Bacon's Rebellion

Democracy Thrives in Sunlight

This Ain’t Your Father’s Fairfax County

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by

James A. Bacon
in

This ain’t your father’s Fairfax County. KSI Services Inc., of Vienna, has received the OK from the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors to build 152,400 square feet of offices (with an option to add 50,000 square feet more), 32,100 square feet of retail and 500 residential units onto a scant 18 acres. The urban, mixed-use project stands on property that previously had been zoned industrial, permitting no residential at all, according to an article in the Connection newspapers.

From my distant vantage point here in Richmond, it looks like a winning formula: Give developers permission to increase density… which increases the revenue flow from the project… which allows the developer to provide public infrastructure such as, in this case, parking, quality open space and the extension of the four-laned, median-divided Government Center Parkway.

The Ridgewood project at the intersection of Waples Mill Road and Lee Highway will have a New Urbanism feel: ground-level retail in multi-story buildings otherwise dedicated to apartments, condos and offices… parking tucked underground… pedestrian-friendly design of the streetscapes… housing designed for households making less than $74,000 a year… and quality public spaces.

Plus, Ridgewood will offer a feature that’s quickly becoming all the rage in Fairfax County, a Traffic Demand Management (TDM) plan. The Connection article offers few specifics on the plan other than to say that “Ridgewood will … participate in a future shuttle-bus program.”

Many of the traffic demand features are baked into the project. A mixed-use project, by its very nature, creates an environment where people can conduct some of their routine errands and trips on foot. Also, because KSI has designed eight percent of the apartments/condos as “workforce” housing, dozens of teachers, police officers, clerks, tradesmen and other blue- and pink-collar workers can forego buying a house in Stafford/Spotsylvania counties and making the grueling, 50-mile commute on Interstate 95 every day.

Developers like KSI and Pulte Homes in Fairfax County are ahead of the curve. They’re designing transportation-efficient communities — not as the result of government fiat or social engineering but in response to market demand. Fairfax County, apparently, sees the wisdom in this kind of mixed-use development and is permitting departures from its outdated zoning code and comprehensive plan.

The Ridgewood project drives home, once again, that the ultimate, long-term solution to traffic congestion in Virginia lies not in widening our thoroughfares to 17 lanes but in revisioning the way we build our communities. This trend is real, folks, and let us hope that the General Assembly takes cognizance of it when it reconvenes later this year to discuss transporation solutions.

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8 responses to “This Ain’t Your Father’s Fairfax County”

  1. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    The fact that you and your ilk are proudly starving the transportation network into decay has nothing to do with these trends. Macro economic forces are at play here, which have no more to do with the level of the gas tax or the secondary road formula than they do with the average annual rainfall. It also has nothing to do with the kind of top down restrictive growth controls preached by the Piedmont Environmental Council. And if you think simply changing to this kind of development means that the need for transportation improvements will wither away, you are just nuts.

  2. Ray Hyde Avatar
    Ray Hyde

    How are they going to forego the sound of the trash trucks backing up the restauruant that is just below their bedroom window?

    I wish KSI and Pulte well. You *may* be right that such developments will reduce traffic, a little bitty bit. But we will still need money for roads.

    I see that Fairfax has learned nothing about TDM from Arlington. Usually the shuttle system is supported by the developer for a limited time: what then?

    Also, I see that a major environmental services company has elected to move its headquarters and 200 jobs OUT of Fairfax and into PW. They have purchased a major office facility there. I don’t now the motivation, but I do know that such moves usually need a fairly short payback period to mae the investment of over $10 million attractive.

    So, if SI makes 150 apartments available in Fairfax (the fringe of Fairfax, at that) and another company makes 200 jobs available in PW, then we are moving closer to balance and less traffic, right?

    I think there are lot of people that feel the way anonymous 1:32 does. It is too bad too, because fundamentally your goals are sound. A little more reality and a little less honeycoating would go a long way towards raising PEC’s public image.

  3. Toomanytaxes Avatar
    Toomanytaxes

    Perhaps, NoVA has already reached or is about to reach the tipping point where it becomes an undesirable location despite either smart growth or a huge investment in more roads. In other words, is it possible that nothing affordable and/or politically acceptable can be done to “fix” the transportation/land use problems that plague this area? Are the Golden Goose’s best days behind her?

    Fairfax County has largely outgrown its infrastructure. Further growth in any form will only exacerbate the problem. True, real mixed use and TOD could have some positive impacts on transportation — at least during the week. But even assuming that these developments are positive for transportation, they will have a negative impact on other infrastructure — schools, sewer, parks, etc.

    Moreover, there’s good evidence that these so-called mixed use and TOD projects will actually generate even more traffic. For example, the proposed rezoning of the Tysons Corner Shopping Center adds 9000 new parking spaces for residents and workers — sounds like quite a few more automobiles on the local streets to me. And, of course, there is this strong desire on the part of many not to live in condos, but to have the most house that one can afford. Short of the creation of a government department that assigns people to housing, we are going to see that mixed use and TOD are not realistic solutions.

    Let’s take the other approach by assuming that we raise taxes significantly, such that the concrete and asphalt flows like the Potomac River after last week’s downpours. If we were to assume that the goal was to bring each major roadway to LOS C (moderate congestion) for morning and afternoon rush hours, what would the cost and necessary taxe increases be to achieve such goal? I suspect the answers are excessive and politically unacceptable. Moreover, would we need 26-lane roadways or freeways/tollways to be spaced every five miles? I seriously doubt that the existing public would accept the level of infrastructure necessary to achieve reasonable traffic flow. Moreover, many citizens would oppose the construction of these transportation facilities on the ground that they would likely generate even more development.

    Then, of course, we have the yet-unaddressed problems of VDOT’s lack of cost controls and the concentration of decision-making in the CTB, which appears to be so prone to conflicts of interest and outside/inside lobbying that it would not likely even fund the projects that would improve traffic flow to LOS C. There’s strong evidence that we truly cannot pave our way out of this mess.

    What is most likely to occur is more of the same, but only worse — continued growth, overuse of infrastructure, mixed use and TOD that just make this place more congested, more battles over land use and stronger opposition to more roads, roads that are obsolete before they are completed, even higher taxes, etc. Finally and probably gradually, NoVA tips into an undesirable location for all but those who have a real need to be here (which is quite a few of us).

    We truly do need more places for jobs and we may get them, regardless of what we do in NoVA.

  4. Ray Hyde Avatar
    Ray Hyde

    Well, right. Downtown Houston is 75% streets, and it still isn’t enough precisely because of the dense highrise development that some people persist in thinking will solve “the problem”.

    As you point out “the problem” is many problems and no one answer will suffice.

    Lest you think this is a faifax problem consider this post.

    http://www.shotinthedark.info/archives/007621.html

    “The fact is, eveyr exercise we’ve had in transit-building so far has been a matter of building trains (or scheduling buses) to take people from where they want (or have) to live, to where their jobs are. Every morning, as the inbound freeways are clogged with finance managers and lawyers and HR directors driving downtown or to the Strip from Burnsville, the outbound buses are clogged with people going from their homes in south Minneapolis to their jobs at malls and garages and hotels in Eden Prairie and Bloomington.”

    Well, at least they have two way traffic out there.

    “But let’s say that someday congestion worsens. Drastically. What then?

    What do you suppose will happen first?

    Government will develop the will – and coerce a tax-weary people – to condemn land and buy right of way and destroy enough businesses and neighborhoods to build enough transit to fill the bill, or…
    Businesses, aware of how congestion is killing their bottom lines, start making allowances: moving the jobs to where the people are, or moving to where the people can afford to live by work, or making it easier for people to commute less. “

    I don’t think we will get to LOS C. But, more roads will allow more people to get to their destination, even if they enjoy 6 lanes of congestion instead of four.

    There is another major flaw in Bacon’s reasoning. He frequently touts the many small businesses that will be magically available in these new pedestrian oriented enclaves. Those small businesses are still going to have to compete with WalMart. They may be able to do some of that by virtue of convenience, but we all know that convenience stores are usually high price stores.

    Bacon needs to throw all those high prices into the mix and see if his plans still result in savings overall. Throw in the approximate double cost for structures over four stories and see if it saves money for the occupants.

    Remember my previous post about the guy who moved his HVAC company and all his employees to North Carolina.

    ITYS.

  5. C. P. Zilliacus Avatar
    C. P. Zilliacus

    First, Jim, nice mention in the Times-Dispatch today (Sunday, 02-Jul-2006) – The many faces of Va. bloggers.

    Now back to our regularly-scheduled programming.

    Why does anyone think that just because a developer puts up a nice-looking high-density project in Fairfax County, it somehow follows that the residents of this new development are going to take transit for commute trips? And what about non-commute trips?

    Residential densities don’t take transit.

    We’re not talking about a building in the Adams-Morgan section of the District of Columbia or the middle of Arlington County’s Ballston Corridor.

    As for TDM plans, well, we have done those where I live (in Montgomery County, Maryland) over and over and over again.

    The record on these in my community is … well … mixed at best. A residential developer is not, in the long run, going to have much influence on what modes of transportation that the residents of his projet decide to use. In spite of the densities proposed here, this is still Fairfax County, and people don’t generally move to Fairfax County to ride transit.

  6. nova_middle_man Avatar
    nova_middle_man

    Jim,

    I think we agree on alot of things. (mixed use, housing closer in business further out, mass transit and chokepoint elimination, etc) The parallels between Albermarle county around Charlottesville and the growth situation in Nortern Virginia are very similar. I would also love to here your comments on the Fan at some point since you live near Richmond.

    Now time for a challenge…

    My name is Joe Fairfax and I love Fairfax County but all of these new developments are making me upset. These new residents crowd the roads and take up valuable park space. They overload the school system, police, fire, water, and sewer systems causing my property taxes to go up and up and up. So, Mr. Bacon why should I support even more growth.

  7. Jim Bacon Avatar
    Jim Bacon

    C.P., I can only presume that the market research of companies like KSI shows that a significant number of residents view the transit option as a meaningful amenity. The logic, I think, is that many households will figure that they can get by with only one car, saving some $7,000 to $8,000 a year in the cost of car ownership. That’s a pretty good incentive.

    NoVa Middleman, you raise an important question that TooManyTaxes and others have articulated: Even if more rational development patterns reduce Vehicle Miles Traveled, what does it do to the cost of other government services? I would maintain that the cost of police, fire and rescue would not change. Why should they? The key cost driver isn’t total population, it’s response time, and response time shouldn’t diminish significantly just because you pack a few more people into a high-rise.

    Sewer — same thing. The investment in pipes has already been made. You might have to add incrementally to the water and sewer purification facilities, but some level of capital investment is probably covered already in the existing rate structure.

    The strongest argument that skeptics have is schools. More people does mean more pupils, and that translates into higher local expenditures. The problem is aggravated for Fairfax County because Virginia’s school-funding formula is so “progressive” — i.e. it redistributes wealth from wealthy localities to poor localities. That’s a tough nut to crack: The problem may never be solved until the state comes up with a fairer formula for allocating its tax revenues to local governments.

    That’s just one of the reasons that Ed Risse says you’ll never get rational human settlement patterns without Fundamental Reform of the entire government and tax structure. I like to think that we might somehow muddle through under the existing governmental structure, but I concede that he may be right.

  8. Ray Hyde Avatar
    Ray Hyde

    “I would maintain that the cost of police, fire and rescue would not change. Why should they? The key cost driver isn’t total population, it’s response time, and response time shouldn’t diminish significantly just because you pack a few more people into a high-rise.”

    What is the basis for this? More people probably means more arrests and more fires. Then we can point back to tha guy who moved his HVAC company to NC. The reason he cited was that it took too long to reach the jobsites. Won’t police and fire have the same problem.

    Ever price the difference between an ordinary fire truck and the ladder trucks and equipment needed to storm a high rise?

    How many high rises do you think you can add to a six inch water main before it becomes inadequate?

    Maybe you save $7500 in car ownership, but you give some of that back up. 200 days of Metro a year is going to cost around $1400, for standing room only, and you get no equity in it. Then, if you have family with different activites on the weekend, you still have to figure out how to cover the other 80% of driving that car might have done. So you rent a zip-car a few times a year and there goes another $1000. By the time you get done your savings might be $4000, not counting time and aggravation and lost opportunities.

    And those residential units are going to cost how much?

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