You may have seen the article by the Washington Post comparing the Reston office market to Tysons. There was some interesting information provided, including the fact that new urbanist planning designs (those with human scale streets and mixed land use) yield better return for land developers in the form of higher lease rates.
It is absolutely true that some companies are paying premiums to be in Reston Town Center despite no metro access and being further from the central business magnet of DC.
However, the article ignores the reality that Reston Town Center is just a very small part of what is considered Reston. If you include the surrounding offices of Reston you would see higher vacancy rates, much lower lease prices, and far worse design standards than those implemented at Reston Town Center.
The reason is because Reston Town Center is a single owner property. It isn’t akin to Tysons as a whole, it is comparable to a single property owner like Georgelas, Lerner, or Meridian in Tysons. The land area of Reston Town Center almost exactly mimics these individual redevelopments of Tysons, but with a 25 year head start on new urbanist ideals. For that, I must say, Boston Properties was truly visionary, but it was easier for them to make a better product.
As a single owner there were no issues of other property owners competing for the same leasees, and therefore avoiding any collaboration together. As a private development, they could implement private road designs that do not comply with VDOT standards, meaning wider walkways, on-street parking, and aesthetic streetscapes that consider pedestrians instead of vehicle through put. As a single owner they controlled the supply for the calculated demand, knowing exactly when they should build out more space, often with pre-signed lease agreements.
A lot of the trouble Tysons got into was because of the above lacking in the prior eras of development. Without a strong jurisdictional master plan Tysons became a scattershot of development with no commonality. If Tysons can simply keep momentum on this new mindset in place, and if it can get VDOT to stop over regulating road standards, it won’t just match Reston Town Center it will be composed of several Reston Town Centers in a central downtown.