Two Developments, 1,500 Units: Arlington Board Approves Major Rosslyn and Pentagon City Projects

• July 20th

by UrbanTurf Staff

✉️ Want to forward this article? Click here.

The Arlington County Board signed off on a pair of transformative residential projects this weekend, approving plans that will collectively deliver more than 1,400 apartments to Rosslyn and Pentagon City — both on sites where vacant office buildings currently sit.

In Rosslyn, the Board approved Monday Properties' plan to redevelop 1401 Wilson Boulevard and 1400 Key Boulevard into a pair of 27-story residential towers with 831 total apartments. As UrbanTurf has reported, the 300-foot Wilson Tower will deliver 506 units and roughly 12,000 square feet of ground-floor retail, while the Key Tower will have 325 units anchored by a 17,000-square-foot grocery store. The project will also deliver a significant piece of Rosslyn's long-planned 18th Street Corridor, with approximately 20,800 square feet of ground-level public space that includes a plaza, terraced planters, and a public elevator. The approval caps a long journey for the site: the Board first approved a plan for the block back in 2014, but Monday Properties spent roughly four years reworking that office-anchored vision into an all-residential one.

A few miles south in Pentagon City, the Board also approved plans from JM Zell Partners and Lincoln Equities Group to convert the former Transportation Security Administration headquarters at 601 and 701 12th Street S (map) into a 607-unit residential project with close to 30,000 square feet of retail. Rather than demolish the two 1980s-era office buildings, which have sat vacant for four years, the Arquitectonica-designed project will gut and reclad the existing structures while adding two new residential wings, along with a half-acre public plaza connecting to the Metro. The adaptive reuse approach replaces a far larger redevelopment approved for the site in 2024 — up to 1,675 units across new towers — that the applicant deemed commercially unviable.

The two approvals continue Arlington's aggressive push to chip away at its office vacancy problem. County planning staff estimate that removing the 563,000 square feet of empty space at the TSA site alone would cut the Pentagon City corridor's office vacancy rate from about 16.5% to 2.3%, and the Rosslyn towers will do the same for a pair of 1960s office buildings that have sat empty on Wilson Boulevard.

This article originally published at https://dc.urbanturf.com/articles/blog/two_projects_nearly_1500_units_arlington_board_approves_major_rosslyn_and_p/24828.