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Old Posted Apr 4, 2021, 7:41 PM
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Can Virginia’s Suburban Counties Retrofit A City Feel?

Can Virginia’s Suburban Counties Retrofit A City Feel?


March 29, 2021

By Wyatt Gordon

Read More: https://www.virginiamercury.com/2021...t-a-city-feel/

Quote:
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As aging malls built in the 1970s and ’80s come to the end of their life cycle, the chorus of voices questioning what to do with dead and dying retail spaces has grown ever louder. With many of its flagship shopping centers either underwater or under pressure, Henrico County has wasted no time in trying to provide an answer for developers and residents worried about a sagging tax base.

- At the site of the old Regency Square mall, the county paid for infrastructure and roadway upgrades to incentivize the recycling of existing commercial spaces, the addition of residential units and the construction of a new sports facility to anchor the development. Surface parking lots became multi-level garages in order to free up more space for buildings while still accommodating the county’s minimum parking requirements. Once the redevelopment is complete, 1,250 new apartments will have joined Henrico’s aging housing stock. — Redevelopment rather than retrofitting is the best way to deal with dead and dying malls according to Daniel Herriges, senior editor at Strong Towns, a smart growth advocacy group. “The fantasy that a mall will be converted to a new use doesn’t often pencil out for developers,” he said. “These single-purpose buildings weren’t built to last 100 years in the first place so many older malls lack exterior windows and have structural problems too. It’s way cheaper to demolish the whole thing and start anew.”

- It’s no coincidence that many of the malls getting new master plans or special use zoning are located along busy commuter corridors. Once blemishes on a site’s redevelopment potential, today proximity to the city and access to public transportation are increasingly important drivers of new residential and retail construction. — In Chesterfield County, Richmond’s southerly, less urbanized neighbor, the conversation around the connection between good public transit and retail revitalization is more complex. Although county officials are interested in extensions of Greater Richmond Transit Company bus routes to several suburban shopping destinations and even keeping the bus system permanently fare-free, the locality’s increasing commitment to transit isn’t a move to revitalize its aging malls. — “In Chesterfield we have 61 shopping centers that are 25 years of age or more,” said Dan Cohen, the county’s director of community enhancement. “It’s easy for planners to say all of this stuff should switch to mixed-use housing with ground floor retail, but some of them can’t be converted to the New Urbanism model because they aren’t large enough.”

- Instead, Cohen envisions dealing with the county’s dead and dying retail centers by tailoring redevelopment to the needs of surrounding residents. “Many of these strip malls could be converted to community shopping hubs, Latinx food halls, or such. So much of this is on an individual basis, that without getting the stories behind these retail spaces you can’t make blanket statements on where these places might be headed,” he said. — In Virginia’s most populous county, the rejuvenation of one moribund mall has triggered an expansion of affordable housing in an unlikely place. The mixed-use redevelopment of the Fair Oaks Mall, a new transit hub, and a planned pedestrian bridge over I-66 led Fairfax County officials to rethink the value of their over-parked government center a mile away. — “I was always astounded by the thousands and thousands of parking spaces at the government center,” said Braddock District Supervisor James R. Walkinshaw. “In the past there was a sense it was useful to have that vast surface parking that was never full, but if we’re serious about our affordable housing agenda, then we have to start in our own front yard. Across Northern Virginia we are land-constrained. There are no wide open green spaces to build affordable housing wherever we want.”

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A rendering of the proposed redevelopment of the Fair Oaks Mall in Fairfax. (Taubman Centers)

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Old Posted Apr 7, 2021, 3:17 AM
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I can see a lot of roadwork around I-66 on google earth - are they extending the orange line to Fair Oaks Mall? If it has a heavy rail station it could halfway live up to the promise of that optimistic render.

But as for those Chesterfield county malls and ones like them - they're basically just relics of a vanished civilization, like soviet mosaics in a town in the Urals.....I still can't fathom the parking provided at these places.
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