By Brian Trompeter
After unanimous authorization by the Board of Supervisors June 27, Fairfax County Executive Bryan Hill will execute an agreement with Arlington Partnership for Affordable Housing Inc. (APAH) and the Fairfax County Redevelopment and Housing Authority (FCRHA) to build and deliver a Tysons Community Center.
The 33,000-square-foot facility will be constructed at the Dominion Square affordable-housing project, which is being built by APAH and FCRHA at 1592 Spring Hill Road.
The agreement is a “big deal” for that part of Tysons, said Supervisor Walter Alcorn (D-Hunter Mill), who confessed to being “a little bit over-the-moon on this one.”
“We’ve known all along that we have a dearth of public facilities, community facilities, in Tysons,” Alcorn said. “This really helps . . . This is a wonderful example of a win-win. I think it’s going to be a major asset – not just, again, for the folks moving in there, but for the broader community.”
APAH leaders in May 2021 entered into an agreement with CARS-DB1LLC to buy about 2 acres of land at the site to build 516 affordable dwellings and the community center in two phases.
Officials expect that agreement to go to closing June 30, after which FCRHA will take title of the property. The Board of Supervisors in January 2022 authorized funding to deliver 175 affordable multi-family housing units as part of the project’s first phase. APAH afterward received $55 million from the Amazon Housing Equity Fund, which it will use to speed up the development process and deliver both the project’s phases simultaneously.
APAH in February received approval of its final development plan and now design and permitting work have begun. The group will manage development of the community center, which will be owned by the county government, leased to FCRHA and operated and programmed by Fairfax County Neighborhood and Community Services.
Among the community center’s amenities will be a full-sized gymnasium, sensory and recreational spaces, community and multi-generational meeting rooms, fitness areas, a kitchen and administrative offices.
In their next agenda item at the June 27 meeting, the Board of Supervisors also unanimously approved at least a 17.2-percent parking reduction (89 fewer spaces) for Buildings C-5 and C-6 in the Dominion Square West development, which will have multi-family housing as well as the community center.
If off-site parking for the site were made available before the on-site parking received construction approval, supervisors could approve an up-to-29.3-percent parking reduction (151 fewer spaces). Parking options in the vicinity so far, however, have not “penciled out” for that scenario, Alcorn said.
“In this part of Tysons anyway, we have the interesting conundrum of an overabundance of parking, but it’s privately owned and wrapped up in development approvals and sometimes over the other uses that aren’t fully using those parking spaces,” he said. “We do have some longer-term needs for public parking, on-street parking [and] other public-parking options in this area. In my mind, we shouldn’t be thinking about this as a commuting option.”
Reducing or eliminating parking requirements for the site, which is located within a quarter-mile of the Spring Hill Metrorail station, will reduce the cost of providing parking, allowing lower prices for buying or renting residential units, county officials wrote in their briefing memorandum.
“The cost of providing parking can be a barrier to entry for both providers and residents,” they wrote. “This is particularly true in high density areas of the county where land and parking construction costs are much higher. These costs must be incorporated into the value of the property, pushing higher rents and other housing costs.”
