Author: chogan@directresearch.com

MAC is just the beginning — take a look at what the Town is planning next. Updated 12/4 for a discussion of “by right”.

REVISION:  After writing the article below, I’ve heard from other people who have looked at this and come to a different conclusion.  Others believe this is just a routine, long-overdue maintenance of the Town of Vienna building code.  Under that interpretation, the verbiage about increased redevelopment and about more mixed-use buildings outside of Maple and Church is just there to get Fairfax County to pay for the work under the guise of “economic growth”.  I guess that’s possible.  But the plain reading of what was written is still as outlined below, in the quoted sections.  It was certainly written up with an agenda of increasing redevelopment and bringing mixed-used buildings to areas where those are not allowed (or at least, not economically feasible) under current Town of Vienna code.

My original writeup follows: Continue reading MAC is just the beginning — take a look at what the Town is planning next. Updated 12/4 for a discussion of “by right”.

Two months into the MAC moratorium, an update 11/20/2018

Background on the MAC moratorium

At the 9/17/2018 Town Council meeting, the Town Council voted to suspend any further acceptance of MAC rezoning applications until (probably) after the next Town election in May 2019.  You can see my write up of that here.  In addition to the three projects that had already been submitted, two more were submitted prior to the moratorium deadline, and it appears essentially certain that the Town will approve both of those additional projects. Continue reading Two months into the MAC moratorium, an update 11/20/2018

Community meeting with Sunrise Assisted Living, posted 11/7/2018

On Tuesday 10/30/2018, representatives of Sunrise Development (Sunrise assisted living) met with a handful of interested Vienna residents.  This meeting was essentially un-advertised, and you just had to know somebody to know it was going to occur.  I did not attend but got notes from two individuals who did attend, and my writeup is based on their notes. Continue reading Community meeting with Sunrise Assisted Living, posted 11/7/2018

Recap and some thoughts on strategy, 10/30/2018

So, what did civic involvement with 444 Maple West get us?

My bottom line is that all we did was help the Town of Vienna government do what it wanted to do.  Public protest merely helped the Town extort more out of the developer, while producing more-or-less the same very large building holding a lot of housing units.  We took what was going to be a blight on this neighborhood, and forced the Town, to force the developer, to pretty it up a bit. Continue reading Recap and some thoughts on strategy, 10/30/2018