Landmark Promises

Landmark Mall may soon be history, but will its demise take with it years of city planning and council actions? Based on the current plan, the answer is yes.

The reason for this is simple: a precedent will be set that jeopardizes all of the hard-won promises made by the City to its residents, including those covering affordable housing and open space at redevelopment sites like Beauregard and the Waterfront.

According to the Washington Post, City staff is allowing the Howard Hughes Corporation to build whatever they want at Landmark Mall. Instead of winning concessions, the developer will be allowed to shove the stop for the extremely expensive Corridor C transitway to the very back of the property.  This will add perhaps 10 minutes to a 30 minute trip for commuters riding from Van Dorn Metro to the Beauregard area. Commuters will not tolerate a detour that adds as much as a third to their trip time. Thus, hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars will be sunk into a commuter line that zips about nearly empty.

The City’s Complete Streets policy is also in jeopardy. When I asked the lead representative for the Howard Hughes Corporation why he was unwilling to conform to the this policy, he responded with the claim that significant pedestrian traffic didn’t exist in the surrounding area. Everyone will drive, he claimed. He even made a joke during his presentation about how cyclists wouldn’t use Van Dorn Street, in apparent ignorance of the City’s plans to install bike lanes as part of Corridor C.

Less than a month after this meeting, an accident involving pedestrians resulted in the death of a child. It was less than a half-mile away from the front door of Landmark Mall. This isn’t the first pedestrian fatality in close proximity to Landmark. A little over a year ago, another child was killed in an accident on Duke Street at the I-395/Shirley Highway interchange. This accident occurred just off the Landmark Mall property on a broken, worn path through the interchange. Various plans have been discussed for years about improving this latter site, but little progress has been made thanks to a lack of funding. The developer is not offering to help fix this.

The developer frequently cites a shared use path running along the south side of the mall as a major contribution to pedestrian safety. That’s great, except that it doesn’t connect to safe crosswalks and safe pedestrian walkways (as the Duke Street/I-395 incident demonstrates). It’s entirely isolated, like a driveway that doesn’t intersect with a street. Essentially, this shared use path is nothing more than window-dressing meant to assuage a skeptical public.

The same can be said of the developers’ drawings of future phases of development, which show them finally coming into compliance with City policies at some point in the distant future. From the developer’s presentation at the second public hearing, it’s clear that scarcely any thought was put into these future phases, as they consist of mere featureless boxes randomly scattered across the property.   

Thus, city staff is being forced to put lipstick on a really ugly pig. With no other guidance than to grow the tax base by expediting redevelopment plans, they are confronting a developer who clearly has absolutely no interest in working with them to create a sustainable development. A few, minor improvements to the pedestrian infrastructure planned for the surrounding area are not being subsidized in any way by the developer, even though the developer is asking city residents to allow for all sorts of exceptions and policy waivers. In the battle of wills, the Hughes Corporation is clearly defeating Alexandria.

Contrast this situation to the recent discussions on the Beauregard Plan, which I was a part of. That plan was genuinely well thought-out, but that was because JBG Properties and its partners realized that working with the city, not against it, was the best way forward. Staff, residents, and the developer worked together to create a good plan, though some still are unhappy with the density.

But density is not the issue at Landmark. Design is the problem. This is a design for a car-friendly yesteryear, where those who walk or take transit are considered unworthy of full accommodation. Alexandria is moving in the opposite direction. Hopefully, the Planning Commission (on June 4) and Council (on June 15) will convey that message to the developer by demanding a better plan.