When I first moved to Northern Virginia, I lived in an apartment not far from Tysons Corner. It was a zoo then, and it’s only gotten worse over the years.
Now, it sounds like they want to turn the whole place into Fairfax County’s version of Ballston:
The transformation of Tysons Corner from a car-dominated tangle of offices, malls and auto dealers into a livable city will start moving ahead in the coming weeks.
Fairfax County leaders and landowners are unveiling sweeping proposals to build densely packed high-rises, miles of new streets, and enough parks, schools, police stations and firehouses to serve an entirely new place.
The results could determine the future not only of Virginia’s mightiest jobs hub, but also what happens across the country. Urban-renewal leaders are looking to Tysons as a model.
The plans come at a make-or-break time. Landowners and developers are ready to invest, but they say that if they are not given latitude to build more densely, they will redevelop under existing rules — promising more of the same auto-dependent, suburban sprawl.
Rebuilding Tysons is a huge undertaking of unknown cost and other uncertainties, including whether Metrorail will ever be built through Tysons to Dulles International Airport. It is also a potentially explosive proposition that will bring out powerful civic groups opposed to too much development. It is at the mercy of the area’s physical impediments, which include four major highways and paralyzing traffic. And it is dependent upon the willingness of landowners and taxpayers to bear the cost of building a city from the ground up.
“I’m calling this the audacity of change,” Clark Tyler, chairman of a county-appointed study panel, told a group of business leaders recently. “This is our last chance to get it right.”
Getting it right has been a 3 1/2 -year undertaking for the Tysons Land Use Task Force, an unwieldy collection of neighborhood representatives, business leaders and developers that is preparing to release a 200-page recommendation on how to remake Tysons. Appointed in 2004 by the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, the task force has studied every aspect of redeveloping Tysons Corner: parking management, traffic patterns, a “circulator” bus line, affordable housing, sewers, storm water.
Live there if you want. Personally, I like the idea of having some elbow room out here in Western Prince William County.
