Arlington County is considering ways to make it easier to turn office buildings into apartment buildings.
A request to advertise public hearings on a new county policy and zoning changes related to office-to-residential conversions received unanimous approval from the Arlington County Board on Saturday.
Proposed changes would “address the need to be more fluid and flexible in the county’s processes,” a County Board report says. A core goal would be to reduce the amount of resources required to undertake adaptive reuse projects in Arlington — shortening how long it takes these kinds of site plan amendment applications to reach the Board.
Ultimately, the changes would seek to curb Arlington’s elevated office vacancy rates by making it easier for property owners to alter the allowable uses for their properties.
“A holistic public policy effort to address the necessary transformation of Arlington’s office inventory must consider how best to accommodate and even incentivize other private investment opportunities that remove or reposition obsolete office supply,” the report says.
More than 70 of Arlington’s 328 office buildings — representing over 40% of office building square footage — are “considered at risk for some form of market distress,” according to the report.
Potential changes would consider a variety of possibilities for adaptive reuse.
One form of adaptive reuse involves revamping the interior of an office building to become residential. This was notably done at 2221 S. Clark Street, formerly home to the Crystal City WeLive — a office-to-apartment conversion that opened with 216 units in 2016.
(The management company Common Living took over the property in 2021 before filing for bankruptcy this spring.)
Other possibilities include adding more stories to an existing building, demolishing some or all of a structure and redeveloping it, and changing the anticipated use of an undeveloped site where an office building is currently planned.
No matter how much Arlington simplifies processes, however, the report notes that there’s probably a limit to how many office-to-apartment conversions are feasible in the county.
“Adaptive reuse is not a clear or viable option for many buildings,” the report says, “as the implementation of an adaptive reuse investment has many challenges and limitations including, but not limited to, the cost of such a transformation relative to a generated market return, and structural limitations such as inefficient floor plates, building facades, and low ceiling heights.”
While these kinds of conversions are currently rare in Arlington, they’re more common in Alexandria and Fairfax County — two localities that, according to the report, have adopted changes in recent years to encourage adaptive reuse.
One notable example is Three Collective, trio of 16-story buildings on the 5000 block of Leesburg Pike in Skyline that began leasing the first of its 675 housing units earlier this year. In Arlington, by contrast, a developer has proposed tearing down an aging 12-story office building in Ballston and building a seven-story apartment building in its place, apparently deciding that a conversion of the existing building was infeasible.
Drafts of proposed changes in Arlington are expected to become available on the county’s Commercial Market Resiliency Initiative webpage no later than Oct. 1.
This item will then go to the Planning Commission no sooner than Nov. 4 before reaching the County Board no earlier than Nov. 16.
