Despite vacancy rates hovering near 20 percent in Arlington County’s once robust Rosslyn – Ballston corridor, obituaries for the area’s commercial development are, like Mark Twain’s famous observation about reports of his own death, “greatly exaggerated.”
A flurry of recent development proposals, some already approved by Arlington County commissioners, are promising to remake one of Northern Virginia’s oldest communities into one of its liveliest opportunities.
The new developments will be anchored by the proposed $317 million transformation of the Ballston Mall. The current 30-year-old, four-level enclosed mall at the intersection of Glebe Road and Wilson Boulevard will emerge as a refreshing open-air shopping “Quarter” with upscale retailers, additional restaurants, an open-air plaza and pedestrian improvements. The existing Macy’s department store will remain open during the construction, and its furniture store will be relocated from an adjacent building to an underground location beneath the main store. Above Macy’s, new office space will replace the existing offices. The existing Macy’s furniture building will be demolished and replaced by a new 406-unit apartment building with a rooftop courtyard and 66,475 square feet of retail on the ground floor.
Nine of the top building projects currently proposed for Ballston, including the renovated mall, found on page 23. If completed as planned, they would add roughly 1,500 additional housing units, nearly 100,000 square feet of new retail space (not including the Ballston Quarter renovation) and nearly 1 million square feet of additional office space.
Strategically located in Northern Virginia, Ballston is four miles from Washington, D.C., eight miles from Reagan National Airport, and 10 miles from the emerging regional center in Tysons. Originally a crossroads in Northern Virginia’s roadways, Ballston developed early in the 1900s as a “streetcar suburb”---a stop on the electric trolley line from Washington, D.C. to Ballston’s more established western neighbor Falls Church. With the decline of the trolley system, the area languished until the arrival of the Ballston Metro stop on the Orange Line through Arlington County in 1979, and seven years later, the opening of the 580,000-square foot soon-to-be-renovated mall.
Today, according to information from the 2015 annual report of the Ballston Improvement District (BID), the 118-acre unincorporated Ballston neighborhood now boasts 7.8 million square feet of principally high-rise, high-density residential, office and retail towers. Nearly 20 percent of its 31,000 employees live in the 8,000 residential units within the commercial area. In addition, Ballston includes more than 1 million square feet of retail space, with more than 75 restaurants. Eight higher education institutions also occupy space within its boundaries.
With the addition last year of Metro’s Silver Line linking Arlington County to Tysons, Reston and ultimately Dulles International Airport, Ballston is once again a busy transit hub for Northern Virginia. Ballston supports 26,000 Metro trips each day, connects to 15 bus routes with 9,000 daily trips, and has seven bike share and Zipcar locations, according to BID. Among the renovations on the BID drawing board is construction of a new $90 million Metro entrance on North Fairfax Drive.
“If there’s a theme that has emerged for us over the course of the past few years, it’s this: people matter,” Tina Leone, CEO of the Ballston BID explained. “The core of what we are trying to do in Ballston is to impact people’s lives in a way that creates a sense of purpose, community and connectivity.”
Leone predicts that by 2020, Ballston will become the preferred location for the live/work/play professionals. “Our apartments are all leased. I don’t know where the rents are going to go, but we are already seeing an increased focus by landlords on improving amenities for apartment renters,” she said.
As in other areas with strong demographics, personalized “experience providers” such as gyms, yoga studios and restaurants are a major driver among its residents. Locals can buy “things” online, or alternatively, at warehouse and supercenter retailers, or specialty stores.
According to figures in the BID Annual Report, in 2015 the average age for the 13,000 residents who call the Ballston area home was 36 years, with an average annual income of $125,000. Nearly 90 percent of the residents have a college degree and more than one third hold advanced degrees.
Ballston is also home to a high concentration of science and technology organizations including the federal government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Office of Naval Research, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, National Science Foundation, and the office of Homeland Security Research. Private technology firms such as Accenture, Applied Predictive Technologies and CACI have facilities there. “Ballston’s technology organizations receive more funding for scientific research per square mile than anywhere else in the country,” according to Leone.
“We are taking this step forward to have a different future than the one we have been struggling with. I think we are on our way to coming out of what has been a couple of really tough years,” Arlington County Board Chairman Mary Hynes explained to the Washington Business Journal reporter Rebecca Cooper in announcing the County Board’s approval of the Ballston Mall project on November 18.. The Board’s decision includes $55 million invested by the county.
Leone stressed that the bustle of new projects reflects a new sense of cooperation and positive changes between the business community and Arlington County government. “We’re all getting on the same page,” she observed.
