It was a year of great change for Fairfax County: 2006 saw the end of the housing boom, the inexorable yet controversial progress of rail to Dulles, road woes at Fort Belvoir, political upheaval in Herndon, the rise of intense mixed-use development — and a day of violence against police that was without precedent in county history.
Virginia’s largest county continued its transition from a bedroom suburb of Washington to a more independent urban center, with a fresh salvo of dense, pedestrian-oriented construction projects proposed and approved. Chief among them was MetroWest, a large, mixed-use development at the Vienna Metro station that saw approval in March after a protracted land-use fight. Following MetroWest were two other major rail-line developments, one approved for the Dunn Loring station and another proposed along a planned rail line through Tysons Corner. The latter, a massive overhaul of the Tysons Corner Center mall, could be approved early next year.
In what some call a correction and others call a downturn, Fairfax County’s real estate market flattened out with the rest of Northern Virginia, though the median home price is still more than $500,000. The Board of Supervisors again launched an initiative to stop the hemorrhaging of affordable housing; 1,000 units have been preserved to date, according to county data.
A plan to build Metrorail through Fairfax and into Loudoun County moved ahead, but not without controversy. At Fort Belvoir, officials scrambled to plan and fund the upcoming arrival of 22,000 new military jobs.
Politically, Fairfax County saw little change, except in Herndon. The local and sometimes national epicenter of the illegal immigration debate, Herndon voted out the bulk of its Town Council this May in what was widely seen as a backlash to the council’s approval of a government-sponsored day-laborer center. Since then, the new council has taken new steps to crack down on both the center and illegal aliens.
On May 8, the Fairfax County Police Department became the target of a gunman. Michael Kennedy, 18, entered the Sully station parking lot with rifles and pistols and fired at police. The shootout resulted in the death of two officers and Kennedy. It was the first police slaying in the department’s history.
