The Falls Church Planning Commission will soon change from being a final decision-maker to an advisor for some new development projects in the city.
The shift in responsibility comes in response to new state laws, which took effect July 1 and aim to speed up the creation of new housing across the commonwealth. Under the new rules, many localities must move from planning commission approval of projects to staff approval of development plans.
A massive proposed expansion to Pentagon City’s RiverHouse development concluded a key phase of the county’s public feedback process with generally solid reviews.
“It’s hard to argue with new housing and park space on underutilized parking lots,” said Kateri Garcia, who represents the Arlington Ridge Civic Association on the site-plan review committee (SPRC) that recently concluded five meetings on the development plan.
One of the first major redevelopment proposals along Langston Blvd is receiving mixed feedback at the start of the formal community review process.
A site-plan review committee (SPRC) meeting on July 24 included debate on whether the boomerang-shaped project with 310 residential units at 3130 Langston Blvd meets the aspirations of the Langston Blvd Area Plan.
Members of the Arlington Planning Commission, who currently work without financial compensation, could eventually start getting paid.
Although posts on the commission are unpaid by longstanding tradition, given the time and effort the job requires, that might change someday.
Numerous large-scale redevelopment and conversion projects are scheduled to go before the Arlington County Board at upcoming meetings.
A full slate of projects would bring a total of 1,535 new residential units and 344 hotel rooms to Rosslyn, Ballston, Shirlington, Crystal City and Virginia Square. They include both teardowns and adaptive-reuse projects involving underused office buildings.
Revised plans for a massive development project at Pentagon City’s RiverHouse site are slowly moving forward, but some neighbors still aren’t on board.
At a meeting last month, developer JBG Smith presented a new proposal to place 738 apartment and townhouse units on three parcels, while deferring final action on more than 2,000 other planned units.
Simpler, more flexible rules for posting signs at commercial buildings could be coming to Arlington.
The Zoning Ordinance Committee of the Planning Commission considered various possible zoning amendments at a meeting last week.
A developer’s plans to add 73 units while retaining the existing Shirlington House apartment building have cruised relatively unscathed through the county’s site-plan review process.
“It’s a good project,” James Lantelme, a member of the Planning Commission who serves on the panel evaluating the proposal, said on Monday.
A proposed new residential building on the western edge of Ballston’s urban core has drawn concerns about its height.
But in a twist, it isn’t that the planned building is viewed as too tall. Some in the public and serving on the site-plan review committee (SPRC) evaluating the development plan see it as not tall enough.
Members of a Green Valley church are pitching their battle against a development next door as a David vs. Goliath fight against gentrification.
The project would redevelop two existing hotels — Hotel Pentagon and Comfort Inn Pentagon City — and a surface parking lot at 2480 S. Glebe Road in Green Valley into a mixed townhouse and multifamily development.
An update to the Falls Church Bicycle Master Plan has the potential to remake some city streets.
But only if there is more effort put into turning aspirations to reality than has been the case with the existing plan, adopted in 2015, according to some members of a key advisory panel.
Despite ongoing concerns from residents in the surrounding neighborhood, the Melwood redevelopment project near Crystal City appears on track to be green-lighted early in the new year.
“This project is going to be approved. It is going to be approved 5-0 by the County Board in February,” predicted Nicholas Giacobbe, one of several neighbors who voiced concerns about the proposal at a Dec. 19 meeting of the county government’s site-plan review committee evaluating the plan.
