The news was grand as presented by Falls Church City Public Schools Superintendent Dr. Peter Noonan at the School Board meeting Tuesday. Buried amid swarms of small print data was the unmistakable news that the City has its aggressive growth under control, that there will be no shortages of facilities or resources moving forward at the schools or for vital services. The one intangible is the challenge of finding talent to fill the jobs that are open here, and that’s certainly a factor not unique to Falls Church, the Northern Virginia region or nation.

Yes, there will be lots of new people in town as residential projects now under construction come to completion next year. In addition to what we already have, there will be 247 new condominiums and 400 apartments coming online in the West End project, 339 new apartments at the Broad and Washington project and 280 new apartments at the Founders Row 2 at W. Broad and S. West Street. But this is coupled with a dramatic decline, for better or worse, in the birthrates of the region, down 17 percent in Fairfax and 23 percent in Arlington.

The data also shows that it is not the new large scale mixed use projects that are causing population growth problems in the Little City. Tracked over a decade, the demonstrable bulk of students still come from the City’s single family detached homes, by a margin of 2,343 to 983 students in the Falls Church Public Schools. It is not new mixed use projects, but the ongoing process of teardown and expansion of single detached homes here that is by far the driver of student growth, and 62 percent of students come from the single detached family home category, compared to only nine percent from newer mixed use apartments.

In a statement to the News-Press yesterday, Council member Marybeth Connelly stated, “The City’s Vision statement highlights the importance of a growing population. Falls Church is ready for growth because the whole City, general government and school leadership, has been making the right moves for nearly 20 years. We’ve expanded all of the school facilities. We are in the midst of a multi-year plan to bring in mixed use buildings that provide great places for people to live, space for desired businesses, along with substantial tax contributions. Our City is better than it was 20 years ago thanks to many visionary leaders and it will keep getting better into the future because we are successfully enacting this visionary plan.”
The related element of this is the prospect for significant and permanent reductions in the real estate tax rate that we can expect in the immediate future.

To the extent there is push-back against this remarkable record of expansion and wealth, it is doomed to rely on cooked numbers and unfounded fears. We are not yet a community driven totally by rationality and the benefits of progress we can shape for ourselves, but we’re getting there.