You have to give Steven Pearlstein credit. It’s easy to be wrong about stuff: to call Tysons Corner a choice address, to fault Reston for not having bums and graffiti, or to assert that building churches is a better use of public money than constructing a tunnel for the Orange Line extension. Anyone can pen those garden variety inanities. It takes balls to compare Route 7 to Midtown Manhattan. That’s some grade A crazy; we’re actually a little impressed.

But we’re still appalled that the Post would let such a confused and ill-informed take on reality, to say nothing of the finer concepts of urban planning, make it into print. It’s difficult, in responding, to know quite where to begin. But let’s start with the comparison between Reston and Tysons, which seems, on its face, a little off. Says Reston expert DCist Jason Linkins:

So far as I can remember, Tyson’s was never a “choice address.” It was a place that people simply had the need to go to from time to time. I can’t imagine that anyone who lived there actually enjoyed it. And while Reston most definitely lacks the urban grit to elevate it above lame, it is nevertheless livable. Every neighborhood has its own municipal pool, you can bike all over the town, it’s exceedingly clean and leafy (though poorly lit), the schools are all habitable, the groceries easy to get to — and this was the way it was even before Town Center.

When he says “the suburban experience epitomized by Tysons had fallen out of favor”, I’m like, when was it ever IN favor? And while Town Center is absolutely homogeneous and plasticine, Tyson’s is not, comparatively, full of “messy vitality”…the place is better described as “a chaotic dump.”

Thank you, Jason.

Photo by robobuzz.