Today, Wednesday, 3/20/2019, at 7:30 PM in Town Hall, in what will probably be the first and last time ever, all three Town of Vienna governing bodies will meet in a joint work session. The Town Council, Planning Commission and Board of Architectural Review will sit in the same room and look over proposed changes to MAC zoning regulation. You can find the meeting materials on this web page. Continue reading Post #202: MAConomics 101
The Historic Mattress District is my son’s name for Maple Avenue just west of the Sunoco (Maple and Center, see map below). For his entire life, there has always been a mattress store in that space. Not the same mattress store. Just some mattress store. At this point, I’d guess three, maybe four different mattress stores.
In its glory days, the Historic Mattress District also had a mattress store directly across the street. But I fear those heady days are gone forever. The sole survivor no longer even has a name — Google simply labels it “Mattress Firm Vienna“. And that’s what it is — it’s the current occupant of the location that must, by long-standing Vienna tradition, remain a mattress store.
I’m actually going somewhere useful with this. Continue reading Post #201: A survey of Vienna retail.
Seriously, we pay them to do this? Part 2 (Part 1 is here.)
The Department of Planning and Zoning is going to have two “Community Workshops” on MAC zoning. Originally, at the 2/11/2018 Town Council work session, these had been discussed as if they were, in part, legitimate attempts to gauge community sentiment about MAC. But anyone who looks at the details of these workshops should realize that’s nonsense. I’ve already covered that here. Continue reading Seriously?
For decades, Vienna has required a 6′ masonry wall to separate commercial property from residential neighborhoods. This page explains what that wall does — reduce the noise from the parking lot. It also explains what it doesn’t do (or, really, what it isn’t needed to do) — reduce the noise from Maple Avenue.
This analysis ends with what I hope is an obvious conclusion. Where MAC development replaces parking lots with (two-story) garages adjacent to residential areas, the old 6′ masonry wall doesn’t cut it any more. Vienna needs to change the building code to require that those MAC garages be enclosed, not open-sided, when they are adjacent to residential areas. Otherwise, MAC strips away a decades-old noise protection that the Town has offered to its residential neighborhoods. Continue reading Sound walls and parking garages, 3/17/2019
After attending every public meeting on this topic for the last two months, I would like to present my summary of the extent to which the Town has engaged in serious discussion, so far, about changing the height limit and imposing density (dwelling units per acre) limits for MAC buildings. Continue reading Building height and density, 3/16/2019
I have posted my cleaned-up audio file, and index to that file, on this Google Drive link. The index isn’t worth much, because, frankly, I found most of this meeting to be … baffling is not the right word. I think I understood it. Perhaps it was just too early in the morning for me.
My wife and I attended the 8-ish AM meeting of the Board of Architectural Review. This was a dry run of a presentation on the MAC “visual guidelines” that will be given to Town Council at the “mega-meeting” scheduled for March 20. It was, in large part, an explanation of how those guidelines were developed.
Having sat through that entire presentation and the discussion of comments afterwards, all I can say is, I wouldn’t change a thing. Continue reading Board of Architectural Review work session, 3/15/2019
My audio file, an Excel workbook that shows what was discussed when in the meeting, and the meeting materials are available from this Google Drive directory.
I attended the 3/13/2019 Town of Vienna Planning Commission work session. The purpose of this was to review proposed changes to the Maple Avenue Commercial (MAC) zoning law. This page is a summary of the high points. I will post my audio file of the meeting, with index, as soon as I have processed it to remove noise.
Briefly: Five floors, cram ’em in, and pave it over. And hurry up about it. That’s pretty much the gist of the proposed changes. There was a rear-guard action by Commissioners Gelb and Kenney to slow that down. But that’s definitely where the Planning Commission and Department of Planning and Zoning are headed.
This evening, I went to Town Hall to attend and record the 5:30 PM meeting of the “Maple Avenue Commercial (MAC) Design Guidelines Working Group“. I am fairly sure this constitutes an open public meeting, under the definitions of the Virginia Freedom of Information Act. And it was, in fact, announced on the Town Calendar.
