Tuesdays at APA-DC: Re-Planning Crystal City As a 21st Century Urban Village

Re-Planning Crystal City As a 21st Century Urban Village
April 26, 2011


The 2006 Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) action hit
Arlington, Virginia, hard. The loss of 17,000 Department of
Defense employees and 4.2 million square feet of leased space was
the equivalent of losing five military bases, and most of the
impact was in the Crystal City neighborhood. Developed largely in
the 1960s and 1970s, Crystal City contained approximately 30
buildings aged 30 years or more, originally built to GSA
specifications that not longer reflected the needs of the market.
Arlington developed a plan to remove the older office buildings,
add more than 30 new buildings, increase density by more than 60
percent, and substantially improve transportation and the entire
urban environment.


This discussion will address the planning process, the economic
and transportation analyses that served as the basis of the plan,
and the innovative financing plan developed to pay for the
necessary infrastructure to make the plan a reality.