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byline: Richard Foster

Transforming Tysons

In 1950, Tysons Corner was little more than a mom-and-pop general store at the intersection of state Routes 7 and 123 surrounded by farms with peach orchards and wheat fields.

By 2050, a rechristened Tysons is expected to be a bustling, cosmopolitan metropolis of more than 100,000 residents living, working and playing beneath an urban skyline of spires and towers.

“Our mantra is … ‘Building America’s Next Great City,’ and we really do believe that. It is a city on the rise. That’s what we’re aiming for, and it has all the ingredients for becoming exactly that,” says Sol Glasner, president and CEO of Tysons Partnership, a nonprofit association of stakeholders promoting growth in Tysons.

Fairfax County created its Tysons Comprehensive Plan in 2010, laying out a 50-year vision for transforming the community into a full-fledged city, replete with skyscrapers and high-density residential areas. Ever since then, Tysons has been on a fast track for growth.

Construction cranes dot the horizon, erecting mega-projects such as the new 5.2-million-square-foot Capital One complex. Its sleek, glass-fronted centerpiece is a 470-foot-high, 31-story corporate headquarters tower that will be the next-tallest building in the D.C. metro region, second only to the Washington Monument.

About  5,000 employees are expected to work at the new campus, and they will have access to modern amenities.

The Fortune 500 banking company plans a transportation terminal, a hotel, residential towers, a 1.5-acre elevated, open-air green space (called a skypark), a Wegmans grocery store and the 125,000-square-foot Capital One Center, a combination conference facility and 1,500-seat performing arts venue. “It’s a minicity,” says Glasner.

Another highly anticipated project under development is The Boro, a $485 million, 4.2-million-square-foot, mixed-use project. It could be a poster child for the modern corporate workplace with a 32-story luxury apartment building, a 15-screen movie theater, a half-acre skypark and the second-largest Whole Foods grocery store in the nation. The developers behind The Boro are The Meridian Group, a Bethesda, Md.-based real estate investment and development company, in partnership with Kettler, a McLean-based development and property management firm.

Other major projects proposed or underway in Tysons include:

  • Scotts Run, a 7.7 million-square-foot mixed-use development, and Arbor Row, a 2.5 million-square-foot mixed-use project with a 3-acre park being developed by Cityline Partners.
  • The View at Tysons, a planned mixed-use development by Tysons-based Clemente Development Co. that would include a performing-arts venue and a proposed 615-foot-tall iconic tower that would be 65 feet taller than the Washington Monument.
  • Tysons Central, a $750 million, 2 million-square-foot, mixed-use project from Vienna-based NVCommercial Inc.

As part of the Tysons Comprehensive Plan, the county government has streamlined zoning in the roughly 2,000-acre area that makes up Tysons.

“There’s sort of an unlimited amount of office, residential and retail that can be built here. … So there’s really no constraint other than economics to keep people from developing,” says Kettler CEO and President Robert C. Kettler. “It’s happening very, very rapidly. I mean, there’s just stuff going everywhere. And so it’s starting to look different and evolve.”

Developers started building in Tysons Corner in the 1960s, drawn by the newly built Capital Beltway that ran right through it, as well as the convergence of state Routes 7 and 123 and the community’s prime location near the region’s two major airports, now called Washington Dulles International Airport and Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.  

By the early 2000s Tysons was known for its corporate office parks and two sprawling, upscale shopping malls, Tysons Corner Center and Tysons Galleria. It was considered an urban “edge city,” growing in the shadow of the larger Washington, D.C., metropolitan area.

With the 2014 construction of the Silver Line extension of the D.C. Metrorail system, development revved into high gear around four new Tysons Metro stations.

Just as affluent Fairfax County provides about 25 percent of the state government’s income tax revenue, so, too, is Tysons an economic engine for Fairfax, generating about a quarter of the county’s tax revenues, says Gerald L. Gordon, the president and CEO of the Fairfax County Economic Development Authority.

Tysons now is home to several corporate headquarters and the major national offices for companies such as Freddie Mac, Hilton Worldwide, Northrop Grumman, The MITRE Corp., MicroStrategy, IntelSat, Ernst & Young, KPMG, Booz Allen Hamilton and Cvent.

It essentially already has been a city for some time now, Gordon says. “We have … 120,000 jobs, 28 million square feet of office space. … We have more space in Tysons Corner than most U.S. cities, except for the top 20 or so.”

Tysons currently is the nation’s 12th largest central business district. The only difference between Tysons and other cities, says Gordon, is that Tysons currently has only about 20,000 to 25,000 full-time residents. Yet Tysons is expected to swell to a city of 100,000 residents and 200,000 workers by 2050.

Attracting those residents and creating distinct neighborhoods where they can live, work and play were key topics at a recent Bisnow conference that examined the challenges of creating a city. Those challenges include affordable housing and dependable mass transit. 

During the conference, Clemente Development Co. CEO Dan Clemente reminded attendees about the need for affordable workforce-priced housing, so that hourly and middle-class workers, such as waiters, bartenders and secretaries, can afford to live in Tysons instead of having to commute in Northern Virginia traffic. His project, The View, includes a 1,400-unit multifamily apartment building near the Spring Hill Metro Station, where all units would be affordably priced.

“To succeed, [Tysons] has to become livable. It has to be a place you and I want to spend time in,” said Stephen Fuller, director of George Mason University’s Stephen S. Fuller Institute for Research on the Washington Region’s Economic Future. “When we have as many people living in Tysons as working here, then you will know we have succeeded.”

Public art and recreational space helps to draw residents, noted Stephanie Pankiewicz, a partner at LandDesign, an Alexandria-based landscape architecture and civil engineering firm.

“Great cities have destination art; they have parks you want to go to; they have iconic skylines,” Pankiewicz said.  Tysons will have grown into the county’s vision for it, she said, “when people want to come here and spend three days in Tysons because they’re going to see art, restaurants and shows and have a multiday experience.”

Great cities also have mass transit. In recent years, the D.C. area metro system has been in dire need of repairs and maintenance. Service has been unreliable, and safety problems have even led to deaths.  To address these issues, Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C., recently agreed to a cost-sharing plan to provide funds for the Metro. The 2018 Virginia General Assembly approved $154 million per year in capital funding, while Maryland has committed $167 million annually and the District has pledged $178 million. The action represents the first time the Metro has had a dedicated funding source since it opened in 1976.

The financial support comes as Amazon considers NoVa, D.C. and Montgomery County, Md., as potential sites for its highly sought after second corporate headquarters. One of the caveats Amazon spelled out during its site selection process was access to public transit.

Besides transit, creating a Tysons with quality dining, entertainment and recreation is “mission critical,” said Asheel Shah, president and chief investment officer of Kettler’s multifamily division. “A Tysons where everybody gets into their car and leaves [at the end of the workday] is not the Tysons we’re all planning for the future.”

Revitalization realized

A raft of multimillion-dollar capital improvements at the Richmond Marine Terminal (RMT) is transforming the city’s river port into a magnet for economic development.

Within the last nine months, developers have announced two major warehousing projects capitalizing on proximity to the river terminal: Newport Beach,  Calif.-based Panattoni Development Co. is building 1 million square feet of speculative warehouse space on 62 acres near the terminal along Interstate 95.

In addition, Richmond-based Hourigan Development is erecting 1.5 million square feet of high-bay warehouse buildings. Called Deepwater Industrial Park, it will be built on the 110-acre site of the former Alleghany Warehouse Co. near Philip Morris USA’s Richmond Manufacturing Center on Interstate 95. The park is located about two miles from the terminal and four miles south of downtown Richmond. “There’s a lot of spinoff private-sector money going in … that wouldn’t be happening if the port had not been upgrading and able to attract more volume,” says Greater Richmond Partnership President and CEO Barry Matherly.

Joseph Marchetti, president with Hourigan Development, says Deepwater Industrial Park “is a significant stride for economic development and the positioning of Richmond as a trade leader.”

Panattoni plans to open the first phase of its project in August, says the company’s senior development manager, William A. Hudgins. That will include 460,100 square feet of cross-dock warehouse space. At press time Panattoni had not yet signed tenants, but Hudgins says the company has spoken with e-commerce retailers and manufacturing firms about the space.

Besides proximity to Interstate 95, RMT will offer Panattoni’s warehouse tenants a competitive advantage by being able to easily plug into the larger Port of Virginia system, Hudgins says, including marine terminals in Norfolk and Portsmouth and the Virginia Inland Port in Front Royal.

The Port of Virginia took over management of the 121-acre river port from city government in 2011. In February 2016, the port signed a 40-year lease for the terminal. The long-term lease led to a series of major investments in the facility.

Two years ago, the Port of Virginia invested $6.2 million to purchase a new, improved harbor crane and 409-foot river cargo barge. In recent months the port used a federal grant to buy a $373,000 specialized heavy-lift forklift as well as a $222,000 central power unit that now allows its river barge to move refrigerated cargo critical to the food and beverage industries. Federal funding also is being used to improve the port’s berth and fendering system (the bumpers that absorb the impact to the berth when a boat is docking).

Moving forward, the Port of Virginia is planning even more improvements at Richmond Marine Terminal. They include the installation of an additional scale and security canopy to allow faster entry for incoming trucks and the addition of a secure “drop lot” that would allow carriers to drop off and pick up cargo containers 24 hours a day, seven days a week. (Currently, companies are limited to the RMT’s Monday through Friday operating hours of 8 a.m. to 4:10 p.m.)

Adding refrigeration to RMT’s cargo capabilities “enables us to provide a more comprehensive level of barge service to current and potential customers and continue to serve as a catalyst for commerce in the Richmond metro area and beyond,” Virginia Port Authority CEO and Executive Director John F. Reinhart said when the new service was announced in December.

Even though the power unit is a recent addition, there are already some potential food and beverage companies considering locating assets in the Richmond area “that would not be looking here if it wasn’t for that feature on the port,” Matherly says.

The improvements also are reaping measurable dividends in the volume of cargo handled at the terminal. Cargo volumes increased by 45 percent in February 2018 compared with the same period a year ago. So far, the river port is on track for a 16 percent increase in shipping this fiscal year.
“Container numbers are rising, the number of users are increasing, and it’s really amounting [to the] success of Richmond Marine Terminal. … It’s beginning to live up to its vision,” says port spokesman Joe Harris. “It’s basically another inland port.”

As the Port of Virginia moves closer to deepening its channels in Hampton Roads that will bring in bigger ships with increasingly greater cargo loads, it’s possible that the RMT barge will need to increase its sailing schedule from three days a week to four or five days a week in the not far-off future to keep up with the increased business, he says.

“The logic is, the rising tide is going to raise all boats,” Harris adds. “The ripple effect is going to reach all the terminals.”

Road to the future?

Mark Riccobono could certainly be excused if he was feeling nervous at the prospect of driving a demonstration car before a crowd of Rolex 24 race fans at the Daytona International Speedway back in 2011.

After all, he was a beginning driver. Also, Riccobono, president of the Baltimore-based National Federation of the Blind, has been blind since early childhood.

Driving a Ford Escape SUV outfitted by a team of robotics students and professors from Virginia Tech with semi-autonomous vehicle technology developed by Blacksburg-based Torc Robotics, Riccobono successfully piloted the vehicle through a 1.5-mile course with turns and obstacles. Sensors on the car provided information about the roadway to Riccobono via vibrating, haptic-feedback gloves that signaled steering instructions to him.

“You could just see the satisfaction on his face, his sense of empowerment,” says Michael Fleming, CEO and co-founder of Torc Robotics. “I just remember the glow from him and the excitement from him on the potential and possibility of that self-driving technology for the people that he cares about the most.”

Before long, not even a steering wheel may be required to drive. Last summer Torc Robotics, which has partnerships with NXP Semiconductors, Nvidia Corp. and the American Automobile Association (AAA), outfitted a Lexus RX hybrid with software and hardware upgrades that allowed the car to drive completely autonomously for 4,300 miles on a trip from Virginia to Seattle and back.

As the automotive industry moves us tantalizingly closer to a sci-fi future of roadways thrumming with such self-driving cars, Virginia has positioned itself as a hotbed for developing and testing autonomous vehicle technologies. This is in large part due to innovative research work coming out of state universities such as Virginia Tech and the University of Virginia, as well as companies like Torc. Created by Virginia Tech alums, Torc develops self-driving technologies used in mining trucks and military vehicles.

Driving the experimental vehicle with Torc’s technology “gave me a greater sense of independence because it shattered my own artificial limitations that I had placed on myself regarding what was possible for a blind person,” Riccobono says. “It opens up opportunities that have not been available for blind people because we haven’t been part of the driving class.”

The momentum toward self-driving cars “has been steps of the imagination going back to the 1950s,” says Brad Stertz, director of government affairs for Audi of America. “It’s been a part of the popular imagination as to what’s possible for decades now, and now we’re at the point of turning it out to market.”

That momentum, however, may be affected by regulators’ reaction to the first fatality of a pedestrian involving a self-driving car. Uber Technologies temporarily suspended tests of self-driving vehicles in March after one struck and killed a woman walking with a bicycle at night outside of a crosswalk in Arizona. The incident was still under investigation as this issue went to press.

Proponents of self-driving cars believe they will have the potential to reduce accidents and fatalities significantly because they eliminate human error. These vehicles also are expected to reduce traffic congestion such as the snarls and backups that perennially plague Interstate 95 and the Beltway corridor in Northern Virginia.

But self-driving vehicles also could bring a host of less obvious but equally revolutionary changes to our daily lives.

For example, researchers at Virginia Tech and elsewhere are studying the concept of “platooning,” essentially creating train-like convoys of automated tractor-trailer trucks. The trucks would reap major fuel-efficiency savings by traveling closely together (like “drafting” with race cars) and would be able to operate virtually around the clock without stopping. (The trucks could have a “safety driver” on board, ready to take over as needed, or the vehicles might be controlled and monitored remotely.)

There also will be entirely new customers for self-driving vehicles — for example, the blind, disabled and elderly. “There is a huge market for this for people who aren’t terribly well served with the transportation and mobility options they have now,” says Stertz.

Virginia now a player
A lobbyist for the Unmanned Systems Association of Virginia, Michele Satterlund with McGuireWoods Consulting in Richmond, calls Virginia “one of the best-kept secrets” in the autonomous vehicle industry, noting that companies and universities are testing this technology on public roads and private courses around the commonwealth virtually every day.

She credits this involvement in part to a welcoming attitude by state government officials and legislators. They generally have let the marketplace evolve but passed a couple of laws to help pave the way for self-driving cars. One recently passed law would allow self-driving vehicles to play videos on a car’s built-in instrument panel when the car is in a fully autonomous mode. This would permit a driver to watch a movie but still be engaged with the car’s instrument panel in case a warning or notification flashes up on the screen.

“Virginia has purposefully — and rightfully so — fostered ongoing and steady dialogue with innovators to help define the path to the future, when today’s research and development phase can eventually become the social benefits envisioned to improve safety and mobility,”  Satterlund says. While some other states have passed laws requiring special license plates or insurance policies for autonomous vehicles, she says, “We don’t have anything prohibiting unmanned systems [and] ground vehicles in Virginia. We welcome everyone — come in and test!”

Last year the McAuliffe administration founded the Autonomous Systems Center of Excellence to help promote an entrepreneurial culture for autonomous vehicles, including aerial drones, while raising Virginia’s profile in related industries. And the Commonwealth Transportation Board has moved to allow testing of autonomous cars and trucks on express lanes on Interstates 95 and 495 in Northern Virginia.

In addition to Torc Robotics, another Virginia company working     on autonomous vehicles is Crozet- based Perrone Robotics, started in  2003 by CEO Paul Perrone, who  earned his graduate degree in com­puter engineering from the University of Virginia. The company, which employs 21 people, announced last year it would be investing $3.8 million to expand its research and development operations in Albemarle County, with plans to add 127 employees by 2021.

Perrone Robotics has developed a proprietary software platform for running autonomous vehicles called MAX. Perrone likens MAX to LEGO building blocks, in that the modular framework allows developers to swap out and add different software artificial intelligence capabilities for self-driving vehicles, such as stopping correctly at traffic lights, self-parking or avoiding obstacles.

His company has received significant investment from Intel Capital. One of Perrone’s board members and mentors is Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Atari and Chuck E. Cheese. Perrone outfitted rock star Neil Young’s electric vehicle with autonomous technology.

The company has a vehicle test track and workshop outside Charlottesville. While the company plans to open a satellite office in Silicon Valley, Perrone says Virginia offers plenty of advantages for companies like his, including affordable, available land for commercial development. Perrone adds that he also is able to compete with Silicon Valley firms for talent by offering employees a better quality of life. “For $500,000 here, you can live like the landed gentry out in the country with a five- to 10-acre plot of land [and] a 2,000- to 3,000-square-foot house,” Perrone says, “whereas in the Valley you’d be living in some pretty small and uncomfortable digs.”

Are we ready?
Not too far away from Perrone’s headquarters, researchers at the University of Virginia also are working on projects focusing on self-driving cars. T. Donna Chen, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at U.Va., is exploring issues related to ride sharing. She asks a fundamental question: “If you could have guaranteed access to a self-driving vehicle whenever you need it, why would you need to own a vehicle?”

Working with smart-matching algorithms in computer simulations, she has found that, when paired with a robust transit system like the Metro in Washington, D.C., and Northern Virginia, using on-demand self-driving cars for carpooling could have a major impact on reducing traffic congestion and freeing up space now devoted to parking lots and decks.

A lot of change, however, will depend on people’s willingness to adopt the technology, she says.  Millenials accustomed to using on-demand ride services such as Uber and Lyft probably will be most willing to relinquish vehicle ownership.

Trust in self-driving vehicles is a major barrier to implementation. An annual survey of U.S. drivers by AAA released in January found that 63 percent of Americans are afraid to ride in a fully self-driving car, with males and millennials being less leery.

First-time passengers who’ve ridden in self-driving cars say that after about 10 or 20 minutes, they tend to forget they’re riding in an autonomous vehicle.

But that’s not to say that the experience can’t sometimes be unnerving. Self-driving vehicles at times can exhibit some very unhuman-like behaviors, such as accelerating like a racecar on an interstate highway entrance ramp. And when confronted with a concrete barrier wall or a bicyclist, a self-driving car might be more likely to maintain its position in the center of the lane, instead of moving to one side, points out Madhur Behl, an assistant professor of computer science, systems and information engineering at U.Va.

He and Lu Feng, another U.Va. computer science professor, are studying this question of trust in autonomous vehicles by using a full-scale driving simulator and measuring how passengers react to a vehicle’s actions. One of their aims is to determine whether a passenger’s confidence can be improved by adding a digital display explaining what a vehicle is going to do ahead of time.

Perhaps the biggest engine for autonomous cars in Virginia is the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute (VTTI) in Blacksburg and its groundbreaking Virginia Smart Road, a 2.5-mile closed-access testing roadway in Montgomery County. Car manufacturers from around the globe come there to try out their latest self-driving tech wizardry. The Smart Road has weather-manufacturing equipment that can create rain, snow or ice. The roadway includes the second-tallest bridge in Virginia and a configurable urban simulation area. This fall VTTI will add a rural simulation area to the test road.

“We are a hub. We’re not southeast Michigan, and we’re not Silicon Valley, but we’re able to keep up easily with those kinds of people,” says VTTI Director Tom Dingus. “We’re pretty formidable — a little mecca in Southwest Virginia.”

If there’s a shiny, new technology available in cars, it’s a safe bet the researchers at VTTI were putting it through its paces long before it ever showed up in an auto dealer’s showroom. The institute started testing autonomous technologies such as automatic braking in the 1990s.

“People for largely the last 30 years have been shipping us their cars to test and evaluate, and that has evolved into more and more automated features,” says Dingus.

VTTI employs a staff of 500. Its clients include 60 automobile components suppliers and 14 major car manufacturers.  The institute also has more than 100 sponsors and brings in about $40 million per year from its research projects. 

At last count, VTTI has approximately 60 projects in the pipeline involving autonomous vehicle technology. Dingus can’t discuss any in detail because of nondisclosure agreements (not entirely surprising in an industry known to drape test car models under tarps).

A timeline
So, when will we start seeing self-driving cars on the roads? When will these vehicles become the norm? Sooner than you think.

Some might argue self-driving cars are already here in rudimentary forms such as those with adaptive cruise control, Fleming says. Also, certain industries, such as mining, have been using autonomous vehicles in closed environments for years.

SAE International, the automotive engineering association, defines six levels of automation in self-driving cars:

  • Level 0: Normal manually driven cars with no particularly intelligent features.
  • Level 1: Driver still controls the car, but it has one automated driving feature such as adaptive cruise control.
  • Level 2:  “Hands-free” features such as lane centering, emergency braking and parking assistance may allow drivers to take hands off the wheel for short periods of time, but they must be ready to take control at any time.
  • Level 3: Cars enable drivers to take their eyes off the road to watch a movie, text or read a book while the vehicle drives itself.
  • Level 4: The car is able to drive itself under defined conditions. A human operator can take over in the event of an emergency.
  • Level 5: Cars such as robotic taxis that are capable of fully autonomous driving without a human operator and don’t have a steering wheel or any visible controls.

So far, Dingus says, no manufacturer has tested a vehicle that he would consider meeting the criteria for Level 5, but VTTI is regularly testing prototype vehicles with sophisticated artificial intelligence that meet conditions for Levels 3 and 4. “No one yet has a Level 3 car that’s in production. There are several people talking about it … You can’t buy it yet but you probably will within the next couple years,” Dingus says. (VTTI built its first working Level 3 prototypes as far back as 2012.)

The process of self-driving cars becoming ubiquitous will be more an evolution than a revolution, Dingus says. By 2023, he predicts, self-driving taxis will become regular features in urban areas where on-demand ride services like Uber and Lyft already are popular. By 2035, about half the cars on the road will be advanced self-driving cars, and the market will hit 90 percent saturation by 2049, he estimates, as long as safety rates are acceptable to the public.

“For a long time, you’re going to have a mixed mode of traffic,” says Azim Eskandarian, head of Virginia Tech’s mechanical engineering department. “We’re obviously going to have a mixed mode of autonomy versus manual driving.” And that, he says, will present its own array of challenges, including questions such as who will be legally responsible in an accident involving a self-driving or remotely driven vehicle.

The barriers to producing Level 5, fully autonomous, self-driving cars are physics and artificial intelligence, Dingus says. Self-driving cars just don’t yet possess enough sophisticated intelligence, sensors and visual equipment to handle the numerous decisions that drivers make every day in dealing with traffic, weather and road hazards.

“Is there a technology ready to handle any situation in any environment? I would say no,” states Fleming with Torc Robotics.

Nonetheless, he likens the evolution of self-driving cars to that of cell phones: “Who would have thought that during the age of brick[-size] cell phones [in the 1980s] that one day there would be a phone where we could pay our taxes, find a date and order a pizza? … It’s not like the cell phone industry said, ‘OK, we’re done developing cell phones and we’re going to move on.’”

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of developing self-driving technologies, Fleming says, is the potential for completely reinventing the driving experience. “If you think about it,” he says, “automobiles have been designed around the driver for the last 100 years. And one of the things that really excites me is, over the next 100 years, we’re going to design cars around passengers, because the driver is going to be a computer, and … we can really start from scratch … You can rethink the interior design from an infotainment standpoint.”

Says Fleming: “[Self-driving cars are] something that we’re working on today, and 10 and 100 years from now, we’re still going to be working on it.”  

125th anniversary

As Roanoke-based law firm Woods Rogers marks its 125th anniversary this year, it can lay claim to being engaged in 21st-century legal areas such as cybersecurity while remaining firmly rooted in the traditions and principles of its founders.

“We’ve seen depressions, wars, peace and prosperity. We’ve seen it all, and yet the firm was able to not only persevere but thrive in whatever environment,” says Daniel C. Summerlin III, the firm’s president.

That perseverance, he says, was the result of generations adhering to a trio of core beliefs: producing high-quality work, hiring talented staff, and encouraging community involvement and public service.

Today, Woods Rogers is the ninth-largest firm in Virginia, employing 78 attorneys in offices in Roanoke, Charlottesville, Lynchburg and Richmond. Six of its attorneys have served as Virginia Bar Association presidents. Notable past partners at the firm have included U.S. District Judge Michael F. Urbanski and the late U.S. Rep. M. Caldwell Butler (a key Republican proponent for impeaching President Nixon in the 1970s).

Recognized by Corporate Counsel magazine for providing “exceptional work” to Fortune 500 in-house legal departments, Woods Rogers is also nationally known for its labor and employment and litigation practices.

Before shortening its name to Woods Rogers in 2003, the firm was known as Woods, Rogers & Hazlegrove. In 2016 Woods Rogers merged with Lynchburg law firm Edmunds & Williams.

‘The Colonel’
Woods Rogers traces its origins to the law practice co-founded in 1893 by Col. James P. Woods Sr., a Roanoke mayor and two-term congressman who died in 1948 at age 80.

“Over the course of history his legend has grown in stature, and I’m not sure which of the stories are true and which aren’t,” Summerlin says with a chuckle, noting that the firm owns portraits of “the Colonel” as well as his riding boots and sword.

James W. Jennings Jr., a trial lawyer who joined the firm in 1973, played tennis with Woods’ now-deceased son, a local school principal.

According to firm folklore, he says, Woods was given the honorary title of colonel of the Virginia militia by Gov. Claude Swanson.

Woods was said to be a “large individual, an imposing figure, a very dynamic personality and an outstanding lawyer, very active in the Democratic Party and the local community,” Jennings says. “He continued to wear frock coats well into the ’30s and ’40s.”

Former fighter pilot
As for the “Rogers” in Woods Rogers, that came from Frank W. Rogers Sr., a World War I fighter pilot and former University of Virginia rector who died in 1982 at age 89. The firm became Woods Rogers Muse & Walker in 1920. A former president of the Virginia Bar Association, Rogers also served as a president of the Roanoke Bar Association, which he co-founded in 1925. His son, Frank W. “Bo” Rogers Jr., who died in 2005 at age 76, was also a distinguished lawyer who practiced at Woods Rogers for more than 50 years. And Rogers’ grandson, Frank W. Rogers III, is a judge for the Roanoke County Juvenile and Domestic Relations District Court.

The senior Rogers’ greatest professional fame came in 1960 when the Virginia Bar Association sent him to the Soviet Union to represent the interests of the family of captured U.S. U-2 spy plane pilot and Virginia native Francis Gary Powers. Rogers and a Richmond attorney submitted an unsuccessful petition of clemency on Powers’ behalf to the Soviet government. The Soviets convicted Powers on espionage charges before freeing him two years later during a tense and much-publicized prisoner swap on a bridge in Berlin during the height of the Cold War.

“There was a lot written about it at the time, but there wasn’t much [Rogers] could do except show the flag,” recalls Talfourd H. Kemper. The firm’s most senior attorney, Kemper was hired by Rogers in 1965: “I was lawyer No. 11 at that time.”

Frank Rogers Sr. was “very demanding of himself and others, and he was very smart and articulate. I don’t know of another lawyer that could write more concisely and clearly than Frank Rogers,” Kemper says.

Jennings, who was also hired by Rogers, says that Rogers was “the driving force in generating the modern Woods Rogers after Col. Woods died … He had the vision for this firm of what it ought to be and how it should be comprised and how it should be run. And we were constantly reminded of that any time we encountered him.”

19 practice groups
Woods Rogers now has 19 major practice groups, including Business and Corporate Law, Cybersecurity, Intellectual Property, Labor and Employment Law, Litigation, Tax, and Trusts and Estates.

And the firm continues evolving to meet new business and economic demands, as evidenced by its new Emerging Growth practice, which is focused on providing new and fast-growth companies with an array of interdisciplinary legal services.

“We really try to cover all the areas where startups and growing companies could have needs,” says Eric J. “Rick” Sorenson Jr., who heads the firm’s Lynchburg office.

The new practice group is heavily driven by firms connected to Virginia Tech, the University of Virginia and Liberty University. It has assisted companies in industries ranging from biotech to fiber optics to renewable energy and brewing. It is equipped, Sorenson says, to assist companies along the entire corporate lifespan, working on issues ranging from corporate formation to seeking venture capital and financing to protecting intellectual property and merging with other companies.

Emerging growth and cybersecurity “have been the two growth areas in the last year that have allowed us to be on the forefront of the new economy,” Summerlin says.

Yet as Wood Rogers continues toward its 150th anniversary, it remains steeped in the traditions that have brought it this far.

“We strive to provide service to our clients in a prompt, professional and pleasant way, and a competent way,” says Kemper. “We’ve spent a lot of time over the years trying to adhere to those principles.”

‘The missing middle’

If Fairfax County developer C. Daniel Clemente has his way, more middle-class and hourly workers in the county’s fast-growing downtown Tysons area will one day have the option of walking to work instead of spending hours battling Beltway commuter traffic.

“If you’re a secretary, you can’t [afford to] live at Tysons. If you’re a waiter, you can’t [afford to] live at Tysons,” says Clemente. He wants to build a 1,400-unit multifamily apartment building at Tysons, near the Spring Hill Metro Station, where all units would be affordably priced for workforce housing in exchange for the county waiving proffer fees of about $35 million on the development.

Currently, Fairfax County requires that 20 percent of units in new multifamily housing be dedicated to affordable housing. Nonetheless, in a desirable area like Tysons — where rents can easily exceed $3,000 per month for a two-bedroom apartment — there are no incentives for developers to create much-needed affordable housing, Clemente says.

If the county approves his unorthodox proposal, Clemente hopes the building, to be called Evolution, would be open to tenants within five years.

As more and more millennials (and, to a lesser extent, baby boomers) move to downtown areas in search of walkable, cosmopolitan environments, corporations are following them in search of young educated workers. This phenomenon has created a scramble for affordable, workforce-priced housing in cities across America.

In downtown Norfolk, where New Jersey-based Fortune 500 human-resources firm Automatic Data Processing (ADP) recently invested more than $32 million to locate an office with 1,800 employees, rents are prohibitive for some workers. With the average renter in Norfolk earning about $33,000 a year “not many of those people … can afford to live downtown where rents are very high,” says Ed Ware, director of communications for the Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority.

While developers are trying to meet the burgeoning demand for affordable rental housing, Ware says, it takes time to obtain permits, financing and tax credits.

Rents triple in trendy district
Downtown Richmond also is drawing more residents. “We’re seeing a lot of people moving back into the city, moving into parts of the city … where people haven’t lived since the mid-1900s,” says Lee Downey, director of Richmond’s Department of Economic and Community Development.

In the popular Scott’s Addition area, not far from downtown, residential rents have more than tripled over the past decade to as much as $1,700 for a two-bedroom apartment. 

In the city’s recently released North of Broad/Downtown Redevelopment Project, it has included a “meaningful” mixed-income housing component as a requirement in a request for proposals from developers. The 20-acre project also calls for replacing the 47-year-old Richmond Coliseum as well as building a new convention center hotel and a bus-transfer plaza.

“We want to make sure that our teachers and our firefighters, the working class, that they can have an opportunity to live in the city that they work in,” says Downey. The city wants to see a full slate of housing options in the project, ranging from subsidized, low-income apartments to workforce-priced homes for sale.

City planners and developers have largely been unprepared for the influx of millennials. “People were a little bit asleep at the wheel in terms of demographics shifts … and the rate at which [millennial migration] has been increasing has caught people off guard,” says Daniel Parolek, principal of Opticos Design Inc., a Berkeley, Calif.-based architecture and urban design firm.

Not keeping pace
A majority of millennials, who now outnumber baby boomers, want to live in walkable, urban environments, but developers aren’t building affordable housing fast enough to keep pace with demand, he adds. In 2010 Parolek coined the phrase “the missing middle.” It describes the type of workforce-priced housing that has been largely absent from cities for the past several decades. Such housing is particularly sought by older millennials who may be starting families and who may be forced to consider a move to the suburbs or to less-expensive cities if they can’t find available housing stock at an affordable price. 

American planning and zoning policies since the 1950s have been successful at enabling the development of single-family housing projects and high-density multifamily apartment buildings, Parolek says. Yet, they haven’t prioritized the construction of “missing middle” options such as duplexes, triplexes, courtyard apartments, town houses and live/work/play communities.

Faced with increased demand for affordable housing, cities and developers now must meet this need with creative options, Parolek adds, including a mix of for-sale and rental properties in the same developments. Other options may include governments relaxing off-street parking requirements in recognition that millennials are less likely to own as many cars as previous generations. Additionally, developers may consider “communal” housing designs aimed at millennial roommates. These arrangements would offer individual bedrooms and bathrooms but shared common areas.

Seniors aren’t selling
Another problem contributing to the lack of available workforce-priced housing is that some senior citizens aren’t selling their homes, says Richmond Association of Realtors CEO Laura Lafayette. That’s because what could be a next option for them isn’t affordable.

According to a recent study commissioned by Lafayette’s association, about 70 percent of seniors in the Richmond area owning homes valued at less than $200,000 aren’t moving because the age-restricted housing communities in the area start at more than $300,000. That’s keeping an estimated 9,000 starter homes off the local market. When these homes do go on sale, Lafayette says, they’re often under contract within a day because demand is so high.

Without available affordable rental or sale options, “millennials will pick up and move” to another market, she adds, creating a problem for corporations that want to retain talent. Millennials “are much more courageous than their parents in that regard.

They will go where they want to live, and then they’ll figure out the job.”

One unexpected side effect of the downtown migration is that, with millennials and baby boomers vacuuming up available affordable housing, people who make less than the area median income are left with even fewer options in cities.

With millennials and baby boomers moving back in, “our cities have gotten safer and more vibrant, and that’s all great news, but the bad news is our lower-wage workers are not finding housing there as easily anymore,” says Nina Janopaul. She’s the CEO of the nonprofit Arlington Partnership for Affordable Housing, which helps provide apartments to low-income families in Northern Virginia.

Disappearing housing stock
In recent local studies, Arlington County and Alexandria determined that more than 85 percent of their areas’ naturally occurring affordable housing stock has disappeared during the past 15 years. Investors have bought up older and distressed properties and remodeled them to appeal to millennials with amenities such as fitness centers and granite countertops, Janopaul says.

“New developments are always going to be geared toward the highest payers, and the folks that are often the most desirable demographics. And millennials usually tick that box because they can pay higher rents and want to live downtown,” says Washington, D.C.-based developer Jeff Wainwright of West End Capital Group, which has redeveloped aging apartment complexes in Richmond and Hampton Roads. However, with rents rising, “people are getting priced out of downtown. Not everybody can afford it,” he says.

Affordable housing advocates  are relieved that the country’s recently passed tax reform bill retained tax credits for low income housing. However, there is concern that the  the reduced corporate tax rate,  from 35 to 21 percent, could  decrease the value of the housing credit for investors.

With a recent study showing that seven affordable housing units are needed for every unit built, it’s an issue that’s not going away, notes Robert Sheppard, managing director of CBRE’s Affordable Housing Group.

“Cities are proactively and aggressively trying to come up with solutions to this problem,” he says.

Health-drink company adding location in Roanoke

When health-drink manufacturer Humm Kombucha settled on Roanoke for the site of its second brewing operation, it probably couldn’t have found another place on the East Coast much more like the company’s home base of operations in small-town Bend, Oregon — and that was by design.

Roanoke and Bend are mountain-valley cities with fewer than 100,000 residents, and both are attractive areas for outdoorsy types who enjoy activities like hiking, mountain biking and river kayaking.

“We believe in taking time off and spending time outside and doing what you love, whatever that might be, and we needed to find a place that had those same type of values,” says Humm Kombucha CEO Jamie Danek. “People just love living in Roanoke. … They couldn’t be more excited about where they live, and you have that same experience in Bend. It’s virtually the same.”

Humm Kombucha learned about Roanoke from friends at Bend-based Deschutes Brewery. One of the nation’s largest craft-beer brewers, Deschutes is building an $85 million brewery in Roanoke and recently opened a tasting room in downtown Roanoke.

Expected to open in July 2019, the $10 million Humm Kombucha facility being constructed at the Roanoke Centre for Industry and Technology will create about 50 new jobs paying an average salary of $39,462 plus benefits.

Humm Kombucha brews a popular non-alcoholic, refrigerated probiotic fermented tea beverage known as kombucha. The drink comes in a variety of flavors such as strawberry lemonade and coconut lime. The company’s product is sold by major grocery stores as well as big-box retailers Target and Wal-Mart.

Locating a brewery in Roanoke on the Interstate 81 corridor will give the beverage manufacturer “much more extensive access to the whole East Coast,” says Beth Doughty, executive director of the Roanoke Regional Partnership.

Humm Kombucha began national distribution a little over a year ago, and the East Coast already makes up about 30 percent of its business, says Danek, who co-founded the company in 2009 with her friend Michelle Mitchell, brewing their first batch of kombucha in Mitchell’s kitchen.

“We’re a bit of a rocket ship,” Danek says. “We’re very fast-moving. The kombucha industry is on fire. … It’s the fastest-growing refrigerated beverage in the country right now.”  

Fixing the model

Last year Colonial Williamsburg Foundation President and CEO Mitchell Reiss handed all of his senior staff members coffee mugs from Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. The legendary Greatest Show on Earth went out of business in May after 146 years.

“I said, ‘Keep it on your desk as a reminder when we have to make tough decisions, because we’re entrusted with saving this foundation. And failure is possible, but it can’t happen on our watch,’” Reiss recalls.

As the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation celebrates its 90th anniversary this year, the nonprofit historic education and tourism organization is in the midst of a radical restructuring aimed at ensuring it doesn’t suffer the same fate as Ringling Bros.

Declines through the years in the number of paid visitors have left Colonial Williamsburg in a vulnerable financial state, forcing the foundation to draw large chunks of money from its endowment to offset operating expenses. As one of the state’s most iconic historic attractions, its fight for survival could be a bellwether for the future of other heritage sites.

“Colonial Williamsburg is one of our crown jewels in the commonwealth and is a destination where families have been creating cherished memories for generations,” says Rita McClenny, president and CEO of Virginia Tourism Corp. Besides shining a light on Virginia as the birthplace of America, the attraction is “the largest living-history museum in the country,” she adds.

With the foundation’s finances hitting perhaps the most dire point in its history last year, Reiss announced a series of dramatic cost-cutting measures. Colonial Williamsburg eliminated 71 jobs and outsourced another 262 positions to vendors who have taken over the attraction’s retail, golf, landscape services and facilities management. The Williamsburg Lodge is now a member of the Marriott Autograph Collection of hotels. The foundation also added two new executive-level members to the leadership team to oversee day-to-day operations, while eliminating vice president positions.  

The changes, Reiss says, will allow the foundation to focus on its core mission of managing the Colonial Williamsburg Historic Area and its educational programs and museums.

The foundation saw about a $5 million improvement to its bottom line in 2017 because of the cost-cutting measures, Reiss says. Yet he acknowledges that the foundation still is running at a loss. In 2016 its expenses outweighed its revenues by more than $70 million. The 2017 deficit was expected to be around $65 million. Reiss anticipates greater cost savings this year and hopes to reduce annual operating expenses by $25 million in the next few years.

Lodging in particular “is recovering nicely” under the new management, Reiss says, noting that the Williamsburg Inn was recently designated a five-diamond Hotel by AAA, and its wedding business has picked up considerably.

“It was clear that we weren’t competent to run some of these businesses profitably,” says Reiss, a former college president and senior U.S. diplomat who was hired in late 2014 to run the foundation.

In 1983 the foundation formed the Colonial Williamsburg Co. to manage its hotel, restaurant, retail and golf operations with the intent of any profits generated going to support its historic preservation and educational missions. But that never happened.

More than 2,100 employees
Even after last year’s restructuring, Colonial Williamsburg remains one of the largest employers in Williamsburg. It has more than 2,100 employees, with about 1,650 of them full time. Started in 1928 with funding from philanthropist John D. Rockefeller Jr., Colonial Williamsburg is almost a small city unto itself. It functions as an open-air, living-history museum made up of restored and re-created buildings peopled with historic interpreters who teach guests about 18th-century Colonial America.

Colonial Williamsburg’s budget, workforce and property holdings far exceed those of internationally famous Virginia history destinations such as Mount Vernon and Monticello, the homes of founding fathers George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.  Colonial Williamsburg attracts about 570,000 visitors a year, compared with about 1.1 million paid visitors at Mount Vernon and 435,000 at Monticello.

Its 2016 annual budget was $227 million; however, the foundation needed to draw down more than $70 million — about 10 percent of the value of its $713 million endowment — to offset operating losses, according to Jeff Duncan, vice president of real estate and former acting CFO for Colonial Williamsburg. The foundation made a 12.1 percent draw from the endowment in 2014 and drew 11.2 percent in 2015, according to the nonprofit’s public tax records. By its own reckoning, Colonial Williamsburg determined that if it continues to draw funds at these rates, its endowment would be depleted within eight years.

In the next few years, the foundation’s goal is to restrict the amount drawn from the endowment to an industry-accepted rate of 5 percent per year. The foundation hopes that rate will be below the amount of the endowment’s annual earnings from dividends and interest on investments made with endowment funds. The ideal is to tap only the interest earned on the endowment’s investments — not the principal. 

In recent years the endowment, managed by Charlottesville-based Investure LLC, has reported annual investment earnings from dividends, interest and gains of around 2.5 percent. The endowment’s overall net assets have fluctuated considerably during the past decade, from $819 million in 2007 to $663.6 million last year, due to changes in the financial markets and the amount drawn down by the foundation. The endowment’s net assets were projected to increase by 11 percent in 2017, due to gains in investments and a stronger overall stock market, Reiss says. The year end increase was 14 percent. The endowment was expected to close 2017 with more than $700 million in assets.

Debt payments
Besides making up annual operating losses, Colonial Williamsburg also has more than $300 million in debt from loans it took out in the early 2000s for capital improvements at its Williamsburg Lodge and other projects.  According to Duncan, “The intent was that, by making these [capital] investments, they would pay for themselves over time. That didn’t occur.”

In addition to paying about $16 million in interest per year on the debt, Colonial Williamsburg has three payments due to repay the principal by 2024, starting with a $137.5 million payment in 2019, say Reiss and Duncan.      

The foundation’s 28-member board of trustees, which includes heavy corporate hitters such as Dominion Energy CEO Tom Farrell, is studying possibilities for refinancing the debt and pushing the repayment date further into the future, Reiss says.  Virginia Business reached out to Farrell and board member Joe Montgomery, one of the country’s top-ranked financial advisers who lives in

Williamsburg, but neither responded to a request for comment.

Despite its struggles, the foundation has continued to receive good rankings from nonprofit evaluators GuideStar and Charity Navigator. They note that Colonial Williamsburg spent nearly 78 percent of its budget on programming expenses in 2015, as opposed to 15.6 percent on administrative costs and 6.6 percent on fundraising.

Access issues
In recent years, Colonial Williamsburg has reported donations of about $40 million in gifts and grants, according to tax filings. 

Yet declines in paid attendance are a major challenge. Other nonprofit historic attractions such as Monticello, Mount Vernon and Historic Jamestowne all reported steady visitation increases during the past decade. At Colonial Williamsburg, paid visitation dropped 19 percent between 2005 and 2015.

Unlike Mount Vernon and Monticello, which are self-contained and require admission for entrance, Colonial Williamsburg’s sprawling historic area is spread along public streets. “We have 65 points of entry at least,” says Andrea Sardone,  the foundation’s executive director of marketing. “People can just walk onto the property … You can walk up and down the street for free. You can pretty much get the flavor of the place, but the good stuff is behind a ticketed door.”

A $40.99 one-day ticket at Colonial Williamsburg includes access to 18th-century trade shops with demonstrations by skilled blacksmiths and weavers, guided tours of the Governor’s Palace and Capital and admission to two art museums.

“We are combating a very, very strong social media word-of-mouth that tells people you don’t need a ticket” to stroll around Colonial Williamsburg, visit shops and restaurants, see historic interpreters and get a feel for the place, says Sardone. Popular travel sites such as TripAdvisor, she adds, include reviews that recommend avoiding the ticketed-only areas.

“We have a lot of people who ‘free ride,’ and it’s getting worse because of the internet,” says Reiss.

Citing security concerns as well as a desire to control paid admissions to the historic area, Reiss hopes to negotiate with Williamsburg city officials to eventually close some streets to traffic. He’d like to enclose the historic area within a fence and have a central entry gate where Colonial Williamsburg could collect admission fees.

Colonial Williamsburg’s base ticket price is twice the price of admission to Monticello or Mount Vernon. In December, during its Grand Illumination event, the attraction planned to experiment with a la carte pricing, introducing an option to tour the Governor’s Palace for $15.

Also on the horizon is a new admissions tax. Passed by Williamsburg City Council, it’s scheduled to take effect July 1. The tax is one component of a plan to finance a tourism development fund (TDF) that city officials say would help seed new tourism projects while benefiting existing sites such as Colonial Williamsburg.

“Our community agrees that stagnant or declining visitation of our attractions is a priority for action by the city council,” says Scott Foster, Williamsburg vice mayor. “The TDF is a tool to help increase visitation by enabling the development of new and expanded tourism assets in our market. We are excited to see the public-private partnerships that emerge through the availability of this funding source and expect that major existing partners like Colonial Williamsburg will benefit.”

Yet, Reiss worries that Colonial Williamsburg will be forced to raise admission prices. He’s in discussions with the city government, hoping to prevent the tax from taking effect. “I think it would hurt everybody, not just us,” he says. “If fewer people come to Colonial Williamsburg, it’s bad for business. It’s bad for tourism in general.”

Building a brand
During the first half of 2017, Colonial Williamsburg saw a 10 percent bump in paid visitation compared with the same period in 2016, and it hopes to see higher numbers in 2018. The foundation collected $22.2 million in admission revenues in 2016, up from about $19.1 million the previous year. 

Sardone attributes the increase to a targeted marketing campaign employing social media and new TV spots that emphasize Colonial Williamsburg’s activities.

Additionally during the last year, Colonial Williamsburg launched new features on its smartphone app. They allow visitors to purchase tickets, schedule carriage rides and determine the location of historic interpreters at any time. The foundation also has launched a 10-minute live orientation program every morning where an interpreter explains everything the historic area has to offer, as well as how to purchase tickets.

Another ongoing dilemma is brand identity. While Mount Vernon and Monticello are tied to Washington and Jefferson, Colonial Williamsburg doesn’t have that sort of public identification. “Most people would say butter-churning,” says Colonial Williamsburg spokesman Joseph Straw, “and we don’t even do that.”

To that end, Colonial Williamsburg recently retained renowned New York ad agency Ogilvy to aid the foundation’s marketing efforts and to help build its brand.

Reiss and Sardone say the foundation also will explore how to appeal to millennials and compete with other entertainment options while staying true to its mission.

That’s a conundrum also being pondered by other historic sites. For instance, Mount Vernon is  overhauling a popular 4-D theater experience as well as introducing a new interactive exhibit called “Be Washington,” hosted by actor Chris Jackson. He portrayed Washington in the smash Broadway musical “Hamilton.”

“People have come to expect certain things presented in a certain media style, so we’re all about telling great 18th-century stories with 21st-century methods,” says Rob Shenk, Mount Vernon’s senior vice president for visitor engagement. These days that includes figuring out “how to tell the story [on Twitter] … in 280 characters or less.”

Despite their struggles to rise above the noise of smartphones and theme parks, however, heritage sites such as Monticello, Mount Vernon and Colonial Williamsburg, remain strong drivers for Virginia tourism, says Gary Sandling, Monticello’s vice president of visitor programs and visitor services.

A study last year commissioned by Preservation Virginia and conducted by Virginia Commonwealth University’s L. Douglas Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs found that tourism at heritage sites accounted for nearly $7.7 billion in annual spending in Virginia. In 2016, the U. S. Travel Association said domestic visitors spent $572 million visiting Colonial Williamsburg.

Looking ahead, Reiss is confident that the foundation is moving in the right direction. “To be $5 million better in a restructuring year with a lot of one-time costs is a pretty significant accomplishment. We’re pretty confident that we’re going to do better than that the next year,” he says.

While cutting staff and slashing budgets is never easy, he adds, “This is a situation I inherited when I started in late 2014. These are not choices that any of us would like to have made but, given the circumstances, the alternative is worse.” 

Wealth worries

More money has been lost trying to avoid bear markets than has been lost in any bear market, says Cassaday & Co. founder and CEO Stephan Cassaday.

“Declines are inevitable; they happen,” says Cassaday, whose McLean-based wealth management firm has $2.4 billion in assets under management, “but so are recoveries, and as long as you don’t need all your money at any one time and you leave your money alone and you let it percolate over long periods of time, you build wealth.”

Addressing client worries about the health of the current bull market is a major concern facing the nation’s top wealth management professionals, many of whom are located in Virginia and are recognized as such consistently, year after year by publications such as Barron’s and Forbes. It should come as no surprise that just six of Virginia’s top advisers collectively manage more than $40 billion in assets if one considers the fact that four of the nation’s top 10 wealthiest counties are located in Northern Virginia.

Jeffrey S. Grinspoon, managing director and partner at Vienna-based VWG Wealth Management, says his clients are “as focused on not losing money as they are on making money.”

The state’s wealth management industry leaders counsel their clients to take a diversified approach to their holdings as a potential way to weather any financial storms, including a possible end to the current bull market, which is the second-longest since World War II (exceeded only by the stock run-up in the 1990s).

In addition to stocks, “you should also own short-term bonds, you should own real estate, you should own precious metals. You should own investments in exponential technologies. You should own oil and gas. There are wide varieties of asset classes, not just stocks,” says Ric Edelman, founder and executive chairman of Fairfax-based Edelman Financial Services, which has $20 billion in assets under management.

However, the Virginia advisers  also are not certain that the end of the bull market is necessarily in sight or that it even will be that bad.

“There’s no rule that says that bull markets should run a certain amount of time. It’s natural for people to say, ‘Well, it’s been going for such a long time, it has to end at some point.’ [But] I’m open to the idea that that might not be true,” Cassaday says. “We’re telling clients we have no idea when the next market correction will occur. … It’s impossible to know those things — but it’s likely we will have some kind of change in the pattern. And I think it’s likely the change will be a sideways movement, a consolidation moment from which we can resume an uptrend.”

“Ignore the fact that this is the second-longest bull market in history,” Edelman says. “That’s not a terribly relevant data point, and the reason is that the circumstances of this bull market are very different from those in the past. … The fact that it has been nine years is not as significant as the fact that the rise has been slow and steady. It’s been the tortoise, not the hare. So you shouldn’t fear it. You shouldn’t be afraid merely because it’s been so long. Second, we have to remember as well that the decline that preceded it was extraordinarily deep. So, the deeper the hole, the longer you have to climb out of it. Part of the reason that this recovery has been so long is because the decline that preceded it was so deep.”

In addition to gauging the health of the market, wealth management advisers today are also more likely to be taking a broader view of their clients’ lives, counseling them on more than just financial goals for retirement. And with wealthy baby boomers and members of the silent generation entering their 70s and 80s and expecting to live longer, their planning is more likely to also involve their clients’ grown children and grandchildren.

“You have all these baby boomers who have aged. A lot of them have substantial wealth. They’re not necessarily the Kennedys and the Rockefellers, but they’re doing the same kind of thinking — they’re having generational thoughts,” says Joseph W. Montgomery, managing director of investments for Williamsburg-based The Optimal Service Group of Wells Fargo Advisors, which has more than $12 billion in assets under management. 

Extended life spans also make wealth planning more complex, involving setting goals such as paying for long-term care in the event of illness, Edelman points out, not to mention saving for college for children or grandchildren.

Like her peers, Dalal Salomon, CEO and founding partner of Richmond-based Salomon & Ludwin LLC, has been working with multigenerational clients for decades. She says that multigenerational planning is critical because “wealth-transition experts’ studies have shown 70 percent of families lose control of assets as well as experience loss of family harmony following the transition of an estate to the next generation.”

Some firms, such as Reston-based PagnatoKarp, try to help families surmount these problems by guiding them to write down their values and draft mission statements to help them identify mutual goals for wealth accumulation.

“The baby boomers are just getting older, and they’ve been such a big part of our population,” says PagnatoKarp founder and CEO Paul A. Pagnato. “Their children over the next 10 years will be inheriting approximately $10 trillion. That older generation has the bulk of wealth in our country, and it’s important for that transition of wealth to be successful.”

Center’s vaults preserve a collection of cultural treasures

Nestled into the side of a small mountain in Culpeper lies a half-moon-shaped, 45-acre campus of laboratories partially overgrown with ivy, like the set of a post-apocalyptic thriller. Adding to the complex’s ambience are its sprawling levels of underground doomsday vaults.

Once owned by the Federal Reserve, the Cold War-era underground facility was built to shelter top federal officials and safeguard billions of dollars in U.S. currency in the event of a nuclear war. These days, as part of the Library of Congress’ Packard Campus of the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center, the vaults secure a cultural treasure trove.

Marking its 10th anniversary this year, the 415,000-square-foot center is home to the library’s voluminous film, video and audio archives — the largest such collection in the world. Its climate-controlled vaults and more than 90 miles of underground shelving protect more than 4.6 million works of art.

“We could drop you at one end and lose you for a week,” says David Critics, the center’s administration officer. The collection ranges from 1880s wax-cylinder recordings to Thomas Edison’s first 1891 celluloid film tests to the latest blockbuster movies and hit songs, which are registered with the library for copyright purposes.

More than just storage space, though, the center’s preservation labs rescue and restore old recordings. Pre-1951 nitrate films are extremely flammable, for instance, and the late 20th-century “safety film” format chemically degrades. The center digitizes content around the clock and is also one of the few labs in the world to make new prints of old films. One of the center’s most recent projects is the restoration and digitization of a donated original print of Edison’s 1910 “Frankenstein” silent film.

Though not open to the public as a library (researchers must request items from the library in Washington, D.C.), the center does hold events such as film screenings, concerts, live re-creations of old-time radio shows and an annual open house.
Its film and video collection, which includes oddities such as the late Jerry Lewis’ infamous unfinished Holocaust film “The Day the Clown Cried” (embargoed from public view until 2025) is so large that two-thirds of it remains virtually uncatalogued. The large backlog means that library researchers find “lost” films “pretty much every day,” says Mike Mashon, head of the facility’s moving image section.

Back to the center

In the 1940s and 1950s the American Dream changed. Driven by white flight and the construction of post-World War II planned communities, families began migrating in ever-larger numbers from cities to the suburbs, seeking subdivisions with spacious homes and lawns big enough for playing children.

As a larger percentage of the workforce fled for the suburbs, companies followed, building office parks and sprawling, collegelike campuses.

Since the Great Recession, however, that trend has been reversed. Today, an increasing number of companies are relocating headquarters and other significant operations to urban areas that appeal to in-demand millennial workers.

Interestingly, many of these corporations also are eschewing big cities such as New York and Los Angeles in favor of opening offices in midtier cities where the cost of living is lower and employees can enjoy a greater quality of life.

The areas that have the most to gain from this new exodus are midsize capital cities such as Richmond; Raleigh, N.C.; and Austin, Texas, says Barry Matherly, president and CEO of the Greater Richmond Partnership.

While Richmond boasts big-city amenities such as universities, museums and performing arts centers, Matherly says, office space costs less and commutes are far shorter when compared with nearby cities such as Washington, D.C.
“It’s easy to attract talent from other areas to Richmond,” he adds. “Young people can afford to buy a house here if they want. They can actually afford to live here.”

Several corporations have decided to move to Richmond’s downtown recently, especially to the Riverfront Plaza office towers. It’s the home or soon-to-be home for new offices for Hanover County-based medical supplies company Owens & Minor Inc.; Washington, D.C.-based International City/County  Management Association – Retirement Corp. (ICMA-RC); Canadian news and information company Thomson Reuters; and New Jersey-based software developer AvePoint.

Washington, D.C.-based CoStar Group, a leader in commercial real estate data and analytics and the parent company of websites such as Apartments.com, opened a new headquarters facility for its research division in the WestRock building downtown, within walking distance of the James River. It has hired about 600 of 830 planned employees for the location.

“Richmond gives you something that is urban for culture but isn’t urban-intensive,” says CoStar CEO Andrew C. Florance. “Within 20 minutes, you can be out in all-green space.”

For CoStar, one of the most important factors in deciding to open a major location in downtown Richmond was its proximity to Virginia Commonwealth University. “Workforce pipeline for us is vital. We need an educated workforce,” says Florance, whose company has hired hundreds of millennial employees in Richmond during the last year.

Retention also was a key consideration for CoStar. “Our researchers build relationships with commercial real-estate professionals all over the country,” Florance says, and his clients don’t like turnover. In Richmond, CoStar can spend less on office space while paying workers at the same rate as counterparts in larger cities. “Richmond just lets that investment in them go a lot further,” he says. “They can have a much higher quality of life in Richmond than they would anywhere else.”

When ICMA-RC was looking for sites in the Richmond area, economic development officials at first showed the company a suburban office park, but ICMA-RC wasn’t interested. “We want to be downtown,” says Gregory Dyson, the company’s senior vice president and chief operating officer.

Millennials make up about 30 percent of his company’s total workforce, Dyson says, and “they want to be where the action is. They’re looking for the excitement of the city.” And with a host of rooftop bars, eateries, galleries and nightspots — not to mention river activities like whitewater rafting and kayaking — downtown Richmond fits the bill.

Companies also may be able to count on keeping their younger workers interested in downtown locations for longer. Millennials are marrying and settling down far later than previous generations and “stay in the city a lot longer,” says David J. Collis, an adjunct professor at Harvard Business School.

It’s not just millennials who are drawn to cities, he adds. Empty-nesters and executives also are excited by vibrant downtowns. And with high-speed internet and advances in telecommunications, corporations are beginning to de-aggregate their suburban campuses and split into divisions, with their corporate leadership moving back to cities. General Electric, for instance, is building a $200 million complex in downtown Boston, with plans to move its top brass there from Connecticut.

There also is a symbolic value to inhabiting trendy downtown spaces, lending companies the appearance of keeping up with the times. Plus, companies see value in breaking out of isolated campuses, says Collis, exposing their people to a more diverse “innovative, entrepreneurial milieu.”

A good example of this is Goochland County-based CarMax, a Fortune 500 company that is the nation’s largest used-auto retailer. Last year it opened its digital and technological innovation center with 150 employees in the Lady Byrd Hat Co. building, a former warehouse that was more recently home to a music venue and nightclub.

Located on the Canal Walk in downtown Richmond, the building features an open work layout, with exposed brickwork, wood floors and high ceilings — a very different space from CarMax’s suburban corporate campus about a half-hour away.

“We’re looking for people who are creative, innovative, technologically proficient, etc., and that want to work in this very progressive, collaborative way,” says Ann Yauger, CarMax’s associate vice president of product. “Downtown just offered so much of a rich diversity of thinking, of people, of environment and stimulation.” The Lady Byrd Hat Co. Building appeals “to different people,” she continues, “and those folks don’t want to work in a suburban environment as much.”

Richmond isn’t the only Virginia city experiencing a downtown corporate rebirth.

In Norfolk, Automatic Data Processing (ADP), a New Jersey-based Fortune 500 human resources firm, has invested more than $32 million to locate an office with 1,800 workers downtown.

Amid renewed vibrancy buoyed by millennial-friendly craft breweries and an influx of new apartments, Roanoke also is attracting new tenants. In September, Associated Asphalt, one of the largest asphalt resellers in the country, and PowerSchool, an education technology company, signed leases to relocate to the former Norfolk Southern building in the city’s downtown.

Meanwhile in Fairfax County’s fast-growing Tysons corporate district, millions of square feet of office space are under development as Tysons morphs into a model for live-work-play. Capital One Financial Corp. is renovating its 24-acre corporate campus into a complex that will include a 470-foot-tall, 940,500-square-foot skyscraper for its corporate headquarters. The new campus also will offer apartment towers, retail outlets and an urban-style Wegmans grocery store.

At Tysons, Fairfax County is creating “a city like environment where you walk to work,” says C. Daniel Clemente, chairman and CEO of Clemente Development Corp. in McLean. Clemente’s company plans to construct a $1.3 billion, mixed-use complex called The View at Tysons. It calls for a 48-story tower that would house condominiums and a five-star hotel. If approved by the county, the project would be the tallest building on the East Coast between Philadelphia and Charlotte, N.C.

Many millennials, Clemente and others note, aren’t interested in driving to work and would rather walk or bike. When they need to drive, they prefer Uber or public transit.  That’s why the popular live-work-play urban planning model resonates particularly well with them.

The growth at Tysons, Clemente says, is an acknowledgement that suburban corporate campuses of yesterday won’t attract tomorrow’s workers.

“Office parks are dead,” he says bluntly. “The millennial workforce is not going to go to an office park — period.  If you own an office park, you better  start thinking about something else to  do with it.”