Editorial

We’ve reprised this theme in this space before, but it’s worth repeating. By envisioning its City Center redevelopment running from east to west on W. Broad Street, the City of Falls Church is moving in the wrong direction. It needs to go, instead, south to north along N. Washington St., from the intersection of Broad and Washington toward the neighborhood of the East Falls Church Metro Station. Looking at the “big picture,” it is development at the East Falls Church Metro that's where the action is going to be in the coming period.

The site has been identified as the main transfer station along Metro's Orange Line for the new rail through Tysons Corner and out to Dulles Airport. Development has already begun around the site, but it is in its earliest infancy. Far-sighted developers are quietly snatching up anything they can their hands on within a half-mile radius of the station, and that includes properties inside the City of Falls Church's city limits on North Washington and West Jefferson.

Picture the East Falls Church Metro station like Ballston now is in Arlington. That's its future. When Ballston was at the end of the Orange Line after Metro first opened, it was barely more developed than the East Falls Church Metro is now. That was only 20 years ago.

The City of Falls Church needs to take a far-sighted approach and plan its commercial corridor revitalization to both feed into and feed off of this. By moving now, it will have time plan a transformation of North Washington into a tree-lined mini-Champs D'Elyses boulevard with mixed use development that will attract residents and businesses, alike, interested in its proximity to both the East Falls Church Metro station and Route 66. The boulevard could both extend south beyond Broad Street and spill onto West Broad. Ultimately, there could be a v-shaped redevelopment loop running down North Washington and out West Broad, effectively linking the East and West Falls Church Metro stations.

This is a no-brainer to us, and only and inward-focused myopia can account for why City of Falls Church officials have not jumped on this notion before now. City officials too often seem to consider anything going on outside the City's borders irrelevant or of only marginal interest. In this case, such a mistaken approach can be catastrophic. It was only last month that the Council, seeing all the development already underway on the City’s border with Arlington, asked for its first, if abbreviated, briefing by City staff on what is going on there.

In addition to revising its internal redevelopment planning before much has yet been committed to, the City needs to move with dispatch to engage Arlington County and the active civic association centered in the East Falls Church neighborhood of North Arlington around the Metro site. All three are important “stake-holders” in what unfolds there in terms of development, traffic and an array of other factors.