Amazon’s arrival in Northern Virginia may do something that hasn’t happened in more than 100 years — bring Arlington County and the city of Alexandria together in the way that they govern their communities.
Alexandria Mayor Justin Wilson and Arlington County Board Chair Christian Dorsey, both Democrats, said in a joint interview that they want to cooperate on ways to deal with the growth and disruption expected with the arrival of Amazon’s second headquarters, Virginia Tech’s new graduate campus and related developments.
The Alexandria City Council and the Arlington County Board will meet in a rare combined session Oct. 1 to talk about the possibilities.
“This is directly responsive to the concern that this is going to be an investment that is only going to benefit small segments of our community,” Wilson said, as Dorsey nodded vigorously. “There’s a fear, and there is data from other communities, that that’s possible, so we’re looking at how do we best position both communities to benefit from all of it.”
Amazon’s selection of Crystal City, Pentagon City and Potomac Yard to be the home for its HQ2 last November triggered both euphoria from government and economic development officials and fear from lower-income residents, who focused on the traffic jams and housing shortages that accompanied the retail giant’s growth in Seattle. (Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
Rents spiked immediately after the announcement, home sale prices rose, and activists staged protests, even as community opposition to a parallel campus in New York City prompted Amazon to reject that deal.
Now the potential impact of adding at least 25,000 new employees in the next decade is beginning to settle in. Five thousand potential applicants came to Crystal City for Amazon’s first Career Day last week, even though the company was offering only information about itself and not taking résumés or hiring on the spot.
Amy Liu, director of the metropolitan policy program at the Brookings Institution, said the infusion of new workers, residents and businesses could go bad quickly if elected leaders don’t act with “intentionality.”
“In the absence of a strong, single elected executive, especially in Arlington where the county chair rotates every year . . . there is a legitimate concern raised by citizens that Amazon could muscle or strong-arm the governing structure,” Liu said.
Dorsey said it became clear “pretty quickly” last November that the two proudly separate communities should work together on major concerns about housing, traffic and other issues.
“We don’t want to be caught flat-footed and reacting to market forces that make it difficult to shape anything that’s meaningful to people,” he said.
The two elected leaders want to consider whether their communities should use the same set of planning and zoning rules, for example, or allow developers to trade development rights between the city and county — perhaps allowing more density for a project in one jurisdiction in exchange for building affordable housing in the other.
Many landowners and developers, and most housing nonprofit agencies, work in both Alexandria and Arlington. At times it’s hard for anyone to tell which community they are in — unless they are clued in to the color of street signs (Alexandria’s are blue, Arlington’s are white).
Wilson and Dorsey specifically mentioned the Arlandria/Chirilauga neighborhood of Alexandria and Columbia Pike neighborhoods of Arlington as among the most vulnerable to gentrification that Amazon’s well-paid employees may bring.
That makes it important to preserve and expand affordable housing, as the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments said earlier this month, but also to educate, certify and train existing residents so they can take advantage of the opportunities that arise.
The real estate sector is already worried about finding enough highly trained construction workers in Northern Virginia, Liu said, and local governments could coordinate certification programs or internships and apprenticeships through high schools, community colleges and universities. Amazon has already pledged to work with schools to help build a “tech pipeline.”
Dorsey and Wilson said they are looking into setting up some kind of public organization that could be a clearinghouse for initiatives and serve as a magnet for investment from the federal government, the commonwealth nonprofit agencies and foundations.
“One of the things that I fear is if we’ve got a whole bunch of people doing good stuff, but they are not really connected and cohesive and working towards one goal, it’s going to be fairly diluted, and the impact will be diluted,” Dorsey said. “Let’s give everyone a place where they can devote their resources instead of saying, [should we go to] the community foundation of Arlington or the Alexandria Association?”
Other cities are figuring this out, as well. Liu pointed to Louisville and Lexington, Ky., which formed the Bluegrass Economic Advancement Movement to develop a joint regional business plan that supports adding high-quality jobs in advanced manufacturing.
Whatever form this effort takes — a community development corporation, a regional housing authority, a joint task force led by elected leaders from both communities — Dorsey and Wilson said they believe they need to act quickly. Dorsey said residents must have a strong say in what projects are pursued, and opportunities to help shape them.
“There are a lot of foundations, nonprofits and think tanks that are watching how the D.C. area, specifically how Alexandria and Arlington, handle this significant investment,” Wilson said. “They see us as a kind of proving ground, a test ground for how a community can handle a large investment.”
The two communities have successfully cooperated in the past on a Four Mile Run restoration project, the Crystal City Potomac Yard bus transitway and the Potomac Yard Metro station. They worked together in the commonwealth-organized effort to lure Amazon, which has become a catalyst for more cooperation across Northern Virginia.
But there’s also a history of each community being out for itself when it comes to economic development. Not so long ago, Arlingtonians gnashed their teeth over the relocations of the Transportation Security Agency and the National Science Foundation from Arlington to Alexandria’s Eisenhower neighborhood (TSA later moved to Springfield, in Fairfax County).
“What we’re going to do beyond this effort is never, I hope, intentionally do things to cripple a neighboring jurisdiction for our own benefit,” Dorsey said.