Fairfax County faces a serious housing shortage which could compromise the region's economy and its real estate prices, according to a report by the Center for Regional Analysis at George Mason University.
By 2025, the region is expected to add 1.5 million jobs and to grow by 786,900 households, the report said. According to a jobs-to-household formula calling for 1.6 jobs per household, the region will have a total of 218,200 too few housing units by 2025.
"They are not building housing fast enough to accommodate the demands for housing that will be generated in these jurisdictions," said Steven Fuller, the director of the Center for Regional Analysis who co-authored the report.
OFFICIALS AROUND the region have focused too much on producing new jobs without following up with sufficient housing, Fuller said.
"These things are diverging to the point where we have this serious shortage of housing to support the economy," he said.
As a result, house prices will continue to increase to the point where "the kind of income you need to buy the average home is beyond what the average family will have."
This could threaten the regional economy, and Fairfax County's economy particularly where many of the jobs and the most expensive homes can be found.
"If it undercuts the health of the economy it will be self-correcting," said Fuller. "That is one way the bubble bursts."
If housing in the closer jurisdictions such as Fairfax County becomes too expensive, people will continue to move further and further away where housing is more affordable, but where commuting times are longer, he said.
"You can't just say we don't want it," he said. "We need to find housing for these people."
"If they all end up on Interstate 81 we've lost the battle."
Steven Alloy, the president of the Stanley Martin Companies who heads the Fairfax County chapter of the Northern Virginia Building Industry Association, has seen that problem first-hand.
"The number of homebuilders from this area who are now building houses in Winchester and West Virginia, it's staggering," he said.
The Northern Virginia Building Industry Association is one of three local building groups who requested the report.
Alloy also mentioned the county's shortage of teachers, nurses and firefighters.
"How are we going to recruit teachers when the teachers' salary doesn't allow them to live here?" he said.
FULLER CRITICIZED Loudoun County's plan to rezone the county in order to slow growth for being ineffective.
"Their growth is inevitable," he said. Downzoning "doesn't make the problem go away."
Alloy said those zoning restrictions were "a political problem." People move to Fairfax and then pressure local governments to make it harder for others to move there, he said.
"The majority wants one thing and it's the role of government to protect the rights of the minority and the minority doesn't have a house yet," he said.
Fuller also suggested concentrating high-density developments close to transit stations even if that requires upzoning. If localities do that, "they achieve the principle of smart growth, they protect the environmentally sensitive areas but they achieve the growth that's going to take place."
Stewart Schwartz, the executive director of the Coalition for Smarter Growth, agreed that housing needs to be concentrated around transit stations.
"We have always said that there is a lack of affordable housing near jobs," he said.
But Schwartz said he was concerned that the study was being used to criticize what he called "Loudoun County's growth management plan" and to call for relaxing zoning restrictions.
"It's already being used as a blunt instrument by the home builders lobby in Richmond to imply that something like Loudoun County's growth management plan is at fault," he said. The report, he added, "should not be interpreted simplistically and it shouldn't be interpreted as a critique of smart growth."