Last week, Chicago-based General Growth Properties, owner of some 200 shopping malls in the U.S., filed for bankruptcy protection – the largest real estate bankruptcy in U.S. history. One of GGP’s local holdings is the upscale Tysons Galleria on International Drive – right in the heart of the urban utopia envisioned by the Smart Growth crowd.
“Unprecedented circumstances in the credit markets have made it impossible for the company to refinance billions of dollars in mortgages and other debts that are now due or will soon come due,” GGP CEO Adam Metz said. Instead of Smart Growth, it’s looking a lot more like Slow Growth.
More than 100,000 workers commute to Tysons Corner each day, but just 17,000 live there, a fact that Fairfax County officials desperately want to change. But the county’s grandiose plans to add 30-story high rises near four shiny new Metrorail stations have run head-first into economic reality.
Unsold units in the luxury condo project that houses a new Harris Teeter grocery store in Tysons have been converted to apartments, and phase two of the project has been moth-balled indefinitely. The same thing happened in nearby Merrifield, where another upscale condo development with restaurants and a gym located just a few blocks from the Dunn Loring Metro station is also begging for renters.
The Metropolitan Council of Government recently released its updated forecasts for Fairfax County. Employment is expected to increase from 661,800 to 871,300 by 2040, or about 9,260 jobs per year – slower than previously forecast. “The fastest growth, in terms of percent growth, will occur in the outer suburbs, which will add new jobs, households and persons more than twice as fast as the inner suburbs,” the COG study said.
This is not what was supposed to happen when the 23-mile Dulles Rail project was approved. The $6 billion-plus transit project was justified by rosy predictions about reversing suburban sprawl and turning an ugly, poorly planned and spread out hodgepodge of corporate campuses and shopping malls into a residential and pedestrian paradise where nobody would need or want a car.
Those predictions were suspect then; they’re ludicrous now, what with Tysons Galleria’s owner in Chapter 11, a glut of empty condos and offices, and a cratered corporate bond market that puts any future construction in Tysons on the back burner.
The new economic reality also totally undermines the main rationale for a centrally-planned and ridiculously expensive transit project that, future Fairfax County residents will note in dismay, was already obsolete even before the first rail was laid.
Barbara Hollingsworth is The Examiner’s local opinion editor.
