Fairfax County planners are fine with a Maryland developer jettisoning retail options for two all-residential buildings at Kingstowne Towne Center near Alexandria.
At its March 18 meeting, the Fairfax County Planning Commission unanimously recommended approval of Halle Companies’ proposal to convert a parking lot into 646 units at the shopping center.
The parking lot is one of the few undeveloped parts of the 35-acre Kingstowne Towne Center. It was originally planned for office buildings before Halle switched to housing after the 2008 recession, but nothing ever came to fruition.
The project will be constructed in two phases, with the initial building providing up to 328 units and the other providing up to 318 units.
Each structure will be a maximum of 150 feet tall and be served by an eight-level parking garage accessible from Kingstowne Village Parkway. Each building includes two swimming pools — one indoors and one outside.
Halle also plans to redesign the pedestrian plaza between the existing Regal movie theater and Panera Bread that is part of the parcel under consideration. The new plaza would include a central turf lawn, a promenade, a fountain feature, a tree grove with movable tables and chairs, an informal stage, shade structures, garden areas and two outdoor dining areas.
Kingstowne Towne Center is owned by Federal Realty Investment Trust, which bought the development from Halle for $200 million in 2022. Once the new buildings and plaza are constructed, they will be “turned over” to Federal Realty, said Kelly Posusney, a land-use planner with DLA Piper.
The Fairfax County Board of Supervisors approved a plan for residential buildings with up to 646 homes in February 2020. The new design needs fresh county approval to remove a requirement that the ground floor of the nine-story buildings include retail uses, which was included as a previous iteration of the proposal.
“There’s so much retail in the Kingstowne Towne Center,” Posusney said. “… Just competing with Federal Realty for a modest amount of retail wasn’t working.”
Braddock District Commissioner Mary Cortina pointed out that the buildings will primarily face loading docks and the backside of the existing retail spaces in that section of the town center.
“There was a phase that we went through where every multifamily building had to have retail,” she said. “I think in this kind of scenario, where you have surrounding retail all around, to put more of it in there doesn’t always make sense.”
The developer plans to designate 12% of any for-sale units or 8% of the provided rental units as affordable housing. The for-sale units would be restricted to people making up to 70%, 80% and 100% of the area median income, while rental units would be for those making 60%, 70% and 80% of AMI.
Fairfax County’s AMI for 2025 was $163,900 for a household of four people, as calculated by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Halle also would provide about $1 million to the county to offset the 69 students expected to be generated for Fairfax County Public Schools.
The proposal still requires approval by the Board of Supervisors, which is scheduled to hold a public hearing on May 5.
A separate application from developer BXP that would convert an office building in the town center into multifamily housing is also being reviewed by county staff.
