Transit-oriented development flourishes in metropolitan Washington as the transportation authority teams up with the private sector.
Living, working, and shopping within a few hundred feet of a Metro commuter rail station is becoming increasingly common in Washington and its suburbs. Thanks to clogged highways, all-adult households, urban liveliness, and other factors, developers are rushing to construct housing, offices, and retail near stops on the region’s 106-mile commuter rail system, which carries 725,000 riders a day.
A tally of “joint development” projects — those in which private developers build on land owned by the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (Metro) — reveals the strong demand for transit-oriented development in the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia.
By the Authority’s count, developers have proposed erecting 5,809 residential units on properties at or near Metro rail stations. That volume of housing is more than double the number of dwellings — 2,571— that were constructed through joint development agreements during the rail system’s first 30 years.
Along with a slew of housing, developers are proposing to build 3.9 million square feet of offices and nearly 2 million square feet of retail on land owned by Metro. Nor is that all. The Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments reports that in 2005, the last year for which figures are available, a fourth of the region’s commercial construction took place within a half-mile of Metro or other commuter rail stations. Transit-oriented development (TOD) is also doing well in a number of other metropolitan centers across the country, such as Chicago, Boston, and Portland, Oregon.
Close to the Vienna station in Fairfax County, Virginia, Pulte Homes intends to construct 2,248 residential units, 300,000 sq. ft. of offices, and 190,000 sq. ft. of retail on a 55-acre site, almost all of which was purchased from 69 households who occupied large-lot detached houses there. Seventy-one percent of the housing in the project, known as MetroWest, will be high-rise. Seventy percent will be situated within a quarter-mile of the trains. Metro made the project more feasible by selling the developer a small strip of land on the perimeter of the station.
At 41 units an acre, the housing at MetroWest will be the densest that Pulte has ever produced. Despite the current slowdown in the housing market, which has caused the postponement of many conventional residential projects in the Washington region and nationally, Pulte executive Stan Settle Jr. says MetroWest’s location is so good that the company is pushing forward, hoping to start land development this July.
Smart-growth proponents such as Stewart Schwartz and Cheryl Cort at the Coalition for Smarter Growth say suburban areas — especially 1.1 million-population Fairfax County — are entering a transition in which low-density areas near certain stations will evolve into walkable, mixed-use districts.
Proposals for dense, mixed development are receiving encouragement from Metro, which Cort says “has changed a lot in the past year — they’ve brought in good people like Nat Bottigheimer as head of planning and joint development.” Bottigheimer, who earlier facilitated TOD at the Maryland Department of Transportation, says, “There’s a growing level of sophistication about what transit-oriented development should be. Expectations of what Metro’s role should be have grown.”
Some developments touted in the past as “transit-oriented” did not offer enough density or walkability to please new urbanists. Last November, at the online discussion site PedShed.net, writer Laurence Aurbach examined development near the Prince George’s Plaza Metro station in Prince George’s County, Maryland. In 1992 the county planning department released a “Transit District Development Plan” calling for a high-density, mixed-use pedestrian district at the station. Later the county watered down the development requirements, with the result that at Prince George’s Plaza, “most construction is suburban and auto-oriented in design and function,” according to Aurbach. Across the region, “getting the urban design right remains a constant challenge,” says Schwartz.
ECONOMIC BENEFITS
Understanding of TOD is clearly picking up. Last September the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments formed a joint development task force, which is to issue its recommendations this spring. The task force has identified the need for improved planning processes, which could generate better site designs. Instead of making developers responsible for getting entitlements for their projects — a problematical situation when a developer is inexperienced with TOD — a different site design process may be introduced.
Bottigheimer sees TOD as helping the transit system by giving more people reasons to ride the trains throughout the day and evening. “In some cases there are concerns about intensification of development,” such as when it may overload already crowded rush-hour trains, he says. Ideally, he says, TOD would increase off-peak and reverse-commuting ridership rather than pack more passengers into the peak periods.
“People are looking at TOD as a quality-of-life strategy and an economic development strategy,” he observes. Arlington County, Virginia, and the District of Columbia have been pioneers in demonstrating the economic benefits of new below-ground commuter rail lines (see Sept. 2003 New Urban News). Since 1980, when a line serving five Arlington County Metro stations between Rosslyn and Ballston began operating, nearly 19,000 houses and apartments, almost 15 million sq. ft. of offices, and approximately 1.9 million sq. ft. of retail have arrived, boosting the value of land and buildings in the three-mile corridor to $14.5 billion, according to Robert Brosnan, county planning director.
Arlington’s two transit corridors — the other one serves Pentagon City and Crystal City — comprise about 11 percent of the city’s land but contain a whopping 42 percent of its $50 billion of real estate value, Brosnan notes. In the two corridors, 20 projects with about 4,730 residential units are currently under construction, Economic Development Director Terry Holzheimer reports. A big focus in coming years will be redevelopment of the section of Arlington near the Crystal City Metro station, increasing density there by perhaps 50 to 75 percent, Holzheimer says.
FAIRFAX GETS ON BOARD
In March, Fairfax adopted a new policy of encouraging compact, mixed-use development within a half-mile of transit stations. This was a major turnabout for the county, but more hurdles lie ahead. Schwartz believes Fairfax “will have to reach the same community consensus that Arlington did.” In Arlington, county government pledged to protect low-density residential areas some distance from Metro stations in return for welcoming intense development near the stations.
Five Virginia Railway Express stations and five Metro stations operate in Fairfax County, and a future Silver Line will bring four Metro stations to Tysons Corner, the 1,700-acre “edge city” where approximately 150,000 people work. The Fairfax County Board of Supervisors is trying to persuade federal officials to place the Silver Line underground for 3.4 miles in Tysons rather than build an elevated structure for it. Washington Post design columnist Roger K. Lewis wrote that tunneling would be aesthetically superior and would allow Tysons to become much more pedestrian-friendly.
Advocates of the tunnel argue that because of recent advances in tunneling, it could be cheaper to go underground than to build an elevated rail line. So far, federal officials have been unwilling to budge from the elevated line. A team led by PB PlaceMaking is helping the Tysons Land Use Task Force prepare recommendations on how the county’s plan for Tysons Corner should be improved.
Also important is the question of where to place the portion of the 23-mile Silver Line that would go to Dulles International Airport. Current plans call for it to sit in the Dulles Toll Road right-of-way — precisely the type of location that Arlington rejected for the Orange Line more than a quarter-century ago. Building the line in an expressway right-of-way would reduce construction costs but create less pleasant conditions for rail riders, as anyone using freeway-based rail, like the Green Line in Los Angeles, can attest. It would also make transit-oriented development difficult.
Not everyone who lives in low-density suburbs favors dense transit-oriented development. “The people in the station areas are often conflicted about whether they want a suburban or an urban setting,” Bottigheimer observes. Some stations will become regional activity centers, others will be more neighborhood-oriented, and those at the ends of the lines will likely serve commuters who park for the day.
Using figures from the Council of Governments and from Chris Nelson of Virginia Tech’s Metropolitan Institute, Holzheimer forecasts that from 2005 to 2030, the “transit-oriented mixed-use centers will achieve true urban development intensities, approaching or eclipsing 200 persons per acre.” That figure is a combination of residents and jobs per acre. Areas such as the Rosslyn-Ballston corridor and Crystal City, Holzheimer says, “will become truly urban,” three or more times as dense as traditional urban places like Alexandria, Virginia, and the Georgetown section of Washington.
This article is available in the July/August 2007 issue of New Urban News, along with images and many more articles not available online. Subscribe or order the individual issue. |
Rendering Courtesy of Federal Realty Investment Trust