Greater DC will see more transit-oriented development

The future of residential construction within reasonable commuting distance of the nation’s capital lies in higher-density and transit-oriented development, says Robert Kettler, chairman of KSI. “The Washington marketplace has been picked pretty clean,” observes Kettler, whose firm, founded in 1977 as Kettler & Scott, has worked on some of the region’s major suburban planned communities. “By and large, it’s built out or it’s in the process of being built out,” Kettler says of the land that’s situated within an hour’s drive of Washington. He describes one of KSI’s next major projects, Harbor Station — where construction is slated to being this year along the Potomac River in Prince William County, Virginia — as “the last big planned community within a 45- to 50-minute commute of DC.” Although some of the Harbor Station’s 1,700 acres is designed in a conventional suburban form, with gates controlling access and with an 18-hole golf course, the heart of the development will be a town center revolving around a Virginia Railway Express (VRE) commuter station. VRE connects to the Metro rail system in Springfield, Virginia, and “is one of the most rapidly growing commuter rail lines in the US,” Kettler notes. Over the years, KSI, a 400-person firm that orchestrates about $600 million of development annually, has worked on many kinds of developments, including Reston Town Center and hybrids such as Cascades, in the fast-growing area between the capital and Leesburg, Virginia. According to Kettler, the advantages of compact, pedestrian-oriented design first registered on the company as an awareness that “you get more money if you put sidewalks on two sides of a street rather than one side.” As the region grew denser, “What we’ve learned in this process is how magnified the property values are when you have mixed uses,” Kettler says. The town center at Harbor Station will have parking garages surrounded on all sides by shops or residential units. “No structured parking will be visible at all,” says Richard W. Hausler, president of KSI. “Everything is pedestrian-accessible and -oriented. “There will be 1,250 to 1,300 residential units in buildings five to eight stories high in the town center.” “We’ve evolved from a mostly suburban residential developer to a mixed-use developer,” Kettler says. Of about 60 developments now in the works, “probably a dozen compact urban sites are under development or predevelopment,” he notes, including a site in Washington at George Washington University, which will be developed in concert with Boston Properties. “People are coming to realize [transit-oriented development] is a good way to live,” he observes. “Driving isn’t going to get better.” Still, a developer’s marketing program has to target rail riders, not assume that diehard motorists will switch to mass transit, Hausler says. When KSI assembled a transit-oriented development in Lorton, Virginia, Hausler says, “we advertised the rail station from the day it opened. The audience we reached was a lot of people already familiar with rail. You don’t necessarily create rail riders; you find them.”