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