A (Radical) Way to Fix Suburban Sprawl

Some 120,000 people work in Tysons Corner, Va., but only 17,000 live there. To transform this hotbed of suburban gridlock into a green, walkable city, a soon-to-be-adopted plan-as envisioned by our artist-calls for as much as tripling the current square footage by expanding upward, with the tallest buildings located next to four new train stations, which should be completed by 2013. David S. Holloway / Reportage / Getty for TIME; Illustration by Chris Dent for TIME

To help turn this overgrown office park into a real city, Tysons' redevelopment task force wants to add as much as six times the number of existing housing units—bringing the total to 50,000—
so more people can 
 live closer to where they work. Key challenges include getting private landowners to create a grid of streets and ensuring that development doesn't outpace the infrastructure to support the proposed 85,000 new residents David S. Holloway / Reportage / Getty for TIME; Illustration by Chris Dent for TIME

Tysons wants to be 
 a truly livable city where people not only work but also play. That's why the land-use plan calls for nearly a tenth 
 of the city's 1,700 acres to be turned into parks and other public spaces. Developers who want to build would help foot the bill for community projects. David S. Holloway / Reportage / Getty for TIME; Illustration by Chris Dent for TIME

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But whereas slum clearance was enforced by local governments, which used and in some cases abused eminent domain to reinvent neighborhoods, the Tysons retrofit almost entirely depends on 150 or so private landowners. (Aside from a fire station, a school and a few public watersheds, Tysons has almost no public land. Like most other places in Fairfax County, Tysons is unincorporated and is overseen at the county level.) The government won't mandate these changes. Rather, property owners will apply individually to increase the scale or density of their holdings, to tear down or add to what is already standing, and work together to hammer out a grid of streets to replace the maddening squiggles of private, dead-end roads — a grid that Alcorn says is as important as the Metrorail in battling congestion.

If all that sounds like a tremendous amount of faith in the private sector, it is. But the draw of Tysons — its plum location between Washington and Dulles, the major highways cutting through it — has made it endlessly marketable to businesses despite the suburban gridlock. Unlike abandoned subdivisions and flailing inner cities, Tysons thrives (hence the traffic). The Hilton Corp. plans to move its headquarters here from Beverly Hills, Calif. Volkswagen and Gannett already call Tysons home. (See TIME's Pictures of the Week.)

Striking a Balance
Property owners big and small have been drooling over the development possibilities. For instance, the Georgelas Group is planning to scrap the car dealership and other low-rise buildings sitting on the 20 or so acres it owns in Tysons to create a mixed-use development near a soon-to-be-built train station. Aaron Georgelas, the group's managing partner, is happy to donate land to the street grid, since the county will allow him to build higher because of it. He also knows that tearing down revenue-generating buildings to put up new ones — even if they're three times as large — is a gamble, particularly in the current economic climate. "You very well could be handing that property over to a bank," he says.

Residents of McLean, Va., and other single-family enclaves near Tysons are more risk-averse. Members of the 95-year-old McLean Citizens Association (MCA) say they genuinely support Tysons' growth and realize its inevitability — but where, they ask, will the proposed 85,000 new residents play soccer, go to school or seek police protection? "We don't want to see it grow faster than the infrastructure to take care of it," says MCA president Rob Jackson. The task force agrees and wants the county to build a tit-for-tat system into the redevelopment plan to ensure that private development moves in lockstep with the public amenities needed to support it.

The other fear: that Metrorail or not, more people will equal more car traffic. Urban-design experts like Williamson insist that adding homes reduces traffic, as long as things like mass transit, supermarkets and dry cleaners are within walking distance. "It's not so much about how many people have cars," she says. "It's about how they use them."

But in February, Cambridge Systematics, a transportation consulting firm in Massachusetts, released a traffic study based on the land-use plan and concluded that despite the mass-transit options, the proposed influx of residents, plus an expected 100,000 new jobs, will result in more congestion. "Maybe," responds task-force chairman Tyler. "But it will have a lot less traffic than if Tysons keeps developing the way it is."

The plan doesn't call for narrowing major traffic arteries — a futile endeavor that Tyler likens to "unfrying an egg" — but it doesn't call for widening them either. Creating bike lanes and crosswalks will help make the area less inhospitable to nondrivers. But what happens if Tysons doesn't bulk up enough to wipe out the sprawl? That won't happen, says Sharon Bulova, chairwoman of the Fairfax County board of supervisors. Enough landowners have already detailed their visions and are simply waiting for the official go-ahead in October to start submitting rezoning applications. And if the economy slows down the redevelopment? "Then it waits," says Bulova. "You don't adopt a new plan and, boom, there's a new city. This transformation will happen over 30, 40, 50 years." After all, it took developers 45 years to make Tysons this big of a mess. It's going to take them some time to fix it.

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