Fairfax County is one of the most important economic engines in the Commonwealth of Virginia. But due to economic pressures from federal cutbacks, the recent government shutdown, and the crippling housing market, this region is currently facing some serious issues. David Ramadan breaks down the county’s biggest problems with Hon. Jeff McKay, Chairman of Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, and guest co-host Theo Stamatis. Together, they discuss what must be done to address the massive drop in available jobs, the alarming number of displaced federal employees, and the negative impact of DOGE cuts. Chairman McKay also explains how empowering small businesses and building more mixed-use buildings can help replenish Fairfax County’s wealth and solve its fiscal issues.
Listen to the podcast here:
Fairfax County’s Current Issues With Hon. Jeffrey C. McKay & Theo Stamatis
Fairfax County is one of the most important economic engines in the Commonwealth, home to George Mason University, Fortune 500 companies, federal contractors, startups, and some of the most diverse and dynamic communities in the country. It's also a county facing real challenges, economic pressure from federal cutbacks, the ripple effects of the shutdown, and a housing market that's pushing workers and young professionals further out. In this episode, we're taking a closer look at all of it.
I'm joined by a dear friend, Chairman Jeff McKay, who leads the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors and has been the center of every major decision affecting the county's economy, its growth, and its future. Cohosting with me is Theo Stamatis, a master of public policy student here at the Schar School and an At-Large Commissioner on the Fairfax County Small Business Commission. Together, we'll break down where Fairfax stands, how the shutdown and federal workforce cuts have impacted families and businesses, and what needs to happen next to keep this county competitive, affordable, and positioned for long-term success.
Gentlemen, welcome.
Thank you. I’m glad to be with you.
Thank you, Dr. Ramadan.
How Fairfax County Is Being Hit At All Sides
Thank you. Chairman McKay, there's so much that we can cover with you, but let's start with the macro. Give us a quick look at jobs, revenues, where Fairfax is strongest, or where you're most exposed.
It's a mixed bag, as your intro indicated. We feel good about where we are in Fairfax County and a lot of measures, but we have some very real concerns about things that I would consider to be outside pressure points. You mentioned the instability in Washington, DC, something we're watching closely. I have to say that when I look back at the last couple of years in terms of jobs, one bright spot is that half of the jobs that have been created in the entire Commonwealth of Virginia were created in Fairfax County. That's over 30,000 jobs.
Our work at the Economic Development Authority and our work in attracting businesses, small and large, is paying dividends in the county. It's at an important time because, as you indicated, and we know too well, what's happening in Washington, DC, is having a toll not only on our families and federal workers, but our federal contractors and small businesses.
One of the biggest challenges is that the data related to those actions is not complete. Many times, it is very much delayed in real time when we get that information. When we're looking at unemployment numbers, we're used to, in Fairfax County, being among the lowest in the country and the lowest in Virginia. We're seeing huge increases in unemployment numbers, which isn't always the case. That's troubling because that's a trend line that points to a larger problem.
The other thing that is on my mind often is, for the people who are being displaced from their jobs or are filing unemployment claims, what is happening to them? That's where we don't have the real data. Are they applying for and not getting other jobs? Do they have another job in the pipeline? Frankly, the worst-case scenario is whether they are relocating to another area. That's where we don't have good data. We will, over time.
We're at the beginning of a shift that is happening in our workforce. I feel like, due to the work of the EDA and due to the reputation of the county, we're going to be able to weather this storm as we have weathered storms in the past. We do think this is more than a thunderstorm event. This is more like a years-long storm that's happening that we're going to have to continue to navigate our way through.
The old saying goes that the best governance is that which is closest to the people. It doesn't get any closer to the people than the board of supervisors. Data delayed. All of these challenges. The federal government across the street or across the river is cutting down jobs and cutting down income. Healthcare benefits that are being slashed. Yet, you still have to balance that fiscal stability with community needs. How do you do so?
I remind my constituents often that a county like Fairfax is being hit from every angle. First, our revenues are down because spending is down because people have lost their jobs. The needs of our nonprofit community-based organizations that provide aid to people who have been displaced and affected, their needs are higher than ever. Their fundraising is lower than ever because some of the people that they relied on to support their organizations aren't getting income.
Tweet: Fairfax County’s revenues are down because people have lost their jobs and non-profit organizations have been displaced.
The county is a direct recipient of federal grant money that is also drying up. We're getting hit at that level. Finally, the big one is if there are shifts in commercial office space and leases that affect our commercial tax base, which is the bread and butter of our county budget, which is based on residential and commercial real estate. Commercial real estate is going down. We have to balance our budget. Needs are going up.
The thing we have to protect against here is rising real estate taxes. One of the things that all of us know is that one of the biggest challenges of our region is the lack of available, attainable, and affordable housing. Real estate tax rates play a role in that. The county is getting hit from every angle. The one positive thing that a lot of us have to focus on is that we entered this storm with very good, fundamental balance sheets. We've got a triple-A bond-rated county organization.
The bond rating agency looks to us for a model of good governance. We have predictability and reliability. We have a highly educated workforce. We have a lot of institutions like George Mason and others in our community that are huge generators of economic opportunity. We have a great public school system. We are the safest jurisdiction of our size in the United States of America, with rich diversity that is firing on all cylinders. I have to try to think of the positives of entering this storm.
Our foundational elements and our fundamentals are so strong that even in tough budget years, like we're going to have in 2025 and 2026 as we balance our budget, the community can rely on the board to make good, balanced decisions that recognize, at this point in time, we're financially constrained, but we also have to maintain and support those fundamental core services that drive our entire economy here. Protecting school funding, investing in transportation infrastructure, supporting our first responders, and supporting our nonprofits that are providing relief services in our communities are foundational, fundamental things that we're going to protect no matter how difficult the budget is that we're facing.
Does Fairfax County Have A Wealthy Population?
There are going to be some tough decisions to be made, which leads to conceptions and misconceptions about the county. Our students at George Mason, those who are on the main campus in Fairfax, down the street from your offices, mostly live there and work there. I have readers as well that come from the Arlington campus, as well as our alums and our faculty that are all over the area. What is the biggest misconception about the Fairfax economy that you want them to know?
There are two, and they're related. One is the misconception that everyone in Fairfax County is wealthy. That is completely wrong. We have people who have become extraordinarily successful and are extraordinarily wealthy. I salute them. That's the type of incubation we want to have happen here, where we can have people from all over the world come to Fairfax County and become economically successful.
That's wonderful, but we need to remember that we also have thousands of people living in poverty, living paycheck to paycheck, and are right on the edge. Many of those people are service employees who are necessary to our economy, even on campus. The people who clean the buildings, the people who manage the landscaping, and the people who work in the food services are important people in our economy. We can't forget the needs that they have.
That is significant. When you look at the number of kids in our public school system on free and reduced price lunches, the number is extraordinary. It's larger than the total size of most other school districts in Virginia. That's one of those indicators that there are a lot of people in the county living below the poverty line and living paycheck to paycheck. We have to be cognizant of that. That's a big misconception.
The other one is related to that. If everyone in Fairfax County is wealthy, why does the county have challenges financially? The misconception a lot of people have is that local governments tap into income taxes, which we do not do in Virginia. No matter how wealthy people in Fairfax County are, our sources of revenue, such as our real estate taxes, commercial taxes, car taxes, and then the things after that are very tiny. We do not tax income as local governments. We do not benefit directly from income tax roles that flow to the Commonwealth of Virginia, not to the localities.
The most famous question or the most routine question I get asked by people is, “How can a county as wealthy as Fairfax County have any fiscal issues?” The answer is because we are largely a funder to the commonwealth of Virginia through income, and we are left to raise revenue through those sources that I mentioned. Those can be constrained. When they are constrained, it creates the fiscal challenge that we have at the local government level. Misconceptions are that people here are all wealthy, and because of that, counties must not have any fiscal constraints. Those are the two most popular misconceptions I hear.
Thank you for clarifying those. For our readers’ benefit, for every dollar that goes to Richmond from Northern Virginia, how much of that dollar comes back to be spent here, Chairman McKay?
We used to measure this through direct and indirect benefits. If you look at the totality of the indirect and direct benefits that we get from the Commonwealth of Virginia, the best estimate is that about 50% of all the revenue that we send to Richmond comes back to Fairfax County. We updated this not long ago. This is going public soon, so this is a timely question.
If you take out outliers like the number of kids that live in Fairfax County and go to other Virginia public schools that are being helped by the Commonwealth, and you take out some of those other indirect things, we are more down to $0.20 on the dollar. Depending on how you do the math, it's between $0.20 and $0.50 on the dollar. As I tell people, regardless of whether you subscribe to the $0.20 or the $0.50, you can at least agree with me that neither one of those is a particularly great return on investment. That underlies what creates a lot of our fiscal challenges.
How DOGE Cuts Impacted Fairfax County
I know the rest of the Commonwealth thank you for those donations. We are recording on November 21, 2025. This episode will not come out for a couple of weeks, so that information will be out there by the time, but it's still timely. You did mention housing. I am on the Governor-elect and Lieutenant Governor-elect’s transition teams. Housing is one of the portfolios I'm working on. I'm going to ask you about it in a minute. Before we go there, let's talk about DOGE cuts for a second. What did you see on the ground as layoffs and agency cuts hit and during the shutdown? Any metrics that keep you up at night, still?
Absolutely. The biggest metric that keeps me up at night is what we don't know. When you have as many people as we have in Fairfax County tied directly and indirectly to federal spending, your exposure is significant. We know that the Council of Governments has done a monthly dashboard. We know that in August 2025, data showed a decrease of 25,000 federal jobs in our region this calendar year. We know that a good chunk of those, you could roughly say, probably at least 1/3 of those, are directly located in Fairfax County. That's huge. We also know that our unemployment rate is going up significantly by historical measures. That’s a concern.
The other metric that keeps me up at night, and it's directly related to the DOGE cuts, is that our economic development authority has a job site that shows the number of available jobs in Northern Virginia. That number last calendar year was well over 100,000 vacant available jobs in Northern Virginia. Here we are, 11 months into this administration, and largely about 8 to 9 months into some of the DOGE cuts that hit, we know that the number of open available jobs is more around 40,000.
What happened to upwards of 80,000 jobs? They didn't get filled by people. They dropped off the ledger as the private sector, and the federal government stopped posting available jobs. That number is going in the wrong direction for the wrong reason. If we were sitting here saying it was going in that direction, you would think it would be a good news story because those jobs are being filled. It's a bad news story because those jobs no longer exist.
That keeps me up at night. That is a direct reflection of what's happening with the DOGE cuts. I get more notices from businesses that are laying off employees. I can tell you that many of these businesses are the ones you would expect them to be. They are our federal government contractors, the Beltway Bandits as we know them. Well-known contractors with the federal government are laying off hundreds of people.
The DOGE cuts have been real. When people talk about the government shutdown, I always remind them that by Fairfax County standards, the government shutdown has been going on since January 2025. It wasn't the longest shutdown in government history that the media was focused on, but the government has been shutting down since January, when it comes to the direct effect on people in Fairfax County who are tied to any level of federal spending. This has been the longest shutdown, and not just because of the literal shutdown, but because of what started during the DOGE reductions.
For the benefit of our readers, I'm not sure how much of this is going to be Fairfax’s share, but the estimates for the federal job cuts are that it's going to cost Virginia overall, and a big number of it will be Fairfax County, a $434 million reduction in our GDP. That's in addition to $250 million in direct funds that'll be cut because of the healthcare cuts and SNAP cuts. So I feel for you and for the job that you and the board have to do in order to maintain the services that you maintain for your constituents.
Dave, let me add one thing to what you said because it's an important thing for people to remember. We know that 42% of the entire commonwealth of Virginia's GDP is in Northern Virginia alone. Those cuts that you mentioned are predominantly in Northern Virginia. Northern Virginia is almost half of the state's entire GDP. This problem, while it's one I'm grappling with because I have to balance my budget, is that I've reminded people this is a Virginia problem, not a Northern Virginia problem. If Northern Virginia is not firing on all cylinders, the state is not firing on all cylinders. If Northern Virginia has a cold, the state has the flu. We can't ignore the fact that this is not just a Northern Virginia problem, but this problem will flow directly to the Commonwealth of Virginia.
Providing Support Services To Displaced Employees
The governor-elect and the Lieutenant Governor-elect are very aware of that. The transition team is working on these issues. Quickly, before I turn it over to my co-host for his questions, what are you doing in the short-term to deal with all of the above?
A lot of things. One, we're providing the types of support services you would expect through Virginia Career Works, our EDA, and our Office of Economic Initiatives to provide re-employment opportunities. We partner with our universities. We have a great cadre of those from George Mason University, Northern Virginia Community College, and others to fast-track degree programs and, in some cases, provide tuition relief for displaced federal employees.
We're doubling down on resources available to our nonprofits, so that people who are living paycheck to paycheck don't lose their homes during this chaotic disruption that's happening in our economy. We are investing in our EDA and emerging technology areas that are big job creators. I was at an event in Chantilly. We are doubling down on artificial intelligence and helping those companies that are working on that.
Cybersecurity is still a strength of Northern Virginia. We are trying to expand those opportunities, as well as aerospace and quantum computing. We are holding conferences. We had a big conference here on quantum computing a couple of months ago. We're trying to sponsor as many of those events as we can so that people can get re-employment opportunities.
People don't realize that a lot of these displaced employees have a skillset that is very highly specialized and important to our nation and public service, but doesn't always directly align with an available job. We're trying to make sure resources are there to re-skill and retrain those folks to get them in another job in Northern Virginia as quickly as possible.
Tweet: A lot of displaced employees have highly specialized skill sets that are integral to our nation-building and public service. They must be given new job opportunities as quickly as possible.
Those are some of the things that we're doing at the local level that are outside of the norm of what you would expect to be happening at a municipal level, but it is important to us. This is a leverage moment with our chambers, our universities, and our contractors. Let's leverage this moment and make sure we're doing everything we can to reskill, upskill, and make sure that jobs of the future are here.
All of us know, if we've learned anything from this exercise and this lesson that we've been through, that we must diversify our economy. I don’t think this change and what's affected at the federal level is permanent because some of these cuts are going to cost us more money than they'll ever save us. We'll realize that and bring back some of these jobs. That being said, we need to make sure we take advantage of this opportunity to expand into those economic areas where we should be in the lead, but haven't always needed to be. We need them right now.
We've been there before, Chairman McKay. Unfortunately, when the dollar starts flowing again from the federal government, we all get set in our ways and go back to the old habits. Hopefully, that won't be the case this time. Theo, the microphone is yours.
Providing Relief To Small Businesses In Fairfax
Thank you, Dr. Ramadan. Mr. Chair, from the small business lens, what relief or red tape fixes help Main Street when federal demand stalls? Could that be payment cycles, permitting, or local vendor preference? What are some of those red tape fixes to mitigate that?
We have local vendor preferences already. We have small, minority, and veteran-owned businesses and preferences through our procurement system. I've been talking to our procurement offices. Board members don't get directly involved in procurement, but I've gotten reassurances from them that they are also getting rid of legacy procurement awards. They are also opening up more procurement opportunities, which generate better competition, lower prices for the county, but also allow some of our smaller businesses to get in the game when it comes to supporting municipalities. We are most certainly doubling down on that.
The other thing is, I've spent a lot of time working on reducing our regulatory impact on businesses. One thing we did during COVID through our grant program is we got to know a lot of these businesses and what their needs are. We took advantage of that through surveys, interviews, and opportunities to say, “What could the county do to help you as a small business?” One of the many things was streamlining our permitting process.
We had a conversation with a couple of AI vendors on how we can better leverage AI to streamline our permitting process. My goal is to see dramatic improvements in turnaround time in permitting, especially those permits that are not highly technical. It should not take you weeks to get a permit to renovate a commercial kitchen. It should not take you weeks to get an inspection done so that you can open that kitchen. I’ve called together our leaders in the county and said, “At this moment, we need to do everything we can to provide as much relief as we can to our local businesses.”
That being said, Theo, I’m proud of what we did during COVID because a lot of local governments used federal spending however they saw fit. We put a ton of money into building relationships, especially with small businesses that were closed or affected by COVID. As a result of that, you saw, when we came out of COVID, a strong rebound in Fairfax County compared to a lot of other jurisdictions.
That mindset continues. After that pandemic, it has moved right into this chaotic moment that we're in. We're going to continue to do that. Our Department of Economic Initiatives is providing some coaching for businesses. They have contracts with people who can help people with accounting and marketing expertise to try to build those bonds with our small businesses. We're not trying to run small businesses. We're trying to help small businesses get the resources and the expertise at low or no cost to help them expand and exist in our ecosystem.
Outlets Where People Can Plug Into The County’s Resources
To piggyback off that, Mr. Chair, you've said repeatedly that Fairfax County is a small business county where 90% of the businesses are 50 employees and below. We are, without question, a small business county. For my next question to you, for student founders at George Mason University, where can they plug into county resources, i.e., incubators, procurement, or site selection? What are some of those outlets that they can plug into?
The number one outlet is to make contact with our Department of Economic Initiatives because they have been on the front lines of providing so many of the resources that I mentioned, whether it's coaching or support. They’re helping them map out future economic opportunities that exist in the county, and then also being able to provide some day-to-day support. The first reachout would be the Department of Economic Initiatives.
The other thing, and this has nothing to do with the county, but I find it valuable, is to link up with your local chambers of commerce. They also create a network of opportunities for a lot of small businesses that no government could create. In addition to that, take advantage of the things that the county sponsors. We have events all over the county, including ones that provide some direct funding for startup businesses. We have our Fairfax Founders Fund that specifically provides startup capital to minority-owned businesses that might not have the same opportunities with commercial banks.
We've gotten deeply outside of the norm of what local governments would do to support our business ecosystem. Our Department of Economic Initiatives manages a lot of that. Be sure you're in one of those networks because those networks matter. Especially if you're a small business, they can be the lifeline for a lot of folks, not only in their time of need, but they also could represent exponential business growth opportunities through those connections.
Recognizing Fairfax’s Alarming Housing Constraints
Mr. Chairman, let's talk a little bit about housing. There's a huge growth constraint. We have a housing problem. You alluded earlier to one of the misconceptions that everybody's wealthy in Fairfax County. Whether it is a full-time professor or a blue-collar worker who works for George Mason or the Schar School, they cannot afford a home in Fairfax County. You advanced an aggressive housing motion in the fall. Tell us about the concrete levers and the speed in production. What are you changing in this new initiative to deal with this housing problem? This is not just a Fairfax problem. It's a Commonwealth problem.
In a lot of ways, a nationwide problem. You're right. It’s certainly a Commonwealth and a Fairfax problem. One of the things when I was first elected chair was that we moved the target of 5,000 new affordable housing units by 2034 to 10,000. I'm happy to say we're about halfway there and ahead of schedule if you look at it on the calendar. This is a huge initiative of mine.
The board matter that I passed asked our staff to double down on this stuff, look at removing regulatory burdens, certainly, and look at getting our Office of Public-Private Partnerships and our Department of Finance more involved in some of these deals with our Department of Housing to expedite their turnaround time.
We get a lot of solicitations for affordable housing that are highly technical and highly difficult to review. The longer that review takes, that's time someone's not in a unit. We are trying to speed up our review of those and the economic documents that go with getting. Whether it's Virginia Department of Housing Funding, federal tax credits, or utilizing our own county revolving housing funds, these projects are put together with a lot of stacks of resources. They're highly technical. We are making sure that we have the people in place to handle those and to handle them as effectively and as quickly as possible.
The other thing is, we have a lot of places of worship in Fairfax County that are underutilized. I talked to a lot of ministers and other folks throughout our community, like, “We'd like to do affordable housing. We have excess land.” We have too many regulations in their way. We are knocking down those barriers, including doing things like saying, “If you're a church and you have excess land, instead of you trying to build affordable housing, how about donating that land to the Fairfax County Redevelopment Housing Authority?
Let them get the housing built and do a ground lease with them, where you don't have to worry about the headaches of building housing. You can focus on what you do well. We'll focus on what we do well.” There are some innovative things like that that leverage the public-private partnerships that are out there because no government alone can solve this problem.
If you think about the problem, the real problem is a lack of housing. The supply and demand factor that drives the lack of affordable housing is that we're not producing enough affordable housing. As leaders, we have to be bold on that. You'll appreciate this as a former elected official. Most people are all for housing until it gets anywhere near where they live. All of a sudden, it’s like, “We were for housing, but not there.” As leaders, we have to be ready. Chair Randall in Loudoun County and I share this line. I think it was mine first, but we'll settle that in a different venue.
Tweet: Small businesses must become part of networks that matter. This can be their lifeline not only in their time of need but in chasing growth opportunities.
I was not going to mention Loudon to you. You brought it up. Mr. Chairman. My home county.
I love Loudoun. They are a great regional partner of ours in Fairfax. Chair Randall and I share this thing. We share with the community a lot that we're willing to lose our board seats over a fight for affordable housing. It is that important to our economy. Politicians or elected officials need to embrace housing and not run away from it when it gets hard on a land use case, and not run away from density where it is needed near transit stations.
Those of us in public office, especially those of us who have teenage kids and college-age kids, know that young people want to live in different environments. They don't want to live in a cul-de-sac in a big house where they have to spend the weekend mowing grass. Our young people want to live in dynamic areas near transit, walkability, and where housing is affordable. You can't accomplish that if you're not bold and looking at your comprehensive plan and saying, “We're going to maximize the number of housing units we can along major transportation corridors.”
The Silver Line, particularly in Tysons and Reston, is a complete demonstration of how you can do that and do it right. Those are the areas we have to make sure we grow a tremendous number of housing units to deal with this issue. The challenge all of us face is that this is a nationwide problem. It's a Virginia problem. It's a Fairfax problem. It's also very much a DMV problem.
One of the things we're making sure of is that the Council of Governments and other organizations are monitoring how aggressive our localities are at building affordable housing. We've got to be all in at this moment. I can't solve the problem alone in Fairfax. We need to solve it regionally at a state level and to do it well. I also always share with folks that affordable housing used to always be a thing we talked about in terms of morality. It's a nice thing to do. We can't talk about it in terms of morality. We've got to talk about it in terms of economic development.
I'll leave you with this one last thought on affordable housing. I like to get out and talk to the government classes in our high schools. I look at a full classroom of high school students. They're getting ready to graduate. I wonder how many of those kids, after they graduate or go to college, are going to be able to afford to live in the community that raised them. We should all take a moment and think about that.
In our Fairfax County public schools, we invest $16,000 a year per pupil in education. Multiply that by the number of years a kid is in our school system. If that kid graduates and goes to another state to work, think about all of the investment that we have lost with that student leaving our region. Most young people will tell you they left because they couldn't afford to live here.
Tweet: When children graduate and move to another state to work, their home state loses a lot of investment. Every state must do everything it can to make them stay.
I've got news for you. We can't afford to have them leave. I'm not in the charitable business of educating people in Fairfax County for the benefit of other economies across the United States. I'm in the business of educating kids because it's the right thing to do, and also because it pays economic dividends, but it only works if you can keep them in your economy.
You’ve nailed so many important points. I'm handling this issue for transition, and it's very close to my heart. You've hit several of those. When I was in office and then when I traveled around, whether it was for businesses or for housing, when we used to go around the Small Business Caucus in the House, we used to go around the Commonwealth, hold these sessions, and ask, “What is the one issue that we can help businesses?” That turned into housing as well.
There were always two answers. It was permitting and zoning, whether it's a small business or a church trying to build a building. There's a story from a church in our region. We’ll keep that neighboring county unnamed. The church is surrounded by high rises all around it. They're the only non-high-rise structure.
How To Achieve Attainable And Affordable Housing Without Breaking The Bank
They said they wanted to put high-rise housing on their property. It has been eight years, and they've yet to get the permit. That's unacceptable. We're seeing a little bit of a change. It's moving from the, “Not In My Backyard,” which you hit on. In our language, we call it the NIMBYs. We are seeing a lot of YIMBYs now, the movement to, “Yes In My Backyard,” but that's out of necessity. We don't want this talent to move away.
The definition has changed. Affordable housing used to be a definition for individuals of low income. That's not the case anymore. We're not just talking about low income. We're talking about middle income. We're talking more about attainable housing. We're not talking about how the low-income can't live here. Our teachers can't live here. Our nurses can't live here. Our early-career-failed contractor employees can't live here. Professors and PhDs can't live here. We're talking about attainable housing, not just affordable housing. I know that is part and parcel of your plan in Fairfax. How are you going to be able to do that without blowing up your budget?
It helps our budget. We did an analysis not long ago. There was this famous finding in most people's minds that housing costs counties money, and commercial businesses raise counties money, so you shouldn't build too much housing.
Another misconception.
Part of that is why we have the problem we have. I look at some of the new housing that's being developed. Some of it is being developed to retain higher-income and middle-income people in Fairfax County. One of the more interesting conversations I've had was in a room full of seniors. Many of them lived in single-family detached houses. They're empty nesters. They realize they don't need a house this big anymore, but the housing options are limited for them to stay in our economy. They want a downside.
When I think about some things like developments that are happening in Tysons, some age-restricted high-rise units, and market rate, you're talking about big bucks for some of these units. The important thing is that there are seniors who have retired from very lucrative careers in Fairfax County. I got to keep them here, but more importantly, I got to free up their house for another family. In that scenario, keeping people of high income who don't have kids is an economic development multiplier.
The old ways in the county, where you were only building single-family homes on cul-de-sacs in the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s, they were producing a lot of kids. They were smaller houses without high assessments. People in those units cost the county money. When you look at today’s developments, when you talk about density, attracting young people, and retaining older workers, we've seen a different change. We've seen that housing conversions can save the county money.
The one that we did that was most interesting was analyzing Skyline. For those folks not familiar with Skyline, they are high-rise office buildings built back in the ‘70s and early ‘80s. It’s an outdated office space and is vacant because of the fact that it's not a great office market anymore. Those buildings were converted using the county's conversion ordinance into residential units. That building is generating way more revenue for the county as a full, leased-out residential building than it ever did as an office building. It has also enlivened that space. It has supported the local small businesses that relied on people to be in those buildings. It was an environmentally smart thing to do. You could reuse existing infrastructure.
This old notion of housing costing counties money is quickly being debunked when you look at the type of housing that we're building. That's how you can afford it. That's particularly important when you have a lot of people who are rethinking, “What is the future for me?” Consider a senior-level federal worker who lives in the county who lost their job, and they're thinking to themselves, “Maybe this is a chance to move to a more affordable area or move to an area where there's the type of housing we need.” That's a space we've got to fill.
I want to try to keep those people here. That's why we're aggressively pursuing all different types of housing so that a lot of these empty nesters and a lot of our young people can afford to live in the county. Those are two target areas for me, our young professionals and our retiring folks in the county. If we can attract and retain more of those, that's a good thing for the county's economy.
Music to my ears. Theo, I'm going to turn the microphone to you again.
How Fairfax Converts Vacant And Underused Office And Retail Spaces
Thank you so much. My next question dovetails, Mr. Chairman, into conversions. I want to say that I heard your speech at the groundbreaking of the residences at Government Center II. There's already I. I remember you said, “If folks don't want families in their backyard, you're going to have homeless people in your front yard.” That is very evident and should send a signal to everybody, “We need housing now.” With conversions, what is the county doing to convert vacant, underused office and retail spaces into these mixed-use, more residential communities that you're seeing?
I mentioned earlier that we put in place years ago a policy for the conversion of commercial space to residential. We also put in place a policy for the conversion of retail space to maker space and quasi-industrial space. The world has changed. If I can take an underutilized shopping center and put an unconventional tenant in there that can help support all the other small businesses that are there, we've had great success on the retail front doing that.
I can think of examples where we've put a brewery into a shopping center, and it enlivened that whole shopping center. It needed that. We have a lot of old strip centers that need that. It's not just commercial office space. It is a conversion of commercial space, in general, and being more flexible in our zoning ordinance about how to use that.
On the housing front, we know that there are a lot of buildings in the county that likely are never going to be reoccupied like they were before. Those are office buildings. We also know that in a lot of cases, they're very expensive to do a conversion to residential. What we have looked at is, through our conversion policy, how we can streamline and advance the zoning process.
Can we allow some of these conversions to happen by taking out the time and cost of going through our regulatory process? I mentioned the Skyline example. There are several others throughout the county. If people are reading who are thinking about doing a conversion, reach out to us. Reach out to the folks at the county on day one so that we can help you get through the process. We have examples where it's been very successful.
The EDA likes to remind folks, and they've told us this in several presentations, and I appreciate this, that the county's office vacancy rate is higher than we like it to be, but it's still a lot lower than a lot of other markets across the country that are comparable in size. If you took out all those buildings that were built in the 1980s, these old suburban office buildings that are in the middle of nowhere, that are dated, and that are not going to be refilled by anyone, out of the equation and converted all of those or redeveloped all of those, the county's vacancy rate would be in the single digits.
Tweet: If you converted and redeveloped all those buildings from the 1980s, Fairfax County’s vacancy rate would be in the single digits.
We've got to reckon with the fact that those buildings are not going to be reoccupied. One of the things I've told our staff is, “Let's aggressively reach out to the owners of those buildings and say, ‘Come to us with some other ideas. We want to help you solve the problem you have. We want to do that together through a streamlined process.’” There's a great opportunity out there in a lot of places in this county to do more of that.
What people have realized is that mixed-use communities are where people want to live. If you have a suburban office park and you can convert half of that to residential, you have created daytime, nighttime, and weekend traffic in that area that helps a lot of the retail around there. Those are some of the things that we put in place and want to see more of in the county.
Streamlining The Processes Of Residential Development
My next question, Mr. Chairman, dovetails into something you mentioned earlier about streamlining permitting in Fairfax County. If you could change one permitting step tomorrow to cut cost and time, what is it? What would that one step be?
It depends on what it is. I would say this. For residential development, it would be to streamline the process builders go through to get VDOT permits. While we are at fault at the county and I chase our staff all the time to do better and turnaround, most of the home builders I talk to tell me their biggest stumbling block is getting through VDOT's process, getting through their bond process, and getting through their approval process. We are making sure those applications that need a state-level review are engaged in that and speeding that process up, as we're doing for our own review.
At a micro level, I've told our staff, “I won't settle until we're beating every one of our neighboring jurisdictions in time.” When people come to me and say, “We got our restaurant permit in Fairfax County half the time it took us to get ours in the district or Montgomery County,” I celebrate those wins, but I always go back to our staff and say, “Half the time isn't good enough.”
We're always looking at our regional metrics and comparing ourselves. I am going to keep pressing our staff to be the number one permit jurisdiction in the DMV in terms of time. One of the things that is helping us with that was the whole conversion to a lot of ePlans. A lot of people didn't like that. Going to all electronic plans was daunting or scary for a lot of folks, but we have seen some measurable improvements in review time. We have a dashboard in the county where our county executives, senior-level leadership, and agency directors can look at all the site plans and permits pending in the county and see exactly where they are in the process.
We've set up a system where alarm bells go off if they're sitting there longer than they should to instigate our staff to get those out the door quicker. We're using a lot of these new technologies to help hold ourselves more accountable and get to my ultimate goal, which is a metric that shows in every permitting analysis that we can do that Fairfax County is getting permits approved faster than anywhere else in the DMV.
Mr Chairman, we can spend another hour talking about talent and transportation. There are so many issues that you're involved in. You talked about regional cooperation as well, which is very important, not just on housing, transportation, and everything else. I had breakfast at the Greater Washington Board of Trade's yearly meeting. Your County Executive, Bryan Hill, was with me, along with Chairwoman Randall and Supervisor Angry from Prince William County, who is Mr. Chairman of VACo.
Answering Three Lightning Round Questions
I know you all work closely together. Even though you compete, you also work very closely together. I'm going to skip all of these issues because of time, and I'm going to go to a quick lightning round. Three quick questions, and we will end with that. This is for the benefit of our students at George Mason. How do I get appointed to a board or commission in Fairfax?
Reach out to my office.
Best entry path into county government?
Through a community homeowner association or nonprofit board.
Third and final one. Top two skills Fairfax employers tell you they cannot find?
We still lag in healthcare credentials. I talked to a lot of healthcare groups, and healthcare credentials seem to be lacking. The other thing, and I don't have an opinion on this one way or another, so I want to condition this answer, is the difficulty they have in getting workers who are willing to come into the office. That could be a whole other program because there are pros and cons of remote work, but I hear from a lot of our employers that we could get more people to come in more regularly to the office.
If I can only get them to come into class as well.
It's not because of the quality of the instructor. It's because of all the other influences.
Episode Wrap-up And Closing Words
They sit in bed with their laptops. They prefer to do that versus showing up physically in class. Final thoughts, Chairman McKay?
I want to make sure that all of our readers are eternal optimists like I am. It's easy to get lost in the negativity and the negative data. I know this recording is coming out later, but for us real time, we're approaching Thanksgiving. Think of gratitude and gratefulness because so many things in our region and so many things at George Mason University work so well. We focus so much time on the things that aren't working and not enough time on a lot of the things that are working that make this place the best place, I believe, in the country by a mile to live.
I mentioned some of those metrics at the beginning of this broadcast. Let us all focus on the things we can be grateful for. I know I am grateful to live in a dynamic, forward-thinking environment like Northern Virginia that will look at any challenge and not back away from it, but find a way to get through it. That keeps me laser-focused every day on continuing to make progress.
Amen to that. I have a saying. I say that every day is a great day in this great country, even the bad days. We've had some bad days, but it's still a great day. Chairman McKay, thank you for joining us and for your insights into where Fairfax County is headed. Theo, thank you for co-hosting, bringing the small business and student perspective to the conversation. For our audience, as always, you can check out all of our episodes of policy and governance perspectives at Schar.gmu.edu/podcast or anywhere you get your shows. We are syndicated on all the platforms. Until next time, stay informed, stay engaged, and stay tuned.
Important Links
About Hon. Jeff McKay
Chairman Jeffrey C. McKay is a lifelong Fairfax County resident, born and raised on the historic Route One Corridor in Franconia District.
From kindergarten to eighth grade, he attended two of Fairfax County’s world-class public schools, Woodlawn Elementary School and Walt Whitman Middle School, before graduating from Bishop Ireton High School. Jeff also graduated with a B.S. in Public Administration and Political Science from James Madison University and is a graduate of the University of Virginia’s Sorensen Institute for Political Leadership.
Jeff has more than 20 years of experience working on behalf of the residents of Fairfax County. First serving for 12 years as then-Supervisor Dana Kauffman’s chief of staff before running and winning the election as Franconia District Supervisor in November 2007. He was elected Chairman in 2019.
Since joining the Board, Jeff has been a champion for equity, education, affordable housing, transportation, revitalization, and the environment. His commitment to these issues has been demonstrated on the Board as former Chair of the Legislative and Transportation committees and current Chair of the Budget Committee.
Jeff is also a regional leader. He currently serves on the DMVMoves Task Force, a first of its kind initiative charged with improving regional transit, the Northern Virginia Transportation Authority, the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, the Inova Health Systems Board, and on the Board of Directors for the Virginia Association of Counties, where he is a past president. In addition, he was twice the Chair of the Northern Virginia Transportation Commission, a member of the Northern Virginia Regional Commission, and a member of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority Board of Directors for four years.
Jeff’s work has been recognized by the Mount-Vernon Springfield Chamber of Commerce as Citizen of the Year in 2019, by the Faith Alliance for Climate Solutions as the recipient of the 2020 Sustainability Champion Legacy Award, by the Fairfax County Park Authority Board as the recipient of the 2021 Chairman’s Choice Award, by the Bernie L. Bates Foundation for his service to the community at the 3rd Annual Privilege Awards, was named one of Northern Virginia’s 50 Most Influential People of 2024 and 2025 by Northern Virginia Magazine, and received George Mason University's Regional Elected Leaders Initiative Regional Leadership Award in 2024.
Jeff lives in Franconia District with his wife, two children, and their retired racing greyhound.
About Theo Stamatis
Theo Stamatis is currently pursuing a Master of Public Policy from George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government (expected 2028), focusing on regional economic development and urban policy.
Theo serves as the Government Relations Manager for the Loudoun County Chamber of Commerce, where he is instrumental in leading the Chamber’s policy advocacy efforts at the local and state levels. In this role, Theo works closely with elected officials, business leaders, and community partners to advance forward-thinking strategies that support economic development, infrastructure investment, housing solutions, and small business growth across Northern Virginia.
Theo's dedication extends to impactful leadership roles that foster vibrant, inclusive communities. He currently serves as Chair of the Fairfax County Small Business Commission, Vice Chair of the Loudoun County Housing Advisory Board, and a Virginia Career Works Northern Region Board Member. Additionally, he is a Rising Housing Leader for the Northern Virginia Affordable Housing Alliance and a Member of the Housing Local Product Council with the Urban Land Institute (ULI).
Bringing a strong background in public policy and community engagement, Theo’s diverse experience spans extensive program coordination, detailed policy and project research, and meaningful involvement in political campaigns across various levels.
He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science with a Minor in Security and Conflict Studies from the University of Mary Washington.
Passionate about collaboration and innovation, Theo strives to ensure that Loudoun County remains a premier destination for businesses and residents alike.