SUNDAY, MAY 15 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE C5
sion nonetheless gives National
Landing a good set of “bragging
rights.”
Boeing has also said it will
build a research and technology
hub to focus on innovating in
cybersecurity, quantum sciences
and other fields, though it has so
far offered few details on where
that hub will go or what it might
look like.
“If you put that [Boeing] on
top of the Amazon HQ2 an-
nouncement and the presence of
other significant tech sector em-
ployers, it casts the message that
this place is great for tech busi-
nesses,” Clower said. (Amazon
founder Jeff Bezos owns The
Washington Post.)
As local officials seek to com-
pete with other commercial cen-
ters around the D.C. region, as
well as other “innovation dis-
tricts” in the Northeast, such as
Philadelphia’s University City or
Kendall Square in Cambridge,
Mass., that message is perfectly
in tune with the booming vision
they are pushing for National
Landing.
According to a market impact
study published in April, the area
has 8 million square feet of new
office space in the pipeline, with
9,00 0 new jobs in addition to
those being created by Amazon.
AT&T has rolled out plans to
build out a 5G network meant to
turn the neighborhood into a
“smart city-at scale.”
What that means for the re-
gion as a whole, though, depends
largely on whom you ask.
Amazon jerseys, Boeing Field
While Boeing has had a pres-
ence in Arlington since it picked
up military contracts during
World War I, the company moved
its defense operations to Crystal
City just as the county was facing
a kind of existential crisis.
Upon the 2005 recommenda-
tion of a federal panel, 17,000
BOEING FROM C1 military and defense contractors
began moving out of the area. By
about a decade later, the process
known as Base Realignment and
Closure (BRAC) had emptied out
about one-fifth of the office space
in the neighborhood.
Boeing’s arrival at its current
offices on Long Bridge Drive in
20 16, then, served as a kind of
counterpoint to that exodus.
“They have been a pretty
steadfast partner in Crystal City
during a very challenging time
for the area,” said Arlington
County Board Chair Katie Cristol
(D). “We were really concerned
about Crystal City being hol-
lowed out, but Boeing was will-
ing to make an investment.”
Unlike many o f its more subur-
ban neighbors, Arlington de-
pends on commercial properties
for about half of its tax revenue.
Keeping office workers around
was and still is essential to sup-
porting county services without
significantly raising taxes on
homeowners.
Yet, Cristol also pointed out
that the aerospace giant’s contri-
butions have gone beyond its
taxes. In 201 9, for instance, the
company donated $10 million to
the county to finance the con-
struction and operation of a new
aquatics center up the street, also
fronting access fees for active
duty military and their families.
In exchange, county officials
named some of the park space in
between the two structures after
the aerospace company.
Today, the Boeing Fields at
Long Bridge Park are a hub for
after-school activity. On one re-
cent Tuesday evening, youth
travel soccer teams ran drills on
the turf as parents watched their
toddlers on futuristic, rubber-
floored areas to the side.
Noemi Vargas, 49, had b rought
her sons to scooter around on the
sidewalk as she scrolled through
her phone, sitting on a bench
across the street from Boeing’s
glass-and-steel offices.
The family had been making
the short walk over from Penta-
gon City for years, but Vargas
said s he had no idea t hat the p ark
was in part named after the
company.
“If it’s e xpensive now, it’s g oing
to be impossible with Boeing,”
Vargas, a stay-at-home mom, said
in Spanish. “Not everyone is
going to be able to stay in this
area. ... But I guess it’s a good
thing if they do bring jobs.”
A few yards away, Sebastian
Edmunds stood on the sidelines
of the soccer turf, chatting in a
circle of parents as their daugh-
ters’ travel team dribbled balls up
and down a pitch named after
Boeing. One-half of the team
wore gray jerseys emblazoned on
the back with Amazon logos.
As a real estate agent, the Falls
Church resident said he’s alreadyseen how the presence of the
e-retail giant has led to skyrock-
eting home values across North-
ern Virginia in the region’s w hite-
hot real estate market. As a
parent, he added, the presence of
these tech companies represents
greater opportunity for his kids.
“When you have Amazon here,
it’s very easy for a child to
imagine going into tech,” Ed-
munds said, looking out at the
scrimmage. “My daughter can
say, ‘I’ll go to college and then
come back and work for Boeing.’
”A ‘clustering effect’
Ask any economic develop-
ment official in Northern Vir-
ginia, and they are bound to
share Edmunds’s conviction.
Their plans to grow and develop
a pipeline of young, diverse techworkers are deeply intertwined
with their push to attract compa-
nies to National Landing and
turn it into a tech hub.
“You can’t have a technology
company right now without tal-
ent,” said Tr acy Sayegh Gabriel,
executive director of the Nation-
al Landing Business Improve-
ment District. “The labor market
is very tight, it’s fiercely competi-
tive. Having the proximity of that
tech talent is essential to opera-
tions.”
When Amazon announced a
national search for a second
North America headquarters,
states like New York and Mary-
land were lambasted for offering
billions in tax breaks and direct
grants to the tech giant, which
earned about $33. 4 billion last
year.
But Virginia bet on the ideathat investing in computer sci-
ence graduates — and building
the pipeline necessary to sustain
it — would be more effective in
luring Amazon and other major
corporate heavyweights.
And it appears to have
worked: While Amazon stands to
receive $ 550 million from state
coffers, more of Virginia’s dollars
are going toward the state’s $1
billion Tech Talent Investment
Program. That initiative has set a
goal of producing an additional
25,0 00 new graduates in comput-
er science and related fields over
two decades, many of them at
Virginia Tech’s Alexandria cam-
pus.
Boeing spokesman Connor
Greenwood said that Boeing is
taking no “economic incentives”
from Virginia. Becca Glover, a
spokeswoman for Gov. Glenn
Youngkin (R), said it is possible
that the state will ultimately
provide the company with some
financial incentives but that they
would not be “significant.”
Enrico Moretti, an economist
at the University of California,
Berkeley, who has studied where
and why companies locate their
operations, said t hat decisions by
both Amazon and Boeing to
build headquarters in Arlington
bodes well for such an education-
centered approach.
While Boeing has not directly
addressed why it decided to
move its headquarters to Arling-
ton, the D.C. tech labor market is
already large and well-educated,
and offers a wide variety of
specializations, he said. Any ef-
fort to widen that pool can only
help produce what Moretti says
appears t o be a “clustering effect”
at work with Boeing’s move.
“If you attract a company like
Amazon, the labor market be-
comes more attractive for future
companies and future workers,”
he said.Ian Duncan and Laura Vozzella
contributed to this report.Virginia’s education focus r eaps job growth, expert says
ERIC LEE/BLOOMBERG NEWS
Boeing’s decision to move its headquarters from Chicago to Arlington points to the success of Virginia’s
strategy of diversifying its tech workforce, economic development experts say.violence in D.C. over time.
The report recommends that
the c ity establish a “Peace Room”
where data and crime analysts,
violence reduction managers
and liaisons from government
agencies coordinate immediate
responses to shootings that ex-
tend far beyond the police. It
also asks D.C. to convene weekly
meetings to review every shoot-
ing incident, create a citywide
database to coordinate services
between agencies for each per-
son under supervision, increase
the n umber o f violence interven-
tion workers and create an acad-
emy to train them.
“The District is unique in that
it is one of the few cities in the
country that has the needed
talent, ability, and resources to
drastically reduce gun violence
in the city,” the report compiled
by the National Institute for
Criminal Justice Reform
(NICJR) said. “However, it is
lacking the political commit-
ment, coordination, a nd a coher-
ent strategy to reduce gun vio-
lence.”
Over the last few years, the
District has established a perma-
nent office of gun violence pre-
vention and announced a flurry
of initiatives that offer holistic
approaches to combating gun
violence.
Some of the p rograms, like the
transitional employment pro-
gram Pathways, have been in
large part celebrated for their
success. But what critics say is
missing is an overall framework
to coordinate resources around
one mission that effectively re-
duces violence in the city. Bows-
er’s signature crime-fighting ini-
tiative, Building Blocks D.C., has
evolved into more of a theory
that even top city officials have
struggled to define.
The strategic plan put for-
ward by the CJCC, according to
its authors and D.C. officials,
could provide the road map the
city needs.
“This starts to create a strat-
egy, not multiple disparate strat-
egies,” said D.C. Council member
Charles Allen (D-Ward 6 ), who
chairs the judiciary and public
safety committee and sits on the
CJCC. “That is the pivot point
and turning point that is poten-
tially in front of us.”
D.C. Director of Gun Violence
Prevention Linda K. Harllee
Harper said the city will use the
report as the foundation of its
work and expressed pride that
the District has already made
progress on much of what was
outlined in the document.
“Opportunities for public and
government input will finalize
the plan,” she said in a message.
“The goal is to create a plan that
REPORT FROM C1 can be fully adopted by the city.”
Public safety has become the
chief concern for an increasing
percentage of D.C. residents as
violent crime c ontinues t o devas-
tate neighborhoods across the
city.
Last year, the District sur-
passed 200 homicides for the
first time since 200 3; as of
Thursday, it is on track for an
even higher number of killings
this year.
Robberies are also up by more
than 50 percent compared with
the same point in 2021, accord-
ing to D.C. police data. A Wash-
ington Post poll released in Feb-
ruary found that 36 percent of
respondents cited crime, vio-
lence or g uns as t he District’s top
problem — twice as many as in a
2019 Post poll.
There is added pressure to
communicate a strategy around
mitigating violence with the
Democratic primary on June 21,
when Bowser will face challeng-
ers from the left who have made
public safety a centerpiece of
their campaigns. Experts say the
new strategic plan provides a
response to swaths of D.C. voters
who have been calling for ways
to address violence outside of
simply relying on law enforce-
ment yet are increasingly des-
perate to feel safe.
If implemented, authors of
the report say, their method can
achieve a 10 percent decrease in
the number of homicides, nonfa-
tal shootings and gun-armed
robberies each year — a metric
they say they achieved in other
jurisdictions with a similar ap-
proach.
The report prioritizes inter-
vention while also including rec-
ommendations that target un-
derlying causes and risk factors
of violence such as poverty and
chronic unemployment.
At the center of the report is a
recommendation to “implement
a comprehensive, coordinated,
citywide Gun Violence Reduc-
tion Strategy,” which experts de-
scribe as a data-driven approach
that has been used in cities like
Boston and Oakland.
The strategy involves relying
on data to identify the people
most at risk of gun violence and
providing them with intensive
services, supports and opportu-
nity.
It also encourages the police
to use a tactic called “focused
enforcement,” which directs po-
lice engagement away f rom p etty
crime and toward mitigating
violence.
The document also suggests
that the District launch a “Guar-
anteed Income pilot program,”
which would provide 200 Black
families with children under 10
years old a monthly stipend of
$750, in addition to other initia-
tives aimed at the root causes of
violence.
“The idea is for this to be a
living, breathing document that
has iterations over time,” said
David Muhammad, NICJR’s ex-
ecutive director.
The District already has in-
vested in some programs out-
lined in the strategic plan, Mu-
hammad and city officials said.
The Child and Family Services
Agency, for example, has long
run success centers that are
similar to the community re-
source hubs outlined in the
report.
More recently, the city
launched its People of Promise
Initiative using data compiled
by Muhammad. That initiative
identifies individuals at the
highest risk of gun violence and
dedicates resources to them, a
central tenet of the strategic
plan.
“I want to say that the recom-
mendations are e ncouraging be-
cause we actually have started
work already in some form or
fashion in every single one of
the recommendations NICJR
has put forward,” Harllee Harp-
er said at the public meeting.
“We are encouraged because it
means we are moving in the
right direction.”
Community members at the
public meeting pushed Muham-
mad and city officials to commit
funding to the recommenda-
tions outlined in the report. The
proposed budget for the 2023
fiscal year includes a $1.7 mil-
lion investment in life coaches
to work with the highest-risk
residents in D.C.
The funding will allow for 20
family support workers and
three supervisors, the city said.
The strategic plan recommends
62 life coaches, but city leaders
said they wanted to roll out the
program in waves. Both Mu-
hammad and Harllee Harper
said they hope to work together
“soon” to develop implementa-
tion plans.
Peace for D.C. Founder Roger
Marmet, who lost his 22 -year-
old son, Tom, to gun violence in
20 18, said he was “surprised,
impressed and heartened” to
see Bowser show up at the
public meeting Thursday eve-
ning. But he said he is looking
for the city’s budgets to reflect
their commitment to the plan.
“I am not 100 percent con-
vinced, and I won’t be until we
see those specific recommenda-
tions implemented with fidelity,
with outside evaluation, with
constant improvement,” he said.
“That is all possible, but it
would be a new way of operat-
ing.”Peter Hermann contributed to this
report.Income for families, violence intervention part of road map for a safer D.C.
ASTRID RIECKEN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
Untraceable “ghost” guns obtained by D.C. police are seen during a 2020 news conference. Questions
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