Vienna Market is one of many “mixed use” developments that you should expect to see along Maple Avenue in the future. Most will likely be “stumpies”, that is, stumpy little apartment/condo buildings with first-floor retail and underground parking. But Vienna Market is a development of townhouses, with some vestigial retail space along Maple.
In theory, in exchange for rezoning that part of Vienna’s commercial district into a housing area, citizens of the Town of Vienna were to have been given a pleasant new quasi-public gathering space. As a quid-pro-quo.
This space, per the plans submitted to the Town of Vienna, below. Note the couple enjoying the day at one of many tables, set in a large, level green area.
Other imaginary views show it as a substantial open, level green space.
What we actually got looks like this, from some pictures I took while on a walk a couple of days ago, below.
You may notice a few things.
There are no tables. Actually, there’s not even enough level space to put a (one) table. There’s no green gathering space. Actually, there’s no gathering space, period. There’s a broad brick sidewalk, a stairway, and some utility paths for residents of the development. There’s the building’s electrical transformer, which will eventually be hidden by shrubbery. And all of the electric meters for the building, which may or may not get hidden by shrubbery. Inexplicably, there are some construction cones stored where the couple was sitting in the first picture. Which is OK, because that’s a walkway at the bottom of a stairway, not someplace you could sit and sip your coffee.
In the end, it doesn’t really matter anyway. Maple Avenue is typically so noisy from passing traffic that the whole idea of a pleasant daytime pocket park, directly adjacent to the roadway, is just kind of silly. At least, not one that you could have a conversation in, at any rate (see this post for sound level measurements.)
But that was the solemn promise the last time Town Council tried to rezone Maple. It just has never come to pass. Not for the Chick-fil-A car wash, where the builders provided a broad sidewalk, terminated by a drive-through exit and two large electrical transformers for the building. Not in any sense for the new old folks’ home, where the residual green space on the lot is less than it was for the prior building. And not for Vienna Market.
This, despite how spacious and inviting those spaces looked, in the materials developers used to sell the development to Town Council.
I doubt we’ll see anything in the form of a pleasant public outdoor area from the last of the MAC buildings, still to be built. Nor, I predict, will the postage-stamp plaza streetside of the new glass-and-steel Patrick Henry parking garage and library get much use.
Directly-adjacent-to-Maple Avenue is just not a nice place to hang out during the day. Never was. Likely never will be. Route 123 is an arterial highway, for goodness sake. And it’s the only east-west non-Interstate through crossing for a roughly five mile stretch. It’s going to be jammed with vehicles, most days, most of the day.
Source: The Traffic Legacy of the W&OD Railroad.
In general, Vienna Market has turned out to be a rather grim-looking development, in my view. Maybe it was just the low cloud cover, the day I walked past it. I guess it reminds me too much of Chicago. This, despite the best efforts of the Board of Architectural Review to salvage something after the original ornate Georgetown-style building plans they approved were somehow swapped for a dull, plain brown brick building. Before Town Council passed it (see this post for my epitaph on Marco Pologate).
It does at least look relatively energy-efficient, with (by modern standards) a relatively small area devoted to glass, in the townhouses.
All the retail there remains dark (un-rented). Judging from Fairfax County tax maps, those townhouses began to be purchased in late 2021. And it’s more than a year since title on the retail spaces was transferred, again per the tax maps. So we’re well past a year, I think, since the building was essentially finished.
Again, it doesn’t matter. Based on my earlier analysis of the economics of such housing developments for Vienna’s MAC zoning, it really doesn’t matter whether or not the retail space is rented. If they can manage to rent it, it’s icing on the cake. This development’s value is in the housing, not the retail. New “mixed use” with significant dark (unrented) retail is the new normal in the suburbs.
Consistent with the vacant retail, every expense was spared for the entrance to the parking garage. Luckily this is something that drivers along Maple will likely not notice. Only if you walk past it will you be treated to this view. I may be confused, but at some point I thought there was supposed to be a mural of a train on that wall, to lighten things up.
So why build this way? The only new land on which you can build stumpies and other high-density housing, in the fully-built-out suburbs, turns out to be the old retail districts. Slap some shops along the street edge of the first floor of the parking garage, and you can build high-density housing in the rest of the space, and term it “mixed use” development.
Fig-leaf retail, maybe that’s a better term for it. It’s the fig leaf that allows the Town to convert the commercial district to a housing district. Under the rubric of “mixed use development”.
So there you have it. It’s kind of grim and unfriendly. But so is much of the rest of the future. So this is just a sign of the times. I question the wisdom of building significant “mixed use” development along a skinny, typically half-block-wide strip of land, directly adjacent to a thoroughly congested urban highway. No matter how trendy mixed-use may currently be, the plausible social benefits of mixed-use development aren’t going to happen in a linear strip like Maple Avenue. But the increased traffic? Yeah, we’ll all deal with that.
As an economist, part of my job was to compare the actual end result with the prediction. That’s good science, and good public policy. Here, this is clearly not the building that was planned. Aside from more tax base, any promised benefit to the general public, from that rezoning, in the form of a street-side pocket park area, has failed to materialize.
On the plus side, it’s not a partially-vacant lot. So that’s a good thing. But you wonder whether or not the promise of profit from the rezoned parcel is what kept it under-used for so long in the first place.
What it’s not, for sure, is what was depicted in those final plans. And it just doesn’t matter. Sunk cost, water over the dam. Pick your metaphor. As long as promises like that aren’t used going forward, to sell the idea of yet more high-density housing along Maple.
All we can ask for is reality-based rezoning. Anything but wishful thinking.
