Construction to start this spring on Rt. 50 townhouses
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| An illustration of the townhouse project at Graham Park Plaza. [EYA] |
The townhouse development at Graham Park Plaza on Route 50 is moving forward.
EYA Development LLC has acquired roughly half of the shopping center property from Federal Realty Investment Trust for $20.25 million, the Washington Business Journal reports.
The company plans to build 177 townhouses, including 22 affordable dwelling units, on the 8.3-acre property, EYA announced. The Fairfax County Board of Supervisors approved the project in October 2020.
EYA says it will break ground this spring. The townhomes, in the Falls Church area of Mason District, will be priced from the $600,000s.
“EYA and Federal Realty are bringing new investment to a corner of the county which has not seen much development in the last two decades,” said Mason Supervisor Penelope Gross. “This will be a catalyst for further redevelopment and revitalization up and down the Route 50 corridor.”
The new mixed-use neighborhood includes “significant open space and parks and cosmetic improvements to the remainder of the shopping center to complement the design of the new townhomes and surrounding community,” the company states.
Related story: Fairfax County board approves townhouses at Graham Park Plaza
“Graham Park Plaza is an inside-the-beltway, well-located neighborhood close to major Northern Virginia job centers like Tysons and Mosaic,” said EYA Executive Vice President Evan Goldman.
Federal Realty had initially planned to develop a mixed-use project on the western portion of the retail center, but abandoned those plans and agreed to sell that property to EYA.
Federal Retail is keeping the eastern portion of Graham Park Plaza, which has Giant, Celebrity Delly, 7-Eleven, Advance Auto Parts, an ABC store, Latino Chicken Place, Northern Virginia Doctors, Pho Tu Ech, Verizon Wireless, Subway, Life Champ Martial Arts, True Smile, and Mavana Nails & Waxing. McDonalds, PNC Bank, and Sunoco, which are on separate pads, will remain as well.
I know that I'm not in the demographic for which this development is intended but I don't understand the attraction of what will likely be quite expensive townhomes in this location (and there are others like it). The surrounding neighborhood is mostly seedy, the schools are no great shakes, the noise from Rt. 50 and Graham Road loud and non-stop, traffic is bad during rush hour, there is no Metro nearby, and the stores nearby are nothing special. I guess in the end none of this matters if you don't have kids and your aim is to sell for a profit in a few years and move to a nicer neighborhood or you're just gambling that the surrounding neighborhood will improve over time.
Ambrose Hills near Lake Barcroft on Columbia Pike sold quickly and those were over $650K. If we can just get some of our older neighborhoods rejuvenated like Arlington by getting rid of the renters and some of the immigrants that turn their homes into renter wrecks we would be in much better shape to say that this area is a competitive place to live.
Here's why:
Graham Park Plaza is an inside-the-beltway, well-located neighborhood close to major Northern Virginia job centers like Tysons and Mosaic,” said EYA Executive Vice President Evan Goldman…
Inner beltway plus historically low interest rates makes $600k condos very attractive to tech workers.
And the joke of being able to buy "affordable housing" units is gone once the unit is sold. Then it's market rate again and our board pats itself on the back for providing so much "affordable housing". This board gives lip service but little else. And they all ran on protecting our environment.
Just an observation, I live south of Lake Barcroft and started working in the Falls Church area in 2009. Much of my work required driving in the area, so I bought an electric car.
I started to notice lot's of new construction in a 5 mile radius of Falls Church.
my rough estimate to date includes just 12 housing construction projects, and there have been many more added since then to West Falls Church.
My point is more than 2,000 housing units have been added, capable of housing more than 4,000 people (minimum 2 people per unit)
That's approx. 5,000 cars using local roads that have not been improved or expanded, or added mass transit requiring use of Rt. 50, Lee Hwy., Leesburg Pike, Columbia Pike which were bumper to bumper before all the new construction.
That's approx. 3,000 children using local schools which even though improved and expanded, still require trailers for student occupancy.
That's untold gallons of waste added to our sewer systems, gallons of potable water piped into residences, many megawatts of electricity connected and therms of natural gas.
Bureaucrats are not interested in protecting the environment.
So you'd rather have them live where? Tysons proper is still building out. There's tons of farmland in PWC and Loudon waiting to be developed.
The metro area is growing and increasing density puts people closer to their jobs. Not to mention that it's an indicator of a healthy local economy.
Beautiful – more wealthy educated residents to replace the current weak population around this area.
Gentrification at its best.
Anyone who would call Route 50/Graham Road "seedy" needs some serious perspective. This is still an incredibly safe area. Pretty much all of Northern Virginia is. I get the impression that xenophobia is why this area is being called "seedy".
As for the concerns about the added population, that is completely justified. Last I checked, Falls Church High School is one of the smallest in the county. I need a fact check on that, are they doing that renovation soon or was it tabled?
I have made this point several times on this blog, and will continue saying it. The county wants to approve high-density residential/commercial developments left-and-right but they don't want to provide the infrastructure to make them useful. This doesn't seem like a very popular idea with many in the county, including bureaucrats, but we need to construct our own rapid-transit system separate from WMATA. Otherwise, welcome to total traffic hell. It makes sense to turn our major roads (Route 50 in this case) into rapid-transit corridors.
If we want to transform into a higher-density landscape, we are doing ourselves a massive disservice by not investing in legitimizing alternative modes of transportation.
You are absolutely right about lack of investment in infrastructure in Fairfax when it comes to transit. Perhaps part of the solution is having a different mindset about who we are, a suburban county or a large City?
We certainly have huge swaths of the county that are suburban and should remain so. But we also have good amount of urbanized/urbanizing areas and some very heavily transited corridors. How would city planners approach providing mass transit to those urbanized area and travel corridors such as 29, 50, 236, 286, 28, 123 and 620. And all of the above options should be considered, Express bus, BRT, rail transit expansion. I know it will require coordination with VDOT, an organization that seems more set up for building roads in suburban areas but it’s well past time for this kind of approach.
As to WMATA, I am not as keen on setting up another transit body. I would much rather focus our efforts, as tall and daunting a task it may seem, to improve WMATA instead of dozens of local transit organizations.
WMATA has proven itself to be an unbelievably inept organization; consistently squandering resources under mismanagement. We can get a much more effective result by establishing a mass-transit system that is controlled by Fairfax County. For the sake of example, let's call it Fairfax County Mass Transit (FCMT). FCMT does not have to deal with the diplomacy and top-down bureaucracy that WMATA does trying to balance the needs of 3 separate large-scale jurisdictions (VA, MD, DC). Rather, it can approach our transportation needs in a more streamlined manner while working in conjunction with other transit authorities and small-scale jurisdictions (Arlington County, City of Falls Church, City of Alexandria). Even more importantly, our funding does not go to WMATA. We hold FCMT directly accountable for using its funds wisely; it is truly our transit-system. Getting any type of accountability from WMATA is next to impossible.
It is possible to create transit-corridors while at the same time preserving the single-family neighborhoods that so many are vocal about protecting. The Orange-line corridor in Arlington is a great example of this. There are still neighborhoods intact behind the high-density development around the transit-corridor.
The reality is that small-bedroom communities of the past are becoming less and less reflective of the demographics of Northern VA. We can either embrace smart transportation planning, which is a holistic approach, or we can continue pretending that this is a sleepy suburb and end up with unmitigated gridlock in an even more incongruent landscape. The latter is a pretty deep hole to dig out of and it's a hole that we are currently digging.
catboy, thank you for your post. As I stated earlier, the need to improve our infrastructure is critical to ensure we grow and maintain the high quality of life standards that Fairfax County is known for.
This is about maintaining our close in neighborhoods and growing our population wisely.
We have been growing Mason District. This district has more white vans roaming the streets per capital than any other district in the County.
Why do you hate white vans? It’s a color, and type of vehicle, I don’t get it.