dense hub. While other suburban counties (including Montgomery County, perhaps Fairfax's main rival as a suburban jobs center) have decided to rein in new growth and development, Fairfax has committed itself to ploughing ahead full bore, recognizing that such a strategy will mean greater density and a change in the county's character.

But will it be enough? Fairfax is sure to continue adding jobs and people; it remains the county's official policy, and the federal government is happy to oblige them by continuing to shift large numbers of federal jobs outward. Yet Richmond lawmakers continue to demonstrate their inability to address current infrastructure needs, let alone those which are sure to arise in an environment of continued expansion. Officials battled for nearly a decade to make construction of the Silver Line a reality, and it will be almost a decade more before the extension is completed, assuming ambitious goals are met. Perhaps one day, a circumnavigating Purple Line will snake through Fairfax as well, but even that addition would leave the county woefully underserved by mass transit relative to the central city.

Photo by billadler.

Without drastic infrastructure improvements, continued job growth in the new employment core will mean soaring Fairfax home prices, greater pressure on existing roads and transit lines, and rapid sprawl. Plans in Loudoun and Prince William to restrict growth will only exacerbate outward movement of the city's boundaries, forcing new growth to leapfrog those counties into the wilds of Fauquier and Stafford, Jefferson and Spotsylvania.

The situation isn't hopeless. Fairfax County could work with the central jurisdictions and Maryland suburbs to coordinate planning and increase Metro's capacity. The region could focus on improving regional rail service, which is widly underutilized given current traffic problems. Options are available.

But the outlook for real progress isn't promising. If recent experience has taught us anything, it's that conditions must deteriorate significantly before local governments can be pressed to act. The best hope for the near term is that Fairfax will be forced to invest in itself to defend the ground it has won. That's certainly not the best way to plan for one's future, but without a sense of shared reponsibility for regional planning, that's about the best we can hope for.