Efforts to build a new Metro station in Alexandria’s Potomac Yard have stalled and city officials find themselves tens of millions of dollars short as they try to build a train station they hope will revitalize the area.
City officials want private investors to chip in to dig and build a new Metro station in the yard, but investors have balked at the $240 million price tag, Alexandria Deputy City Manager Mark Jinks said.
“We’ve not found a deal that everyone can agree on,” he said.
The Metro station is the key to redeveloping the area. City officials want to scrape most of the current big box retailers off as their leases expire and replace them with high-density apartments and condos and pedestrian-friendly storefronts and streets. Without a new Metro station, though, it will be hard to sell the new development as “walkable.”
The city finds itself about $32 million short of their goal.
“It’s going to take a long time to build out — probably two decades. But you need a Metro station early,” Jinks said. “It’s a fixed cost.”
Officials aren’t extending the Blue or Yellow lines, but rather digging a station around existing lines. That actually makes it more expensive because it means that most of the work will have to be performed overnight and surgically, requiring top consulting and overtime dollars, Jinks said.
Only one Metro station has been built around an existing train line — the New York Avenue station on the Red Line five years ago. That cost more than $110 million.
“With Metro costs, you won’t hit the break-even point for the first decade,” Jinks said.
Planning officials are nonetheless optimistic that they will have the money in place by the late winter, early spring.
“It’ll be built,” said Val Hawkins, president and CEO of the Alexandria Economic Development Partnership.
In the decades since Potomac Yard was planned, real estate investors have abandoned sprawling, driving suburbs in favor of denser, urban-style city centers, a la Reston Town Center. The most expensive real estate tends to be that in the most walkable areas. Indeed, a community’s “walk score” can represent thousands and even millions of dollars in higher property values.
Alexandria officials say the sprawling malls of their Potomac Yard were only supposed to be interim. But officials in Arlington County, which also controls parts of the old railyards, pushed for high-density development along Metro tracks in its earliest days. Alexandria is paying a heavy price for sprawl now, said Stewart Schwartz of the Coalition for Smarter Growth.
“It’s a tale of two cities,” he said of the contrast between the two Potomac Yard developments.
Alexandria’s master plan for Potomac Yard probably will be completed by February, Jinks said.
