A Fairfax County panel will recommend letting landowners within blocks of Tysons Corner’s planned rail stations build more than twice the development allowed anywhere else in the county, forming the core of what officials hope will be Tysons’ vast makeover.
The Tysons Land Use Task Force, in its long-awaited presentation to the Board of Supervisors on Sept. 22, also will advocate steering development into eight connected neighborhoods, expanding Tysons’ base of moderately priced housing and creating a grid of urban streets, among other recommendations in a draft of the report.
The proposal, which won’t be voted on for months, could easily triple the 46 million square feet of development in Tysons Corner.
The task force has toiled for three years to reshape one of the nation’s busiest business and retail centers, hoping to balance new jobs and living space and encourage pedestrians and mass transit.
The area is expected to add 100,000 jobs and 80,000 residents in the next four decades. However, the task force has engendered controversy with the scope of the proposed development.
Some community activists say Tysons is ill-prepared for an onslaught of new traffic and overwhelmed services, and doubt that developers, and not taxpayers, will foot the bill for needed improvements.
The task force doesn’t spell out a specific way to pay for that infrastructure, but suggests using new tax revenue generated by the development, local, state and federal funding, developer contributions, and other sources. T
he vision for Tysons is centered on the principles of “transit-oriented development,” in which growth is clustered around public transportation hubs to cut traffic.
The task force will suggest putting the densest development within an eighth of a mile around the four Tysons stops of the planned Dulles Corridor Metrorail Project, diminishing beyond that. Perhaps the task force’s most ambitious aim is to cut the miles each resident drives to below the regional average.
“Can you do that in Tysons, given the auto domination of Tysons?” said Task Force Chairman Clark Tyler. “Hard to say, but it’s a reasonable goal. You’re talking about changing behaviors.”
That inner radius of development could far surpass the development of the most urban corners of Fairfax County, judging by a density metric called “floor area ratio,” or FAR, which is calculated by dividing gross building floor area by the total site square footage.
The highest FAR allowed anywhere in the county is three.
The Tysons Task Force wants to allow a FAR of six, rising as high as 7.8 for residential space if a developer meets green-building and affordable-housing thresholds.
That upper limit worries Ted Alexander, chairman of the Greater Tysons Citizens Coalition, an umbrella group of community officials and activists.
“We support development and growth, but the thing that we don’t want to happen is see the growth grow faster than the infrastructure,” he said.
Rob Jackson, president of the McLean Citizens Association and a member of the coalition, said the task force hasn’t justified why it needs such high development density.
“It’s very frustrating,” he said. “We’re seeing conclusions and nothing that leads up to these conclusions.”
Tyler doubted that developers would take full advantage of the allowed density, which would require major contributions to transportation and other needs, but said the potential for it provides a needed incentive.
