Loudoun County, Virginia

kinds of developments to be built around stops on the new Metrorail line. “We’re excited about continuing to build a different kind of housing product,” Rizer reports. “That’s important for the young workforce that our technology businesses are going to be dependent on.” Loudoun County is known across the world as data center alley. More than 10,000 of the county’s employees work in, or around, the data center industry. When it comes to facilities, the county has more than 20 million square feet of data centers, with another four million under development. Those businesses will net the county more than $350 million in local tax revenue this year. Loudoun County has an incentive program to attract businesses, but that program hasn’t been used to attract data centers. “We have not incentivized data centers locally at all, not one dollar,” Rizer reflects. “There is a great population has swelled from about 125,000 to nearly 415,000. Despite that growth, about two-thirds of the county remains relatively rural. In fact, Jackie and John F. Kennedy built a sprawling, horse- country estate just outside of Middleburg on the southern edge of Loudoun County. “It has been an amazing opportunity to be able to preserve a lot of the charm of western Loudoun’s farm country and horse country and we still have these seven beautiful small towns that are just jewels for this entire region,” Rizer says. “So, we’ve been able to preserve almost all of that through our success of the eastern part of the county and it’s taken a lot of pressure off of having to build more houses throughout the western part.” This has been one of the best years for housing sales Loudoun County has seen. Homes are sometimes sold within hours of being listed. Unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of smaller units in the county, but there’s potential for those