Word: virginias
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When the Census Bureau announced last August that northern Virginia's Loudoun County had become the nation's most affluent, with a median household income of $98,483, it was something of a shock to locals. Loudoun is far from exclusive: a third of its 255,000 residents arrived in the past half-decade. The median house sells for $440,000. These Loudounites are not trust-fund babies or Wall Street zillionaires but youngish professionals with kids to raise and mortgages...
More than half of those jobs were on the Virginia side of the Potomac, the bulk of them white-collar stuff like management consulting, computer services and scientific research. The epicenter of the boom has been Fairfax County, just east of Loudoun and a notch below it on the income list. Fairfax is home to a million people and 600,000 jobs. It is ethnically and racially diverse. It has excellent public schools. Its unemployment rate is just...
...regions around the country trying to emulate it, as they did Silicon Valley in the 1990s? The simple answer is that they can't. "If you can force the rest of the country to send you money or go to jail, it does wonders for your economy," says northern Virginia writer and noted urban thinker Joel Garreau. Stephen Fuller, who runs the Center for Regional Analysis at George Mason University in Fairfax, puts it more gently: "It's nice to have a rich uncle...
...move to outsource government, begun under Ronald Reagan and accelerated during the Clinton years, has been a spectacular boon to northern Virginia. The once green region offered land, few restrictions on business and a transport hub in Dulles International Airport. The presence of the Pentagon, that greatest of cash-spewing economic-development engines, was the clincher...
There have been times, especially during the late 1990s tech boom, when some business folk in the area thought they had outgrown their rich uncle. But their post-2000 experience, when other tech centers floundered but northern Virginia boomed, taught them otherwise. "You had your stable base coming from government contracting, and then you had this explosion around telecom, IT and the Internet," explains former Virginia Governor Mark Warner, who was a co-founder of Nextel and later a venture capitalist. "Then, after the bubble burst, you had this unfortunate need to build a homeland-security industry...