On Sundays (the only days when construction crews aren’t out on the site from before the legal start time of 0700 until dusk), I walk over to where developers are cramming 82 three- and four-story townhouses on five acres of land. You know—on the former corporate campus with the ponds, water lilies, herons and sacred lotus.
It’s
truly depressing to see these structures that are designed to look like every
other townhouse development in Fairfax and Loudoun counties, with no attempt to
suit the surroundings. (I read through the design documents that Fairfax County
Planning Commission staff thumbed up. The cars the artists used to depict
parking were BMWs and Porsches. So much for solving the housing shortage.)
These—the model units—are presumably the three-story design, because they
clearly are not the two-over-two that are meant to comprise the four-story
ones. And yet they have a fourth floor taking up half the structure footprint. My
guess is the half-the-space part is the “loft opening to a roof terrace”
and I wonder if that was what FCPC approved?
Well,
but after I threw up a little in my mouth, I wandered towards the ponds and
noticed that the site has had other visitors, whose journeys were memorialized
in the construction dirt that turned to mud over the past week:
And
all those little pawprints made me happy. I’m grateful that they’ve not yet
abandoned us, despite the desecration of their habitat.
And I hope
they pee on the luxury townhouses.
©2025
Bas Bleu
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