Is Tysons Corner beyond salvaging? Has Fairfax County missed the window of opportunity to create functional human settlement patterns there? Or is Virginia’s largest business district doomed to a slow, lingering death by entropy?
I haven’t studied the issue closely enough to pretend to know the answer. But I do worry that the opportunity to transform Tysons Corner into something more economically sustainable has passed us by. What’s different now than 10 years ago? For one, energy costs are higher, and about 98 percent of the people who work in Tysons commute there from somewhere else. For another, construction costs have escalated markedly. The cost of tearing down and rebuilding the business district in a more functional grid pattern — not to mention providing the connective transportation tissue to the rest of the region — has become impossibly expensive.
There may be enough wealth-generation potential in the businesses congregated there that those impossibly high costs might yet be borne. The business base is overwhelmingly geared toward knowledge-intensive companies that pay high salaries and can afford high rents. But there are limits to how much companies will be willing to pay, especially with competing business centers like Reston/Herndon and Rosslyn/Ballston all too eager to whisk them away.
Such are the thoughts I have as I catch up on the activities of the Tysons Corner Land Use Task Force, which has been meeting monthly since June 2005. The task force is supposed to submit recommendations for transforming the region, which by all accounts is crippled by limited ingress and egress from the rest of the Washington metropolitan region and terrible transportation circulation within.
I have been goaded into thinking about this topic by a document submitted by a blogger who goes by the pseudonym Too Many Taxes. TMT passed along a press release from the Greater Tysons Citizens Coalition (GTCC) and has been stimulating some interesting dialog in the comments section of this blog. After many distractions, I am turning my attention to his correspondence.
Let me lay the groundwork by stating that the Tysons Corner Land Use Task Force has a noble goal: laying out a vision for transforming the business district over the next 30 to 50 years into something far more hospitable and functional than exists now. The task force is saying all the right things. Development needs to be more compact. It needs to allow mixed uses. It needs to create gridded, pedestrian-friendly streetscapes. It needs to allow for non-automotive transportation options, from bicycles to mass transit.
The impetus for the task force is the expectation that the commonwealth of Virginia will somehow find the $5 billion or more required to extend a heavy rail spur from the existing Metro rail system to Dulles airport, passing through Tysons Corner on the way. In theory, the rail line will provide much of the transportation capacity needed to serve the region, and the combination of Metro stations and higher building densities bestowed by Fairfax County will provide property owners the financial inducement to re-develop their land in line with this new vision.
But there are problems that just won’t go away. Higher densities are fine — as long as Fairfax County and the commonwealth of Virginia can find the means to pay for the correspondingly high levels of roads, utilities and other public services required to support such a population. Higher densities are not OK if they fail to generate revenues streams to pay for the additional infrastructure required.
That brings us to the GTCC press release, which points out that Tysons Corner as currently developed has 45 million square feet of commercial, retail, hotel and governmental/institutional space and some 7,900 residential units. Those numbers pale in comparison to some of the scenarios being discussed. Says the press release:
At the last public outreach meetings in February 2008, citizens were asked to comment on two prototypes with stated density levels of 96 and 127 million square feet. Since the February meetings, County staff has analyzed the 127 million figure to result in an “Intensity Potential” of 146 million square feet. In comparison, the Task Force is considering a recommendation that would have an intensity potential of 220 million square feet.
In other words, different density scenarios under discussion call for anywhere between three and five times the current density. We’re talking mid-town Manhattan, if I’m not mistaken.
In 2000, the area supported 65,500 jobs, according to the Bureau of Census. Presumably, tripling density would increase the number of jobs by a like amount — to close to 200,000 people. Quintipling density would put the number over 300,000. If transportation is bottlenecked now, what would it be like if five times the number of people were commuting in and out of the area? Such a vast number would swamp the capacity of a single rail line and four above-ground Metro stations to serve the district. In other words, to paraphrase Ed Risse, the prospects for achieving a balance of population and transportation capacity seem remote.
In theory, allowing developers to build more residential housing would help alleviate transportation congestion. According to a 2007 market analysis, 17,500 residential units would be added under the “moderate” growth scenario, 25,000 under the “strong” scenario. While some of those residents undoubtedly would work in Tysons Corner, most of them would not. According to the 2000 Census, only a third of the 11,300 residents in Tysons worked locally. If that ratio stayed constant, the added residential units would take only 3,000 to 8,000 commuters off the roads. Mixed use is part of the solution for Tysons, but only a small part.
One more point: The task force is counting on higher densities to provide property owners the incentives to re-develop along the lines laid out by the proposed comprehensive plan. But the business district has a track record between 1994 and 2006 of absorbing 600,000 of office space per year on average. To fill the tens of millions of square feet contemplated would take decades. Property owners cannot generate a competitive return on capital if they have to wait that long for a payback.
In an April letter to the task force, property owner Dan Clemente touched upon the desnity problem. “As it exists today, throughout this quadrant, all of the property is currently developed with sound business uses; the densities being proposed in this plan are not high enough to justify the economic costs involved with disrupting these going concerns. That being the case, this design will frustrate if not make impossible the planning staff’s goals of consolidated development.”
While the planning staff could solve Clemente’s problem by increasing his density, it could not do so politically without increasing the density of other property owners as well. But to do that would create a massive overhang of development rights that would allow developers to build far more office space than the district could possibly absorb in an economically justifiable length of time.
From my vantage point, it looks like Tysons Corner is locked into its dysfunctional human settlement patterns. The cost to transform the district into something more inviting and sustainable is so high that it cannot be economically justified. If Tysons cannot be transformed, it will enter into a long, slow decline relative to other business districts with better urban design.
I hope I’m wrong. In a sense, Tysons is “too big to fail.” Northern Virginia, and by extension all of Virginia, has too much riding on the success of the business district as a cent
er of economic activity. But I hold out little hope for its long-term future.