Tysons Corner Center, Half-Owned by Alaska's Permanent Fund, Is the Eighth-Largest Mall in the US
Key Takeaways
- •Tysons Corner Center opened in 1968 and covers about 2.2 million square feet of retail space in Tysons, Virginia, outside Washington, D.C.
- •The mall also serves as one of the region’s largest office-space markets and has been reshaped with a Metro station, office towers, and a hotel.
- •Half of the property is owned by the Alaska Permanent Fund, which invests Alaska oil revenue and pays annual dividends to eligible residents.
- •The other half is owned by Macerich, a California-based REIT that recently completed a $710 million refinancing of the property.
- •Joseph Lawler argues that ownership spread across distant investors can reduce the incentive to care about a place’s beauty.
Tysons Corner Center, today the eighth-largest mall in the country, also functions as one of the largest sub-city-sized markets for office space (WTOP). The mall opened in 1968 and now spans roughly 2.2 million square feet of retail in Tysons, Virginia, outside Washington, D.C. — a suburb that became a textbook example of what journalist Joel Garreau dubbed an 'edge city.' Since 2014 a Silver Line Metro station has served the property directly, and office towers and a hotel have been built alongside the retail floors — the kind of mixed-use repositioning US mall owners have increasingly pursued as more shopping shifts online. Fairfax County's long-range plan calls for growing Tysons into a walkable urban downtown around the rail line.
The property is half-owned by the Alaska Permanent Fund, the state-owned corporation that invests Alaska's oil revenue on behalf of the state's citizens (The Washington Post). The fund was created by a 1976 constitutional amendment as North Slope oil money began to flow, and it pays an annual dividend to eligible Alaska residents out of its earnings — earnings that include returns from holdings such as a Northern Virginia shopping mall. The remaining half is held by Macerich, a Santa Monica, California-based real estate investment trust (REIT) that is in turn owned by hundreds of large institutional investors and many individuals, and which completed a $710 million refinancing of Tysons Corner Center (Macerich).
In an essay for The New Atlantis, Joseph Lawler argues that liquid real estate markets, combined with distanced ownership of the kind seen at Tysons Corner Center, militate against beauty. His title — 'You Probably Own This 7-Eleven' — sketches the chain he means: Alaska oil royalties flow into a sovereign fund, the fund buys half a mall, the mall's co-owner is a REIT held by faraway institutions and individuals, and at the end of the chain sit owners who would not recognize their own property if they shopped there. When ownership is that dispersed, Lawler argues, no one is positioned to care whether a place is beautiful.
