Category: MAC zoning

Post #375: Did I say condos? Just kidding. I meant assisted living.

Sometimes the goings-on in Vienna are just stranger than you can imagine.  So I don’t quite know what to call this one.  Musical chairs?  Bait and switch, the sequel?

Recall that the Town approved a building with 37 condos plus retail at 380 Maple West (corner of Wade Hampton and Maple).

Well, guess again.  Looks like the 380 Maple West developer may just flip the property, and hand it off to become an assisted living facility.  And as part of that, they’ll partially re-open the MAC zoning that had been approved, to allow the builder to “amend the proffers”.

I can’t make up stuff like that.  You can see the (somewhat cryptic) meeting materials here on the Town’s website, and you can see a more detailed writeup on Vienna Citizens for Responsible Development Facebook site.

This possibility isn’t even part of Town of Vienna code.  The Town had to cite a section of  Commonwealth of Virginia statute to justify it.

Say what?

I can only speculate as to what this is about.

Sunrise?  Plausibly, if the assisted living provider is Sunrise, this is Vienna’s way of getting rid of the lawsuit that Sunrise filed against it (Post #342).  As of yesterday, Sunrise’s lawyers may have been unaware of this development, so it is far from clear that Sunrise is, in fact, involved.

Edit:  In addition, this possibility was raised by the developer, to some of the neighbors, well before Sunrise was turned down.  Given Sunrise’s investment in its own proposal at Maple and Center, it seems unlikely that they would be hedging their bets.  Particularly as this property is almost directly across the street from  …

Kensington?  Alternatively, Kensington Assisted Living might be involved here.  Kensington was well underway in developing a proposal for an assisted living facility at the empty BB&T bank building property.  That is virtually across the street from 380 Maple West.  Because I have never seen two competing assisted living facilities across the street from one another, I believe that converting 380 Maple West to assisted living effectively bars Kensington from developing the BB&T bank property.

So … it’s hard to say.  If the assisted living provider in question is Sunrise, then this quashes the Sunrise lawsuit.  But that also materially harms Sunrise’s most direct local competitor, and the owner of the BB&T property.

On the other hand, if the assisted living provider is Kensington, then the Town should, at least in theory, have to explain why it allowed one competitor but denied another, as part of the Sunrise lawsuit.  (Or, possibly, the Town would use this in its defense.   They could claim that approval of this assisted living proves that they were not biased against having old people in the heart of the MAC zone.  So, possibly, this now becomes part of their lawsuit defense?)

On yet a third hand, dissing Sunrise might be intentional.  As an extra bonus for the Town, they effectively get to thumb their noses at Sunrise, as a punishment for Sunrise daring to sue.  And use the fact that they are allowing their competitors into Vienna in their defense against the Sunrise lawsuit.

Or possibly the Town is merely the passive player here, and this is just a by-product of the developer’s selling the right to build to the highest bidder.  Whatever the real motivator, the story has to be told such that, somehow, out of thin air, the developer wants to flip to the property to this new use.  If the Town of Vienna itself were shown to have acted with favoritism toward one of two competitors, they should rightly be sued by the other one.

As it stands, to do this, the Town is going to have to make up a whole bunch of nonsense about why Sunrise was completely inappropriate in the heart of downtown, but fill-in-the-blank is a great fit for a section of Maple where (e.g.) you have to walk a quarter-mile merely to be able to get to the restaurant across the street.

Trying to be an economist for a moment, consider the macroeconomic context. We are way overdue for a recession. The developer faces considerable uncertainty as to when, exactly, the project will be finished and the condos are on the market.  Condos are more sensitive to economic dips than other property. But health care is traditionally thought to be recession-proof. So this could be a way of transferring the right to build from weak hands (individual builder, condos) to strong hands (national chain, assisted living) in anticipation of a general economic slowdown.  And the current owner of those rights likely will make a profit for his trouble.

So, absent better information, either of two scenarios would fit.  This could be the Town’s way of sidestepping the Sunrise lawsuit.  (In which case, keep an eye out to see what favors the Town will use to repay the developer.)  Yet, Sunrise’s lawyers seemed to be unaware of this development.  Or, maybe it’s just business as usual, and the developer is selling the building rights to the highest bidder.  Kensington was definitely interested in that neighborhood.  In which case, I would think it would make it harder for the Town to defend the Sunrise denial in court.  I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

Care to speak up again?

First, at the time the 380 development was passed, several citizens got up and testified in favor of it.   What a wonderful thing this was.  How this was exactly what the Town needed here.  How this new retail would revitalize this section of town.  How this building should be approved because Vienna desperately needs single-floor living for the elderly.  And so on.

Wonder if we’re going to hear back from them, now that the actual building will have nothing whatsoever to do with what they so strongly defended?  I bet not.

Second, when some Town council members wanted to rescind the original approval, many parties, including the local newspaper, loudly cried “foul”.  A deal’s a deal.  You can’t go back on that.  The very fabric of government would unravel if you could simply undo a deal at will.

Wonder if we’re going to hear from them again, now that the deal is going to change?  I’d bet not.

How can they do that (physically, I mean)?

And by this I mean, how can they take that physical building, as approved, and make an efficient assisted living out of it?  Honestly, for the life of me, I can’t see how they can do that.  So I have to wonder, how much is that building going to have to change, to do this?  Is the entire MAC process that much of a sham, that, after the fact, they can just completely reconfigure the agreed-upon building.  If so, what on earth are we actually going to get at 444 Maple West?

Just off the top of my head, and keeping in mind that Sunrise appears to be shooting for a roughly 100 bed facility as their minimum efficient scale (see Post #205), I’m going to discuss what Sunrise would probably want to do to the building to make it work as an assisted living facility.  So this is structured as if Sunrise were known to be the assisted living provider in question.

The 380 building has too much ground-floor space devoted to parking and retail, relative to what Sunrise needed. Sunrise needed that space for its own common areas, not for parking or retail. But I thought the parking was part of the specification of the building. Can Sunrise just cut that out, and reconfigure the ground floor, as they see fit? So totally change the amount of, location of, and access to the parking, with no public review? Just drop most of the retail? Really? Then what the heck was all that MAC nonsense about in the first place.

Ambulance access.  Recall all the discussion that went on w/r/t/ dedicated ambulance parking and loading at the Maple and Center facility? All the fuss and bother. Made them put in a dedicated space, got all up in their grille about not blocking Maple, and so on. Is that all just moot now? Whatever-the-heck Sunrise wants to do at this location, hey, that’s fair? That can’t be true.

Ambulance nuisance.  The original Sunrise location was not adjacent to a residential area.  Here, does this mean that ambulances would use Glen/Roland to access that building? If so, that’s a big deal to this neighborhood. (Shortest land route from VVFD to that building appears to be Center/Locust/Courthouse/Glenn/Wade Hampton, but the ambulances may be given instructions to stay on the main routes as long as possible.

Even if not, the noise of the siren alone is a big deal to the neighborhood. They’re going to put that here, with zero public comment? Again, what on earth were those MAC public hearings about, then?

Room size versus hallway width.  Assisted living facilities typically have tiny, hotel-sized rooms, linked by broad corridors, to large commons areas. Here, the rooms are too big, the corridors are (I would bet) far too narrow to pass building code for this sort of facility, and it has no common areas at all (other than the shops on the first floor, which are too small to be useful).

Dementia floor.  This building lacks a secure, internal green space for the dementia floor. It lacks all the dedicated common facilities that a dementia floor must have (e.g., its own dining room). I think the 380 building only has one elevator, but the Sunrise needs two, one of which is dedicated to the dementia floor.

Conditional use permit.  As I understand it, Sunrise got a conditional use permit (pending MAC approval) for the use of the land at Maple and Center.  But, the Town’s notice does not even mention the need to get a different conditional use permit, for use of the land at 380 Maple West.  Did they just not bother to mention that, or is the case that if you get such a permit for anywhere in Vienna, you can transfer it as you see fit?  That makes no sense.  So, doesn’t this have to go before the Board of Zoning Appeals?

I just can’t see how this can work, as described. The building as-is doesn’t work, as I see it.  Which means they pretty much have to design a new building.  Can they just do that?  I.e., once approved, can they just swap in a materially different building, for a completely different use, and say, eh, close enough?  If so, what’s the point of those MAC public hearings?

And I will just point, once again, to 444 Maple West.  If this flies, does anybody really know what we’re actually going to get at that location?  Seems like, if this is acceptable, what you actually get with MAC is the right to build … something.  To be determined.

 

Post #373: The 9/4/2019 Multimodal study community meeting

My wife attended this meeting, held last night at Town Hall.  I believe she left slightly before the meeting finally broke up.

The contractors talked for about the first half-hour, and then people were invited to get up and look over some maps.  And chat.  There did not seem to be much newsworthy to report, but I am providing a copy of an audio recording of the first 35 minutes at this Google Drive link (download “2019-09-04 …”).  The discussion of traffic begins about 22 minutes into the recording.

I have said everything I care to say about this study in a series of recent posts, ending with Post #364.

The only thing of particular interest to me is that one my my neighbors quietly let the contractor know that there is some long-standing interest in this neighborhood for closing Wade Hampton at Maple.  This would be one way of dealing with the cut-through traffic that will be generated by 444 Maple West, 380 Maple West, and all the rest of whatever-the-Town-approves for my end of Vienna.  Apparently the contractors had never heard of that and were taken somewhat aback by it.  So while this was a study about changes in land use and so on, there was no attempt to address the details of the actual near-term land use changes that have already been approved for my neighborhood.  Certainly not changes that are being suggested by the residents, as a way to keep the burden of MAC-generated traffic off their streets.

FWIW.

 

 

Post #370: MAC-related public meetings this week

There is one public meetings this week relevant to MAC zoning.

Wednesday, 9/4/2019 at 7 PM in Town Hall, there will be a presentation on the Town’s “Joint Maple Avenue Corridor Multimodal Transportation and Land use Study”   

The Town appears to be asking for citizen input at this meeting.

An overview of the study, including a link to materials presented at Town Council work session on 8/19/2019, maybe found at this page:

https://www.viennava.gov/index.aspx?NID=1327

You can read my writeup of this study in Post #359 and Post #362.

You can also read my analysis of what I consider to be the most important item in this study — a projection of likely MAC-generated increase in traffic on Maple — in Post #358, Post #361, and Post #364.  That may or may not be a subject of discussion at the Wednesday meeting.

The Town reserves the right to change or cancel meetings on short notice, so check the Town’s general calendar before you go, at this URL:
https://www.viennava.gov/Calendar.aspx?NID=1&FID=220week

Post #368: Revising the commercial zoning regulations

At the 8/19/2019 Vienna Town Council meeting, there was a seemingly innocuous item listed on the agenda as “Directive to Town staff to research amending requirements related to commercial parking, parking lot landscaping, and streetscape.”

If you walk through the meeting materials for this item — which you can, as of this writing, access at this URL  — it still looks fairly cut-and-dried.  At issue were a handful of items such as the amount of parking required for commercial buildings, the nature and type of any required landscaping for parking lots, and the MAC “streetscape” requirements including broad brick sidewalks.

Although the language of the motion was not provided in advance, once you got to hear it, it still seemed fairly — eh — boring, for want of a better word.  Cut-and-dried.   Here’s Councilman Majdi’s motion, which I am pretty sure I transcribed word-for-word, from the tape:

“I move to direct town staff to draft amendments to the MAC as its top priority, and simultaneously to consider amendments to the regular commercial code: C1, C1A, C1B, and C2, in Chapter 18 of Town Code that affect the MAC.  I further move to direct staff to draft amendments to the regular commercial code that require the MAC streetscape, require landscaping for parking lots, and direct staff to consider changes to parking requirements or other incentives to encourage economic growth on Maple avenue, when drafting these amendments.”

In the end, that passed 4-3, with (what I characterize as) the remaining pro-MAC Town Council members (DiRocco, Noble, Colbert) voting against.

And yet, while I’m not seeing some fantastic controversy there, discussion lasted for an hour and a quarter.  I really don’t understand what went on.  There was an hour of discussion before they even heard the language of the motion.  At that point, the Mayor invited an audience member to get up and speak.  (This was not a public hearing, so how that was legal, I have no clue.)  Then immediately after that, they voted.

It just struck me as a strange session all around.   Like more was being not said than said.  So I’m just going to flag this one, putting a marker down in case, at some point, it becomes clear what happened.

At the end of this, I’ll give my best guess as to what is going on.  Let me emphasize that the final section here is pure guesswork.  Best guess, this was an attempt to focus the scope of (at least the initial) rewrite of the Town’s zoning ordinance to a handful of items that might be viewed as critical to Maple Avenue development.  And, as importantly, not to give Town Staff license to rewrite every aspect of the zoning ordinance. 

Continue reading Post #368: Revising the commercial zoning regulations

Post #364: Curiouser and curiouser, or, uncertainties in projecting traffic

This post points out a few major uncertainties in projecting likely traffic impacts from Maple avenue redevelopment.  It’s the last thing I plan to write about the Town’s multimodal transit study.

To cut to the chase, if somebody tries to convince you that these estimates are Science, and Should Not Be Questioned, just laugh at them.  Because the closer you look, the cruder and more divorced from reality these projection methods appear to be.  And then the actual real-world complexities of traffic have to get layered on top of that.

I’ll start out by telling you why these studies systematically understate the actual impact of redevelopment on traffic.  With a seemingly absurd illustration, right from the contractor’s report.  In a way that I think everybody can understand.  Click here if that’s all you care to read that section, a discussion of selection bias.  After that, I move on to more complex issues.

But you might also want to check out the final and purely speculative section, which asks whether traffic seeks its own level.  Maybe Maple is about as intolerable as it can get.  If so, and we add a bunch of housing/commuters to Maple, well, something’s got to give.  And maybe that something will be people who used to shop on Maple, going elsewhere.  Maybe, in the end, converting our commercial district to housing will simply leave total traffic roughly unchanged, but displace shopping trips with commuting trips.  Guess that’s kind of a good news/bad news scenario.  Maple won’t be materially worse for traffic.  But businesses on Maple might not like the results.

Continue reading Post #364: Curiouser and curiouser, or, uncertainties in projecting traffic

Post #362: The Town’s multimodal transportation study, Part 2

This post looks superficially at what I consider to be some of the least-useful or most-puzzling suggestions in the Town’s multimodal transportation study.  My discussion of the big-picture issues for that study is in Post #359.  You can download the presentation summarizing the study here, from the Town’s website (.pdf).

What follows is not a systematic assessment.  It’s just a collection of the items I found most puzzling or most unlikely at the time.  Or the ones that just blithely assumed that (e.g.) existing parking and buildings could be eliminated.  So these show the proposal and my immediate response.

Detail follows

Continue reading Post #362: The Town’s multimodal transportation study, Part 2

Post #361: Yet a third cut at MAC-generated traffic

You might wonder how I managed to pick up on the Kimley-Horn traffic result  Post #358.  I mean, they did their best to flash that across the screen.  They provided more-or-less zero discussion.  None of the meeting participants said boo about it.

In fact, until I actually got my hands on the presentation, I thought I must have misread it, as you can see from the struck-out section of Post #357.  How could a result like that have been presented with no discussion?

But I remembered it because I was prepared to see it.   Or something very much like it.  Why?  Because the answer to the question “will MAC development add materially to Maple Avenue traffic” is pretty obviously “yes”.  I had already convinced myself of that more than a year ago.  Different methods will lead to different estimates, surely.  But even now, no matter how I slice it, that’s the answer I still come up with.

In this post I present yet a different calculation to suggest that this is plausible.  Just a rough cut, no real work involved.  I’m going to gin up a crude guess for the number of peak hour Maple Avenue trips you might expect, just from commuters living in all that new MAC housing.

Continue reading Post #361: Yet a third cut at MAC-generated traffic

Post #359: The Town’s multimodal transportation study, Part 1

In Post #358, I discussed what I saw as the single most important finding of the Town’s “Joint Maple Avenue Corridor Multimodal Transportation and Land Use Study“.  This post discusses the rest of that study, as presented at the Town Council (and PC and TSC) joint work session on 8/19/2019.

To cut to the chase:  There’s nothing (or almost nothing) useful in the rest of the report.  Not just because much of the detailed analysis was just-plain-wacky. It was, as I hope to discuss in a later post.  (Example:  Let’s let people park on Maple.)  But mostly, the basic approach was fundamentally wrong, in a way that prevents the Town from using the results to make rational decisions about Maple Avenue.  At best, I guess you might call it a place to start.  Or maybe a relatively inexpensive mistake, so that you know how to try to structure a usable study.

This posting is only about big-picture overview issues.  It’s already too long as is.  If I want to talk about the details, I’ll have to do yet another posting.

First, I’m posting my recording of this joint work session.

Why?  See Post #260.  Hope I’m wrong about that, but … just in case, my recording of the 7 PM 8/19/2019 work session is at this Google Drive link.

There’s no index, because it’s only 45 minutes.   Audio is lousy because there was poor microphone discipline, so it’s a mix of amplified and unamplified sound.  That requires a lot of post-processing (amplification, noise removal, compression) just to make it audible.  The heavy post-processing and low original volumes left a lot of artifacts in the recording.

But if you want to know what was said, and you weren’t there — sadly, looks like this is your one and only opportunity to do so.  See Post #260.

 

Continue reading Post #359: The Town’s multimodal transportation study, Part 1

Post #358: A one-third increase in Maple Avenue rush hour traffic.

The Kimley-Horn analysis presented at the 8/19/2019 Town Council work session estimated that even a modest amount of MAC development on Maple would result in (by my calculation) a one-third increase in peak rush hour traffic on Maple. 

I believe that’s the single most important fact to come out of the 8/19/2019 Town Council work session and meeting.  And yet, the contractor (Kimley-Horn) and the combined TC/PC/TSC blew past that so fast, nobody even bothered to discuss it.  So, since they didn’t talk about it, let me walk you through it.  With my usual citations as to sources and methods.

But first, I have to acknowledge a tremendous debt to Councilman Noble, who, as I recall, had to do everything short of pound his fist on the table to get this analysis included in this study.  I’m going to pile on the sarcasm later, but here, I am completely serious. This analysis was not part of the original proposal for this report.  But this is one of the numbers we must have, in order to have any rational discussion of what’s best for the Town of Vienna.  And if he hadn’t persisted, this would never have seen the light of day.  So, we, the citizens of the Town, owe Councilman Noble a debt of gratitude for prodding the Town into taking this step in the direction of having a rational, fact-based discussion of the future of Vienna under MAC.

Rational means discussing the pros and cons of your actions.  But the Town barred any discussion of traffic during the development of MAC.  So this action rights a long-standing error, and starts us down a path toward a rational discussion of the issues.

Detail follows.

Analysis

First you need a tiny bit of context in order to understand what the Kimley-Horn report showed.   That context is this:  How many cars pass down Maple Avenue, now, at the peak rush hour?  Answer:  About 2366 cars.

To be clear, that’s 2366 cars, passing a point on Maple, during that peak hour.  To see how I got that, turn to Virginia Department of Transportation traffic count data.  Download the 2018 Town of Vienna data from this link (.pdf).  Scroll to page 7.  Here it is with full detail.

Here it is again, simplified to just the key numbers.  (Sorry if you have to squint, this is how it looks in the .pdf from VDOT).

This is the street segment from Nutley to Follin.  At the far right is average weekday traffic of 33,000 vehicles per day.  Moving to the left is the “K factor” of 0.072, which is the fraction of daily traffic that was observed during the peak traffic hour.  (In this case we can tell that this number was an actual measurement by VDOT.)  Multiply the two together to arrive at (33000 x 0.072 =) 2366 vehicles during the peak rush hour, as measured by VDOT.

(The scientifically-trained among you will laugh at four significant digits for this number, but let’s just continue.)

OK, now you’re ready to understand the Kimley-Horn analysis.  First, get a copy of the Kimley-Horn 8/19/2019 presentation from the Town’s website, at this link (.pdf).  Turn to slide 10.  Without (yet) commenting on the quality of those numbers, let me just take them at face value. The key number is in boldface near the bottom:  +758 PM peak hour trips.

So, how much does rush hour traffic increase, under this scenario?  Well, that’s (758/2355 =) 32%. 

Or, in round numbers, a one-third increase in rush hour traffic.

A short break for some sarcasm.

Well, who could possibly have guessed that?  Who would have thought that concentrating a bunch of high-density housing projects on the single most congested street in Northern Virginia* might result in — more congestion?  Completely unexpected.

* OK, yeah, I made that up, about the single most congested street.  But if there were such an award, don’t we all think that Maple would be in the running for it?

Proper discussion.

First, the most important thing to realize is that this is only a partial build-out of all the available MAC property. The entire MAC zone contains 106 acres, more or less.  At the time MAC was passed, both Town Council and Town staff were cited as guessing that more than 60% of that acreage would eventually be redeveloped under MAC.

So, by eye, if you combined all the colored blocks on the picture above, what fraction of Maple was assumed to be redeveloped, for the Kimley-Horn estimate?  Knowing what I know about those lots, my guess is 20%.  So, this estimate says that if 20% of the MAC zone gets redeveloped under MAC, you’ll see a one-third increase in peak rush hour traffic.

By extrapolation, then, what the Town originally envisioned as a full build-out of MAC — 60%-ish of the entire MAC zone — would result in a doubling of peak rush-hour traffic.

You know, love MAC or hate MAC, that’s something we really need to think about.  Shame on those who forbade any discussion of traffic as MAC was being developed.  You did your Town no favors by doing that.  And, again, kudos to Councilman Noble for finally getting some numbers on the table.

Second, are there any obvious shortcomings of those Kimley-Horn numbers.  Yes, one leaps off the page:  Giant Food shopping center.  Look at the largest teal box on the picture above.  That’s the Giant Food shopping center.  They are claiming that redevelopment of that lot — all 10 acres of it — would result in just 65 additional rush-hour trips.

Hahahah.  No.  I would love to see the contortions they had to go through to get that number.  If they keep the retail — which you kind of hope they do, if you buy groceries in Vienna — then what you ought to see is the rush-hour trips generated by all the new housing.  So far, these MAC projects are averaging about 100 new Town residents per acre.  That’s a 10-acre lot.  So what you ought to see there is the Maple Avenue rush hour trips generated by maybe 1000 new persons, call that maybe 600 new adults, living on Maple.  I don’t think that just one-tenth of them will have jobs that require them to commute.

So, from a flat-footed common-sense perspective, it sure looks to me like they shaved that Giant shopping center number down.  Quite a lot.  There’s no telling whether that was a one-off, or whether all those projections were systematically shaved down.

Finally, can we “triangulate” this in any way?  That is, compare it to some independent estimate, done by some other method, to assure us that the Kimley-Horn estimate is in the ballpark?

Why do that?  There’s a lot of potential for slack in these traffic analyses.  A lot of potential for judgment calls.  And you’d like to see somebody else’s analysis to be sure there is no large systematic bias in the numbers.

I did my own crude estimate about a year ago, for total traffic (not rush hour), simply by extrapolating the 444 Maple West projections.  That’s my post titled “Traffic and the Ultimate Impact of MAC Zoning“, posted 7/26/2018.  Let me dig that up and compare to the Kimley-Horn estimate.

This is my crude estimate, from one year ago, impact on total (not rush hour) trips on Maple:

A year ago, I crudely estimated that a full build-out of MAC would increase total trips on Maple by 118%.  Extrapolating the Kimley-Horn number to a full build out of Maple implied an increase in total trips on Maple of 100%.  As these things go, that’s a bullseye.  My crude extrapolation and the Kimley-Horn numbers are definitely in the same ballpark.

I should probably mention other technical details and caveats that might materially matter, such as the treatment of “bypass” trips.  I should equivocate over the Chick-fil-A-car-wash number, because some fraction of those might never make it literally onto the segment of Maple between Nutley and Follin.  I should probably ask about the fraction of trips that might not make it to Maple at all, because I can’t know exactly what the Kimley-Horn analysis did.  (I assume that because this is about Maple, those are estimated Maple trips, but I can’t be sure of that.)  But let me stop here.  I think this is good enough for now.

I’m going end by repeating what I said more than a year ago, in the post cited just above.  If it sounds kind of strident, well, maybe in hindsight that was perfectly justified.

“The bottom line here is that under any reasonable set of assumptions, this is a significant and material issue, and the Town needs to stop avoiding it.  They need to look to the future, see what kind of Maple Avenue they are creating, and act now to avoid the worst impacts.  I can also understand why a pro-growth Town Council would not bother to do this basic calculation.  There is no way to paint a pretty picture here.  But the fact is, if the Town is bent on remaking Maple under MAC, they need to do this calculation properly and restructure MAC to give us something tolerable on Maple.  As it stands, there appear to be no long-term Town estimates of the ultimate impact of MAC.”

But now there are some estimates.  That’s progress.