Nearby

And so what if you need the nerve of a NASCAR driver to get there from subdued southern environs. You roar up I-95 (head hunched over steering wheel, eyes bulging and vigilant), veer onto that hellish, eight-lane Mad Maxian wind tunnel known as the Beltway (tension sweat beginning to creep through your shirt), and then, just when your nerves are primed to explode … you quite suddenly relax. Perhaps it’s the embarrassing realization that you’ve only traveled 100 miles and didn’t really need the full-size Hummer and Xanax pack you borrowed for the trip.

Welcome to Fairfax. Yes, the traffic is an itsy bitsy issue, but as Stephen Fuller, a GMU professor and director of the school’s center for regional analysis, points out, “it’s largely a byproduct of our success.” Fuller says that he spoke to a former county executive recently who remarked that he’d much rather be stuck in traffic driving to a job than driving 60 miles in search of one. Point taken.

Numbers rarely define a locality, but in the case of Fairfax County they are telling—astonishing. Here is a place with the second-highest median household income in the county (more than $120,000), whose residents are young (a median age of 39), ethnically diverse (roughly 35 percent of the households have someone who speaks a foreign language) and extremely well educated (more graduate degrees per capita than any other locality in the world). The county’s budget—with a general fund of $3.2 billion—is bigger than those of a few states. The county’s public school system is stellar, and the county’s state university, George Mason (GMU) is quickly shedding its reputation as a commuter school. It’s got 32,000 students and about $750 million in new construction going up. Seven Fortune 500 companies are located in Fairfax—and owing in great part to the largess of the U.S. government, the county’s unemployment rate, which has spiked to about 5 percent, is still half the national average. In fiscal year 2008, a whopping $17 billion in federal procurement money went to companies based in Fairfax County.

A lot of it went to IT companies for which a federal agency is the client. About one-quarter of all technology jobs in America are in Fairfax County, which has been dubbed Silicon Valley East. The Center for Innovative Technology (CIT), located in one of the county’s most recognizable buildings, has long been an economic incubator for telecommunications, internet and, most recently, for startup bio-science companies. Drive from Tysons Corner out to Loudoun, along the Dulles toll road, and see a long string of recently built 15-story office buildings with names like Envision and Oracle, Accenture and Net App splashed across glitzy facades. “Our technology sector is not single dimensional but multi-dimensional,” says Bobbie Kilberg, CEO of the Northern Virginia Technology Council.