The Fairfax County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday unanimously approved the plans for redevelopment of Reston's Spectrum Center, ensuring that the Reston of the future will have Reston Town Center-like development from the Dulles Toll Road (and future Metrorail station) to Baron Cameron Avenue.
"This plan coming in gives the community a picture of what the Town Center core will be and subsequent development that will take place," Hunter Mill Supervisor Cathy Hudgins said at the BOS public hearing.
The plan for the Spectrum includes 774,879 square feet of non-residential use; 1,422 multifamily residential units (with 12 percent set aside for affordable housing) in seven new residential buildings; 38 percent open space; underground and structure parking; LEED certifications; two new east-west streets and expanded bike trails and pedestrian access.
The development will be divided this way:
Land Bay A (where Best Buy and the soon-to-be closed Barnes & Noble are located) is planned for 546 dwelling units, 255 hotel rooms, 172,000 square feet of office, and 62,500 square feet of retail uses.
Land Bay B (where PetSmart and On the Border are located) is planned for 643 dwelling units, 270 hotel rooms, and 48,650 square feet of retail uses.
Land Bay C (where Harris Teeter is located) is planned for 237 residential units and 134,896 square feet of retail and bank uses. Only Harris Teeter will remain - and expand into the current Office Depot space - in the redevelopment.
Additionally, Land Bay B will wrap around the planned 23-story office tower at Bowman Towne Drive and Reston Parkway. That building, which will contain retail and 18 stories of offices, was approved by the supervisors in September.
There were no citizen speakers in the public comment period, but land use attorney Mark Looney, representing Spectrum owner Lerner Enterprises, offered some history of the parcel.
The land was rezoned as part of the Reston Town Center commercial district in the 1980s. When it opened as a strip-mall retail in the mid-1990s, it actually was underdeveloped, said Looney.
"It was underdevelopment in respect to the property zoning," said Looney. "Reston Town Center was intended to be a grand downtown. This was developed in transition [due to the economy of the early 1990s]. In the interim, it be came a big box-development."
The redevelopment of the Spectrum has been in the works for years, but the timing was not right to move forward until now, said Looney. Additionally, the first Metro Silver Line station is slated to open at Wiehle Avenue in December 2013 and the Reston Parkway Station is scheduled to open in about six years.
The Spectrum is located just over a half-mile from the planned Reston Parkway Station, making it a proper place for transit-oriented development, Hudgins said.
The application was reactivated last year, and was recommended for approval by the county planning commission in November.
Looney said the redevelopment is "the vision for what the property was always intended to be," adding that many buildings will be oriented toward Fountain Drive - which will become a central boulevard lined with shops and outdoor cafes - rather than oriented towards parking lots.
To see the entire staff report on the Spectrum, click here.
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Any effort to reduce the scale of new development is worthwhile, but even under the best circumstances, we will see many more people and cars in central Reston. The only real solution is get people out of their cars and into public transportation. Once the Silver Line opens, Reston needs frequent feeder bus service to the new station. And, unlike the County's apparent plan, Reston needs bus service to extend well beyond Reston's borders -- to serve the people headed to the Silver Line from the south and west as well as the people headed to jobs in Reston. To be specific, one goal needs to be to get as many people who now drive north on West Ox/Reston Parkway each morning out of their cars and into buses.
Fairfax County/the superivors don't care that Reston is a planned community. They will overbuild and over populate. Not everywhere in the country is like this. Some communities do say no to more growth.
An intersection like Reston Parkway and Sunset Hills can handle only so many cars in an hour. Traffic at that intersection and others in central Reston is rapidly approaching capacity, without any new construction. Cars burn gasoline, a oil-based product. Oil is a limited, non-renewable commodity. Cars produce air pollution. The Washington area already exceeds EPA's standard for clean air. The decision to expand public transportation, in order to get cars off the roads, conserve oil and improve air quality, is only a matter of "when." Do you want to do it in a planned thoughtful way or do you want to do it under crisis conditions? (For example, when central Reston reaches gridlock or when the Washington area governments are forced to curb air pollution.) Yes, public transportation is not a "free lunch." We will need to subsidize it with tax dollars (just as we subsidize car travel with road construction and maintenance expenditures.) Yes, people will have to change their traveling habits. Driving downtown will, in the foreseeable future, be either impossible or very expensive. (See London's congestion charging scheme and similar efforts elsewhere in Europe.) But European cities have also demonstrated that public transportation and a high quality of life are clearly compatible.
Kathy Kaplan
They won't be prying the cars out of our cold dead hands. What they are going to do is to restrict parking by removing parking spaces. It's a New Urbanist technique. No parking spaces at the grocery store. Hudgins will expect us to pay a service to deliver our groceries to our homes. I kid you not. Reston is to be "car-free." Don't you guys ever read the RA magazine? Kathy Kaplan
In the same space that two or three cars occupy (with a total of three occupants in many cases), a bus can carry 50-60 people. Given the limited nature of the central Reston road network, bus lanes would be necessary. (You will note that the County has already begun hinting that this is the case.) Every full bus means up to twenty cars off the road. Sounds like progress to me. Are the suburbs ideal for bus transportation? No they are not. In many cases, we will need to develop new services using smaller buses and on-demand services (you schedule a pick-up in advance) similar to those found in some rural areas in Europe. Nevertheless, we have little choice. The roads can't accommodate more traffic, we are running out of oil and we can't continue polluting the atmosphere.
Environmental comments aside in this debate, people are not going to go to the Reston Town Center by bus. Period. The subway, five years out (maybe) and more than 1/2 mile from Spectrum is going to do almost nothing to alleviate traffic. We all know this. So when will we hear a common sense solution to an obvious issue.... plans need to be made NOW to handle the many additional cars which will be cascading on us, assuming the Spectrum plan is a success?
The idea of making Reston "car free" is so ludicrous. We all know it. The handful of nirvana-creators who think we will add all this office space, restaurants, and residential housing and people will gladly access by foot or bicycle, need to be placed on the back burner. People who have common sense and can deal with the upcoming traffic issues, please step forward.
Ann, I liked your commentary and there is immense truth in it. The fact that County officials act offended by your well thought comments tells me that you hit an exposed nerve. Good job. The options are NOT, I repeat are NOT: 1)either accept Spectrum's plan and any growth approved, i.e., winked at, by the County OR accept urban sprawl. Or.. 2) You either "change with the times", i.e. accept whatever changes are tossed at you as inevitable (especially since your County bureaucracy has blessed it as okay) OR be a cave person who hides in the corner and rejects all growth. Susan, I am neither of the above. Stop typecasting people into the narrowness of one of two camps. Anyone want to have a REAL debate on this issue, a thorough debate on how this should all work for the good of the community? Then bring it on. But guess what....this is NOT what County officials nor developers want. They want to make all the decisions, hold minimally-advertised "public hearings" on weekday afternoons to satisfy a legal requirement, then just plow forward with what they want to do to assure their own well being. Public opinion, to them, is a nuisance, and maybe a threat.
While we spandex ourselves, helmet up, and pump, pump up and down and eat tofu. Yucht. The future doesn't look so good to me. Glad I'm old already.
The 53-page report is available here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/32716465/Reston-Transportation-Meeting-the-Needs-of-a-21st-Century-Planned-Community-Transportation-Work-Group-RCA-Reston-2020-Committee-June-1-2010
Our superivisor won't fight for Reston as a planned community. It's treated like Any Suburbs, VA. And that's a crime. We moved from Bethesda to Reston partly because of the beyond insane traffic. Right now Reston is magnificent compared to Bethesda - even at the worst intersections. But with Fairfax County powers that be at the helm, Reston will catch up.