Annals of Development: Welcome to Band Camp
Former Editor-in-Chief Ryan Avent writes a weekly column about neighborhood and development issues.
Things used to be clearer for Fairfax County. It used to be known as the epitome of upper-middle class suburbanity, even earning name-checks in popular novels and songs as such. With acres and acres of rolling hills covered in leafy suburbs and landscaped office parks, it was a quiet complement to the quirky inner suburbs of Northern Virginia and the dense chaos of the District. But things have changed a lot for Fairfax, and fast. The outer border of the metropolitan area has long since passed through the county on its way toward Fredericksburg and West Virginia, and the outer border of the dense inner city is getting uncomfortably close. No longer a bedroom community, Fairfax was recently declared a second jobs core in the region, a title built on the strength of the defense and software firms that fill the office buildings stretching along the county’s highway corridors. But there remain more bedrooms than ever; not long ago, Fairfax County topped the million person mark, becoming the first, but almost certainly not the last, jurisdiction in the Washington area to do so.
Growth in Fairfax County has recently come to a fairly abrupt halt, however. Expansion of low-density suburbs has pretty much exhausted the supply of available land, meaning that future development will need to come in the form of denser infill. Such development is frustrated, for the moment, by a lack of transportation options. Fairfax’s roads are perpetually jammed and the county, despite its size, is served by fewer stations than any other Metro jurisdiction, with the exception of tiny Alexandria. The stations Fairfax does have are limited by their placement and design. Isolated from the fabric of the county’s neighborhoods, the Fairfax stations have contributed minimally to the structure of neighborhood development. But this is the county’s own fault.
As Zach Schrag details in The Great Society Subway, Fairfax, from the beginning, pursued a different strategy regarding its Metro stations than did Arlington or Montgomery County. Where they sought to run their Metro lines through population centers and then develop more densely around the stations, Fairfax largely ignored its pockets of density—including the budding area called Tysons Corner, opting instead to place the Orange Line in the median of I-66. Where other parts of the Washington area saw transit as an opportunity to reshape areas of low density, Fairfax saw low density as a reason that transit wouldn’t work. Now, having built themselves out, Fairfax has been forced to cut back on growth while other jurisdictions continue to press on.
Now the county is trying to re-engineer its population centers and run transit where it should have gone 40 years ago, but the attempt to shift strategies has been confounded by difficulties, the most recent of which is the federal government’s assertion that the first stage of the project is budgeted to cost about $250 million more than the feds would like. Fairfax must now attempt to cut spending without reducing potential ridership, or the Federal Transit Administration may be tempted to scuttle the entire line. It’s absurd that the federal government might derail the plan, just as it was absurd that silly federal funding rules made revising the plan to include a Tysons tunnel overly difficult. Uncle Sam hands out highway money without nearly the oversight required of transit projects, and the government’s position on the tunnel was laughable—funding would have been withheld, even if the additional money for tunneling came from a non-federal source. Fairfax may yet regret its failure to hold out for a tunnel through Tysons; the decisions to take the easy route when drawing the original transit corridors is one of the reasons Tysons didn’t get Metro decades ago.
What should Fairfax County’s transportation and development strategy be? The question is complicated by Fairfax’s odd role as a suburban waystation. Roughly 250,000 people commute from Fairfax into the District and inner suburbs every day. At least another 300,000 Fairfax residents commute to a workplace within the county, and something like 200,000 people commute from outer suburbs into Fairfax County to work. No one solution will cover all three problems. Enhanced Metro service, including new extensions, will facilitate better travel into and out of the core of the region, particularly if development around the new lines is transit-oriented.
Picture taken by andertho.
Within county commuting is more complicated. Much of Fairfax’s 400 square miles is just a smear of low-density development, without clear development loci, but denser growth in some pockets has begun to pick up. If the county doesn’t want congestion to strangle off the development of those pockets, it should begin planning for connections between them, including high-capacity light-rail lines. At present, Fairfax doesn’t have many residential neighborhoods sufficiently dense to support light-rail transport, but that shouldn’t stop planning for such lines. One of the lessons of development in this area over recent years is that transit shapes future development. If Fairfax anticipates new growth, then the construction of light rail around the county will provide a structure around which denser development can take place. Without that structure, new people and businesses will be limited by the constraints of the road network. The comparison with Arlington County, also a waystation, is telling. Arlington has a number of development pockets, but the densest growth has been centered around the Orange Line corridor—thanks, in part, to deliberate and foresighted planning. This has allowed Arlington to add billions in new development without appreciably worsening local traffic problems. This option has so far been denied to Fairfax, because the county chose to run its share of the line along I-66. It’s hard to develop walkable neighborhoods along a highway median.
Commuting into Fairfax from the exurbs is a more difficult problem. While growth in Prince William and Loudoun Counties has slowed due to concerns about over-taxed infrastructure, rates of housing and employment increase remain high in those places relative to Fairfax. Fairfax County’s historic growth patterns may have lacked focus and density, but its experience pales in comparison to that of its southern and western neighbors. In many ways, this is also Fairfax’s own fault, as the primary engine of sprawl in Northern Virginia. The growth of jobs well outside the metropolitan core has enabled the strong residential growth in far flung areas, and the spread-out, road oriented pattern of Fairfax development has ensured that commuting patterns to Fairfax jobs are almost entirely based on automobile travel. Undoing that mess will be very difficult, if not impossible. The best hope is for Fairfax to work with its neighbors on better land use plans and on transit corridors, along which bus rapid transit might run in the near future as a place-holder for future rail lines. Commuter rail has a small but important foothold along two corridors, and service there should be enhanced, as well. But the experience of Fairfax is instructive. Prince William and Loudoun (and later on, Stafford and Fauquier) will probably not act until conditions force them to act.
Fairfax’s role as a sprawl inducer creates mixed-feelings in much of the development community toward the county’s plans for dense urbanization. If Fairfax successfully shifts gears into a transit-oriented dense-growth phase and thereby continues to add jobs and people, the attractiveness of a location in the outer suburbs will only be stronger, while meaningful extension of the transit network into those jurisdictions is difficult to imagine in the near future. That’s the big difference between the primary and secondary jobs cores in the region. Energy in the District’s downtown pushes new jobs and people into traditionally underdeveloped areas of the city or over the city’s border into the inner suburbs—places still very well served by transit, with street grids and zoning equipped to handle upward growth. Energy in Fairfax means a lot of open space going under the bulldozer to make way for single-family homes, shopping centers, and automobile oriented office parks. It’s sideways development, and there’s no reason to suspect it won’t continue until it hits mountains or water, in the absence of good planning.
The question surrounding the construction of the Silver Line shouldn’t be whether the $5 billion or so bill for the complete line is worth the cost. By practically any measure it is. The increase in development capacity along the line will mean new business and tax revenues in amounts certain to make $5 billion over 8 years look like chump change. The better question is: what is Fairfax getting it? It’s all well and good to aspire to urban greatness, but how does Fairfax see itself fitting into the region as a whole? The District isn’t threatened by office dominance usurpation on Fairfax’s part; economically it surely benefits from proximity to the many companies located there, but it must wonder how it’s supposed to move forward on planning and infrastructure investment given Fairfax’s approach to growth. Not for no reason do many planners hope that Fairfax cannot figure out how to take advantage of the development patterns seen in Arlington and Montgomery Counties and the District. A Fairfax County hemmed in by its own growth may allow regional concerns to return to the fore; that would be far better for the long-term quality of life of area residents.