'No Silver Bullet' To Making Downtown Fairfax Viable: Snyder

FAIRFAX CITY, VA — Eric Snyder was walking around the Fairfax Famers Market on Saturday, May 8. As chairman of the Downtown Fairfax Coalition, he was keeping an eye on things for the market manager, who happens to be his wife Brenda.

The nonprofit Downtown Fairfax Coalition was formed in 1990 to provide a direction to the City of Fairfax on planning decisions they were making for development in the downtown area.

Eric Snyder took some time out from his duties at the market to answer a few questions from Patch about the coalition's role in promoting businesses in the the downtown area.

PATCH: How long have you been involved with the coalition?

ERIC SNYDER: [The coalition] started in 1990 and it's been going ever since. It started the market in 1995, and then, of course, we moved the farmer's market here in 2000. It's been in this parking lot since 2000.

The organization was formed to provide direction to the City of Fairfax in the planning decisions they were making on development in downtown Fairfax, and to try and address the issues that retail tenants were having. When we first started the organization, there was a lot less retail downtown. The buildings where Penny Pinchers is now and where Paint Your Own Pottery was, are two buildings we bought from Til Hazel back in 1990. They were Fairfax County offices, actually the one was, the second building where Paint Your Own Pottery was, was used as storage for his law firm. So it was full of file boxes.

It's a beautiful little building.

It's a wonderful old building. My partner in that was Rick Dickson, who's a downtown fixture, a real estate broker. We converted them to retail and we felt like we needed support from the city and the city needed to understand what the downtown needed. So, we've gone through an education process. It's been ongoing now since 1990 and we're making progress. We've worked hard to see the two way traffic re-instituted. People hate us for it.

How is what you're doing different from a chamber of commerce?

It's a development focus. We're not really a merchants association. There is now a merchants association. When we first started out though, because we opened ourselves up to both property owners and to businesses, we had a focus that said, this is how we're going to redevelop. downtown. This is more focused on making the downtown area more economically viable.

What is the importance of having a viable downtown for the city?

You see it in the national movement now of everybody's got to have a viable downtown. What it does is it gives off basically the heart to the city. It generates a tremendous amount of commerce and it draws people to the city. You have an identity. It's like going to Tysons Corner. Their downtown is really the shopping center, the Tysons Corner Shopping Center. All that other stuff around it, you don't see or participate in.

What are some of the initiatives coming up that you're focused on?

We've maintained the farmer's market, because we wanted people to come downtown and shop. When we started this, there was very little retail and there were very few people coming downtown, except there were lawyers, and there was all of the staff that worked here at the county government center in the building that is no longer there, the Massey Building. Then the county moved out to the Taj Mahal in Fair Oaks and took with them the equivalent of 300,000 square feet of office space. All the workers who worked in downtown Fairfax left.

What projects are you looking forward to in the next five years?

We have restaurants coming in. You've got the Capstone Project, which is going to be student housing that they're building downtown. We're hoping that brings a group of younger people here that will support the restaurants. It has a stronger tie to George Mason.

It's all the little pieces. It's not one piece. There's no silver bullet to this thing. You need more businesses. You need more people to want to come downtown. And you're constantly fighting the perception that you can't drive through downtown because the traffic's so bad. There's no place to park. Well, there is parking and the driving is no worse than driving to Tysons or anywhere else. I mean, welcome to Fairfax County and the City of Fairfax. Try to get from here to Chantilly.

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