DC: Tyson's Small Retailers Don't Fit Into Grand Plans Spurred by Silver Line

[ukw]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/...y.html?hpid=z2

Tysons’s small retailers don’t fit into grand development plans spurred by Silver Line

To reach the pinnacle he’s at today in the retail world, John Kenney, Northern Virginia’s leading purveyor of sex toys and porn videos, has conquered many obstacles.

You don’t build a chain of 13 (soon to be 14) “couples boutiques,” as Kenney calls his stores, by folding to pressure from obscenity prosecutors, hostile zoning boards or angry neighbors inveighing against sin.

Again and again, local governments and citizens groups pondering ways to get rid of him have been stymied by the First Amendment. In Old Town Alexandria, for instance, no amount of fulminating by preservationists in 2009 could stop his Le Tache Couples Boutique from leasing space on King Street near a tavern where some of the Founding Fathers slept.

But now, in Fairfax County, Kenney, 58, has met a foe he knows he can’t defeat.

He says his 5,600-square-foot Tysons Corner emporium — once the second-most-profitable sex-toy and porn-video boutique in the Kenney empire — will not survive the high-rise redevelopment expected to result from the advent of Metro’s Silver Line.

The property Kenney rents has been sold, and the new owner intends to build skyscrapers.

Planners and developers think the Silver Line, due to open July 26, will radically alter the face of Tysons over time...

Nor will it include a lot of other “low-density” enterprises — strip-mall pizza joints, storefront insurances agencies, gas stations, muffler shops — places where three or six or a dozen people work but where thousands could be employed in new steel-and-glass towers. Many of those long-familiar, small establishments are bound for extinction in Tysons, real estate analysts say...

The developers say they plan to terminate all the leases, bulldoze the properties and put up giant buildings for people who want to live, work, shop, dine and imbibe near the Metro...

Their project, called Tysons Central, is consistent with the county’s strategy for remaking soulless, car-clogged Tysons into a transit-dependent, quasi-urban community...

Thrilled by the arrival of rapid transit in Tysons, developers and planners predict it will spur vast corporate and residential growth in the years ahead...

Photo
http://img.washingtonpost.com/rf/ima...EeO83Cr27LIDqQ

[mhays]

Big buildings have small retailers too.

Initially they'll be corporate type tenants with large credit lines and reputations. Over time, they'll have more mom & pops.

Some types of stores rarely do well in highrises of course, like auto shops. Suburbia is still full of less-desirable sites for those. Maybe not the same ones of course. Anyone who doesn't own their land and building is subject to that kind of change, which is pretty important if we're going to transition areas from suburban crap to urbanity.

[dc_denizen]

they said the same thing about the lumber yards and muffler shops (and gay clubs) displaced by the nationals stadium. businesses will adjust.