Experts say the new Metro stations coming to Tysons Corner won’t single-handedly fix the area’s traffic congestion — to really do the job developers need to build housing to accommodate all income levels. That means not just affordable housing for low-income households but residences for the regular Joes who may not earn an executive’s salary but don’t qualify for housing breaks.
“It’s essential to [Tysons Corner’s] success — if you don’t get the housing, I don’t think you will get that economic development,” said John McClain, deputy director of the George Mason University Center for Regional Analysis.
McClain was part of an Urban Land Institute panel held in Tysons Corner on what developers should do to make the sprawling, automobile-reliant area a bustling and walkable urban center. Tysons’ biggest problem is its lack of any kind of housing — 17,000 people call the city home but more than 100,000 people are employed there.
The disparity means that traffic jams are a fact of life — on a good day the line to exit from Interstate 495 to Tysons stretches back a few hundred feet onto the Capital Beltway. But simply extending the Metro system is only part of the solution.
The Tysons Center Urban Center plan, adopted in June, estimates the area will host 200,000 jobs and 100,000 residents by 2050. That means that while jobs will double, housing is expected to increase nearly six times over.
And the panelists said while Northern Virginia’s average income is wealthy enough that developers could offer mostly high-rise apartments at the full market price, that won’t solve the traffic problem.
Many workers in Tysons earn below the average salary of roughly $100,000, and it is those middle-tier jobs that can fuel a growing region’s economy — if workers live near their jobs, they said.
Developer Thomas S. Bozzuto, chief executive officer of the Bozzuto Group, said the dense zoning allowed in Tysons means that investing in an apartment complex that offers reasonable rent to the area’s middle-tier incomes doesn’t have to be an act of charity.
“You can do work force housing … and still have a very viable product,” he said.
And the major land owners need to coordinate to ensure the right ratio of housing, retail and office space is being built, said J. Douglas Koelemay, vice president of community relations for Science Applications International Corp., which owns 18 acres in Tysons.
“The results of a new Tysons can’t be realized until everyone buys into the vision,” he said.
