Dear Supervisor Hyland,

On Tuesday, November 20 the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors will be holding a Re-zoning Hearing regarding the VSE property development. Part of this re-zoning calls for the development of a 15-story office building directly across the street from Midtown Alexandria Station.

 The residents of Midtown Alexandria Station applaud the efforts and welcome a new development and neighbor to the Huntington community. We understand that the goal of the development of the VSE property is to improve the Huntington community. In addition, we understand that new development and a growing neighborhood is a reality of living near the metro.

However, we must respectfully and firmly disagree against the expected height of the office building directly across the street from our western units. We don’t feel the current plans are an ideal layout for the community. Before the rezoning is complete, we encourage to board to reconsider how detrimental the expected height of this office building is to our residential community and to take a proactive approach to find the best and most ideal scenario possible.

At its current designed height we are concerned that it will have the following impact to our western facing residents (totally 50+ units from floors 7 to 16):

• Block the sun from our pool during the summer months. Our pool is regularly open 7 days a week from the end of May until the end of September.  It will surely affect our property values for all 360 residents of our building if our pool is overshadowed every day of the summer every year.  As far as we know, a shadow study for our pool has not been conducted.

• Increase the sound level of the trains as they go by. And while the sound studies have found that there won't be an impact, we don't know if they took into consideration the fact that there are plans to build other buildings soon after.

• Decrease our level of privacy for the office building patrons working late, looking in, seeing which units are not occupied and accessible, etc.

As a result we feel that this could negatively impact the potential property value of all Midtown residents.

 We are not against having a commercial building (offices) next door, we are just against having it be so tall (15 floors). Instead, we would ask to limit the office building from 15 floors to 7 OR keep it 15 floors and move it to the back part of the new development's lot/property where it will block the least amount of western views if any. We feel that this would help maintain the residential feeling we have come to expect out of Huntington.

Sincerely,

The undersigned residents from Midtown Alexandria Station

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