A proposal to replace a 40-year-old office building in Rosslyn with new condos is going before the County Board this Saturday.
Taicoon Property Partners is seeking to raze the 1980s-era building that formerly housed the Air & Space Forces Association at 1501 Langston Blvd. Proposed to go in its place is an eight-story, 88-unit condominium building.
The building would also include a ground-level museum space related to the association and its history. The portion of the parcel previously deeded to the Northern Virginia Conservation Trust on the western end of the 1.31-acre site will remain untouched.
The parcel is bounded by Langston Blvd and I-66 to the south, N. Oak Street to the east, the Palisades Park townhouse community to the north and northwest, and Park Georgetown apartments to the west.
A portion of the Custis pedestrian and bicycle trail is on the site’s southern border, and the former Key Bridge Marriott site is located to the east.
Both county staff and the Planning Commission have found that the development plan is “generally in conformance” with the guidance in the Langston Blvd Area Plan. But at the Planning Commission hearing, the Arlington County Civic Federation raised concerns about the review process for changes to the site’s General Land Use Plan (GLUP) designation.
Planning Commission members on Sept. 9 voted 12-0 on a series of recommendations in support of the project. Commission chair Denyse “Nia” Bagley said the final proposal reflected input from the community and the site plan review committee that evaluated it.
“You can see how a project evolves in the process when you have an applicant who is willing to listen,” Bagley said. “Generally speaking, most of that turns into a better project than when we started.”
In terms of density, the site would have a floor-area ratio of 3.89. This measures the interior square footage of a building divided by the square footage of the lot it sits on.
Development plans call for 16 one-bedroom units, 46 two-bedroom units and 26 three-bedroom units. The 88 total units are below the 90 allowed under existing zoning regulations.
The developer has the option of either paying $1.58 million into the county’s Affordable Housing Investment Fund or providing several committed affordable units either on-site or elsewhere in the county.
Between three and seven units would be required, depending on where the housing was built.
The site’s existing underground garage would be retained, providing a total of 149 spaces. A pedestrian plaza is also proposed along the Langston Blvd side of the site, running parallel to the Custis Trail and providing access to the museum entrance.
Taicoon Property Partners purchased the parcel from the Air & Space Forces Association for $19.1 million in 2023. A year later, as development plans were being finalized, a local resident sought historic-district status for the 1984 building.
The Historical Affairs and Landmark Review Board rejected the proposal.
The project is another in recent efforts to clear out older, often vacant commercial space in Arlington, either through office-to-residential conversions or more traditional raze-and-replace strategies.
The 1501 Langston Blvd project is rare among all the projects in that the resulting housing will be for-sale condominiums rather than rental apartments or hotel rooms.
