Posts by Ellie Ashford

The owner of the stone building where the Seven Corners Animal Hospital is located at 6300 Arlington Blvd. has been declared bankrupt, although the vet clinic's lease still has five years on it. The same person also owns an adjacent building at 6801 Wilson Blvd. Both properties have been foreclosed and are expected to be sold at auction.

Nearby, 3 medical professional buildings, at 6305 and 6319 Castle Place and a larger one at 2946 Sleepy Hollow Road are for sale. That land is zoned for higher density than the current buildings, so it could eventually support a larger development project, said Clark Turner, sales associate with West, Lane and Schlager. This sale is not a foreclosure.

The owner is asking $225 a square foot, or $2.9 million for 6305, $3.8 million for 6319, and $6.9 million for 2946. A buyer could purchase the buildings separately or all together. It should be noted the sales brochure for those properties says average daily traffic along Route 7 is 41,000 cars.

Meanwhile, an eight-story Hampton Inn hotel has been proposed for Arlington Boulevard at the South Street intersection between the BB and T Towers and American Lube.

These changes could be the catalyst for a different kind of development in Bailey's Crossroads; one that does not repeat the problems of the past.

"Seven Corners Shopping Center is difficult to enter, difficult to park in, difficult to like," Sellers wrote in the Lake Barcroft newsletter. "It's a 1960s shopping district faced with the realities of the second decade of the 21st century."

"Everybody knows the hideous intersection that brought Seven Corners its name and daily causes thousands of cars to stream through our neighborhood streets," he continued. "But fixing the intersection would be a nightmare and a huge expenditure."

Any new development will worsen the congestion on Route 7. "There are terrible right of way issues," Sellers conceded. "If you widen Route 7, you're going to put some shopping centers out of business. And if you put in streetcars, where would the cars go?"

Sellers believes addressing the mess at Seven Corners calls for an areawide solution that includes more than just the shopping center and intersection.

Seven Corners doesn't have a chamber of commerce but it does fall under the jurisdiction of the BCRC, which worked for the past 10 years on developing a conceptual plan for the revitalization of Bailey's Crossroads, which was adopted by the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors last year.

Sellers would like to see the BCRC "spearhead a community effort to consider the future of Seven Corners." He notes that "neither Fairfax County, the Office of Community Revitalization and Redevelopment, nor Mason Supervisor Penny Gross have ever done any overarching planning review for Seven Corners. We need to start."

All the neighborhood groups close to Seven Corners need to be involved. "The community needs to come to come together and focus on what they would prefer for that area for the next 50 years," Sellers says. "It has to be a process where everyone feels they are involved from the beginning."

Two years ago, the Ravenwood Park Citizens Association mobilized local residents to oppose a major redevelopment project proposed for the Sears site on Route 7. The developer ultimately withdrew that proposal. But more projects are on the horizon. "Any time there's a change of ownership, it creates an opportunity for development," Sellers says.

Bailey's Crossroads is poised for new development, too. A mixed-use project to include Fairfax County government offices for social service programs and about 300 residential units has been proposed for Moncure Avenue, next to Columbia Pike. That project has not gone through any official approval processes yet.

Meanwhile, a temporary fire station will be installed on that site while a new Bailey's Crossroads fire station is built on its existing site to replace the building badly damaged in a 2010 snowstorm.

Sellers encourages local residents interested in development plans for Seven Corners and Bailey's Crossroads to attend BCRC meetings. The group meets on the third Tuesday of the month at 7:30 p.m. in the Mason District Government Building.

Crossposted at Annandale VA.

The chamber directed a team of consultants to draft an "Annandale Demonstration Project" to illustrate what the new plan for Annandale could do for the community and show land owners the benefits of consolidation.

The team, chaired by chaired by Jeffrey Levine of Levine Design Studio, analyzed the community's demographics and the leasable space available and determined that there is a need here for housing for young professionals.

They designed a hypothetical 4.5-acre mixed-use project for the area along Little River Turnpike on land currently occupied by Pep Boys, Café Chocolate, ARA Fusion Restaurant, Palace, and Dolce Bakery and Café.

The five-story project would have 83,000 square feet of shops and restaurants on the first floor and 210,960 square feet of housing units on the upper floors, says Levine, who is on the Annandale chamber's board of directors.

Parking would be at the rear of the building. It would have a visually interesting façade, while Little River Turnpike would be transformed into a tree-lined boulevard, making the area more pleasant for pedestrians. The team estimated the total cost of the project to be about $75 to $85 million. Levine says the cost of building higher-end residential units in Annandale, about $180 per square foot, is less than comparable units in Tysons Corner.

The proposed development takes advantage of several factors, Levine says. The Annandale plan amendment allows a form-based code, which means the county can approve higher density or taller buildings if developers agree to provide certain amenities. But, he stressed, only the developers first in line will be able to take advantage of this flexibility. The transportation infrastructure doesn't have the capacity for the entire Annandale business district to be urbanized.

"The Chamber of Commerce and the Korean American business community are starting to work together a lot more," he added, and some of the small property owners are beginning to see the benefits of consolidation, although "nobody is rushing to do this."

Several larger projects had been proposed a few years ago for the properties now occupied by Kmart and the bowling alley, but the poor real estate market has quashed those plans.

Unless visionary developers step up with large-scale projects for Annandale and land owners find a way to consolidate their properties, we could end up with new development consisting of a series of small projects, like the new TD Bank, which although nicely designed, doesn't take Annandale to the next level.

Cross-posted at Annandale VA.

While the five largest property owners in the area are working together on a multi-year plan for higher-density, mixed use projects aligned with transportation improvements, residents—and anyone who drives through the area—will likely face huge traffic tie-ups until those new projects are implemented.

At a Jan. 31 meeting of the Beauregard Corridor Stakeholders Group, Donna Fossum, chair of both that group and the Alexandria Planning Commission, said when the new BRAC office building opens in eight months, "everyone's lives will change."

To put the developers' proposals in context, Fossum invited Christopher B. Leinberger of the Brookings Institution to give a presentation at the Jan. 31 meeting on the benefits of creating "walkable urban places."

According to Leinberger, there are two main options for development: "drivable suburban," in which housing, retail, and office buildings are all separate and connected by roads, and "walkable urban," where people have access to transit and can easily walk to shops and restaurants.

The "drivable suburban" model contributes to sprawl, which creates lots of problems, including long commutes, economic segregation, higher levels of greenhouse gas emissions, higher energy use, and even increased rates of obesity. The highest levels of foreclosures occur in the outer suburbs Leinberger says, because "we built too much of the wrong product in the wrong location."

The pendulum began to shift in the mid-1990s, he says. Surveys show 82 percent of the "millennials," people born in the period 1980-95, want to live in walkable urban places, like Arlington and Dupont Circle.

Metropolitan Washington has 23 existing (and 16 emerging) "regionally significant places," including walkable urban places like downtown DC, "downtown adjacent places" (such as Dupont Circle and Georgetown), suburban town centers (Bethesda and Silver Spring fall into this category), places where suburban strip malls have been redeveloped (Ballston and Friendship Heights), and "surburban green field developments" (Reston Town Center and National Harbor).

The presence of the BRAC project in the Beauregard Corridor gives this area the potential to become a "regionally significant place," Leinberger says. But in its current state, "it's neither fish nor fowl"; it's not quite a drivable suburban area nor a walkable urban area.

"There are few successful examples of drivable dense urban places," he says. There is concern that if it isn't transformed into an urban walkable place, "it could be on a downward spiral," as younger people and investments abandon the area for more favorable communities.

According to Leinberger, successfully transforming a suburban strip mall environment into a walkable urban place—like Ballston and Clarendon—requires strong management to protect the quality of life in surrounding neighborhoods from noise and traffic cut-throughs. When it's done right, the value of single-family homes near urban walkable places will rise significantly, and the tax base will increase, primarily from commercial property. He says this kind of development will cut greenhouse gas emissions and energy use by some 60 to 80 percent.

He acknowledged some of the challenges of developing the Beauregard Corridor are the barriers posed by I-95, Seminary Road, and Holmes Run.

The development of Annandale poses even more challenges. While the Beauregard developers envision the eventual extension of the Columbia Pike streetcar line along Beauregard Street, there is no plan to bring transit to Annandale. And while most of the property in the Beauregard Corridor is concentrated in the hands of a few developers, Annandale is chopped into many small parcels of land. Any attempt to bring a large mixed-use project to Annandale, as proposed in the Annandale amendment to the Fairfax County comprehensive plan, would require consolidation of land.

Leinberger told the Annandale blogger such development is possible: If one visionary developer takes a risk on a large project, others will follow. But communities like Annandale could stagnate if other areas, like the Beauregard Corridor, draw development and businesses from aging suburbs.

Kai Reynolds of the JBG Companies, one of the Beauregard Corridor property owners, says Leinberger's presentation about the value of urban walkable places is very much in alignment with what the developers want to do—except for Leinberger's statement that developers should help pay for transit.

Representatives of the five companies who own properties along the corridor have been meeting with local residents periodically to explain their vision for redevelopment. The developers have promised to provide public amenities, such as parks, athletic fields, or community facilities, based residents' priorities.

At their latest meeting, Jan. 24, the developers outlined their plans for multi-phased, higher-density development—including about 4,600 new housing units—to occur over the next 25 to 30 years. A key part of the plan is the creation of an elliptical traffic circle to improve traffic circulation through the Beauregard/Seminary intersection and a new network of through-streets to replace the current system of parking lots, cul-de-sacs, and dead-end streets around the existing housing developments. (You can access the presentation from that meeting here.)

JBG has plans to transform the current shopping center between Reading Avenue and Rayburn Avenue into a much larger mixed-used development with more stores, offices, and a new nine to 12-story hotel. "There is not enough commercial space to meet the demand," says Victor Dover, with the Dover, Kohl and Partners town planning firm, who represents JBG.

A representative of Home Properties, which owns Southern Towers, wants to replace the adjacent three-story garden apartments with a series of five-story multifamily buildings and new parking decks, resulting in 669 additional units within the next five to 10 years.

Jon Eisen of the Hekenian Group, which owns the 10.1-acre Shirley Gardens property on the other side of Beauregard across from Southern Towers, is planning a 16,000-square foot mixed use development with a hotel, offices, shops, restaurants, 520 multifamily units, and, on the land closest to the existing single-family houses, 15 to 20 townhouses.

Peter Schultz of Duke Realty, which owns Clyde's and a series of office buildings along Beauregard, has longer-term plans to replace those buildings with more energy-efficient projects, possibly including a boutique hotel, in about 10 years.

According to Dover, the developers have refined the plan they presented to residents in December, reducing the proposed developments by half a million square feet, cutting 500 housing units from the plan, simplifying the street grid, adding more green space and recreation areas, and adding a site for a fire station at Beauregard and Sanger Avenue.

The developers' next meetings with residents will be Feb. 28, focusing on open space and environmental issues, and March 28, with more details on the ellipse and other transportation plans.

Cross-posted at Annandale VA.