At the monthly meeting of the Falls Church City Council’s economic development subcommittee in City Hall Tuesday, the discussion centered around what should be the best way to promote the City for the real estate developer bus tour that will be coming through the City next month and stopping in the City’s West End for lunch. That’s happening because F.C.’s Planning and Development office put out the bucks to be a prime sponsor for the annual event this time. So far, there are five buses that have been booked for the tour. Developers and their teams will fill the buses to look around the region for where they might want to put something.

Central to Falls Church’s marketing pitch is for this, of course, its success in attracting big time developers over the last two decades. Anyone who drives past the West End now gets to see what all the hubbub was about in the last decade’s efforts to demolish the old high school, build a brand new one nearby, and dedicate the 10 acres of the old school land to dense economic development now being built out by the Hoffman Company. The mass of tall building edifices that loom over the area now, even as some won’t be completed for a while, is jaw dropping. They include a new hotel, to be ready soon, a big grocery, condos, apartments, senior living, restaurants, retail, a medical building and parking garages and public spaces. Hoffman has just announced plans for placing a giant mural on one of the big blank walls that looks back into the City. While this is all very dense, it will be an amazing boon to the Little City when fully operational, both in terms of the availability of the amenities it will provide close at hand, but in terms of the tax revenues it will rake in permitting further cuts in the residential real estate tax here.

This development is in addition to smaller but still big mixed use projects that have either come on line or will soon, such as Founder’s Row One, Founder’s Row Two, the Insight Broad and Washington project, the Quinn Senior Living center and more, much more.

But equally important is the City’s educational system, with its preschool through 12 International Baccalaureate curriculum, its close proximity to major transportation hubs and routes, its civically involved and savvy population, and, as we suggested, its local newspaper, ours. Falls Church is now the only jurisdiction in the wider region with its own print newspaper offering total market coverage of its community, which presents a major advantage for anyone with anything to market, sell or convince anybody of anything, which maintains and cultivates an engaging and caring readership, and which is state certified to carry official legal notices of any and all kinds.

Realtors know how routinely touting the existence of our City’s own newspaper helps sell houses. It also sells thoughtful economic development.