Zoning Wonks Rejoice! We Read the Fancy Lake Anne Redevelopment Report So You Don't Have To

My, that is a professional looking document! Unveiled earlier this week, the final report of the Lake Anne Village Commercial Reinvestment Plan clocked in at a nearly Dickensian 130 pages. (Did the authors get paid by the word?) The bottom line is that the consultants hired by Fairfax County to develop the report are arguing that the best commercial concept is to market Lake Anne as a food and dining destination, and the best way to do that is to find a way to centralize the management of the plaza. Not exactly news to anyone who's followed Lake Anne's changing fortunes in recent years, but there are more specific action plans on how to do these things -- more than 45 pages of them, in fact -- than we've seen before.

It's taken us a while to read the 130-page report (and now our mouths hurt from all that moving our lips as we read). What does the darn thing say anyway?

First of all, the consultants were able to locate Lake Anne on a map. Good on them.

With that out of the way, the report has some good news! According to its authors, Lake Anne could support up to 9 new dining establishments, a small specialty food market, a wine shop or bakery, a modern full-size pharmacy, and a few personal service tenants such as a dry cleaner. Yeah, we're shocked, too, but there's a big "if."

All of this is based on what the report's authors call the "upside" scenario. (Translation: Keep clapping!) It touches briefly on the redevelopment plan for Lake Anne approved by Fairfax County in 2009. Those plans could ultimately lead to as many as 1,755 new residential units and nearly 250,000 square feet of new commercial space at Lake Anne, and that redevelopment is really the key to revitalizing Lake Anne. But more than two years later, there hasn't been a peep about any project more extensive than repainting at Lake Anne, thanks to the ongoing slow-motion collapse of the global economy market conditions and the new hawttness of the Metro drawing all the bollardy attention to both sides of the Toll Road.

Bob Simon, bless his heart, said just as much when the report was unveiled.

Reston founder Robert E. Simon said the Lake Anne Merchants Association and LARCA are already doing almost everything the report discussed. He said the future lies in new ownership with money to spend.

"All of [the report] will not accomplsh what we need to have accomplished until a developer comes in here using comprehensive plan," said Simon. "Our real future really lies in a developer coming in when the market recovers."

That's the truth.

But let's pretend that filthy "web loggers" get paid by the word (or at all) and dive a bit deeper into the report. The idea of focusing on creating a dining destination at Lake Anne is hardly a bold one, as restaurants have driven most of the retail growth throughout Reston in the past decade. Lookit this fancy chart:

We're guessing cupcakeries fall under "food services."

For those of you still awake, here's a smattering of other highlights from the report:

• The community's preference is for a "combination of concepts," but the food and dining destination ranked highest.
  
  
• The appeal and significance of the existing architecture at Lake Anne is "recognized by modernists, architects, planners and some segments of the general public." (The remaining segments of the general public tend to comment loudly and repeatedly on this "web log" whenever Lake Anne is as much as mentioned.)
  
  
• The April 2008 Wiehle Avenue/ Reston Parkway Station Access Management Plan shows the potential for a paved trail connection between the LAVC and the Wiehle Avenue Station. That was actually news to us.
  
  
• The LAVC will be eligible for designation in the National Register of Historic Places in 2016, when it turns 50. Maybe we should go for a Colonial Williamsburg approach, only with costumed interpreters wearing polyester and demonstrating how to properly burp a Tupperware container.
  
  
• Currently 13,844 square feet of the 73,471 square feet of Lake Anne's commercial space is vacant -- or 19 percent. That's not great, but it's better than a lot of shopping malls these days. (Have you been to Springfield Mall lately?)
  
  
• The economics of leasing and running retail space at Lake Anne are challenging, to say the least: "Many owners have a very low to almost zero return expectation, with some owners leasing their space at cost. This in turn creates a disincentive for tenants to maintain a competitive business with healthy sales volumes," the report states. And it gets worse: "Depending on their level of invested equity, a market driven commercial investor would have to charge an annual rent ranging from $24 PSF to $40 PSF+ in order realize a reasonable return. At the high end of this scale, rents would have to approach the rates achieved by the highest performing commercial spaces in Reston Town Center. Assuming industry standards for retail operating margins, this implies that the tenant would have to produce an annual sales volume of at least $335 PSF." That's not hard to do when you're selling iPads and whatnot, but a hell of a lot tougher for locally owned businesses.
  
  
• There are a mind-boggling 26 non‐residential property owners in the core Washington Plaza area, which does not include the owners of the ASBO building, the Washington Plaza Baptist Church, and the Lake Anne Professional Building. "The ownership structure of these individual commercial units does not lend itself readily to creating a retail merchandising strategy that will allow the diversity of retail types to enter the marketplace and create a balance of retail categories that is needed for the LAVC to be successful," the report (under)states.
  
  
• Newer Restonians may not feel the same about Lake Anne as long-timers, according to the report: "While many residents appreciate the national tenants located in Reston Town Center, they do not want to shift away from locally owned businesses in the LAVC," it states. "However, newer residents do not seem to have the same traditional connections to the scale, character and mix of the LAVC, with one interviewee saying that while Lake Anne Village is an important symbol, the passion to protect the LAVC from change is harder to understand, and considered the design qualities of the village to be 'an appreciation to be gained over time, but not something that is automatic for everyone.'"
  

The report has some value, but the reality, again, is that improving the fortunes of Reston's brutalist gem will depend largely on significant redevelopment -- something the Reston Association itself wasn't willing to do. Hopefully others will step in at some point sooner rather than later.