In the Washington, D.C., area, new housing starts remain the powerful locomotive driving construction of new retail developments. Due to unparalleled consumer demographics, few places in the country can match this area’s dramatic one-two combination of new rooftops and strip centers. The projects generally arise in one of three forms:

w Grocery-anchored: Manokeek Village Center, a 160,000-square-foot retail center anchored by Giant Food and developed by Manekin LLC, is the prototypical example. Situated in suburban Prince George’s County near the Charles County line in Maryland, it is in close proximity to new single-family \and townhouse developments and surrounded by new road systems.

w Planned Unit Developments (PUDs): These developments consist of separate residential pods in tandem with adjacent recreational and retail amenities that service a captured consumer group. In Virginia’s Fairfax County, this is seen at Lorton Town Center, developed by KSI. Positioned along Interstate 95 and the Virginia Rail Express (VRE), Lorton Town Center is comprised of two components — the 130,000-square-foot grocery-anchored Lorton Marketplace Shopping Center and the 124,000-square-foot lifestyle/service-oriented Lorton Town Center at the VRE station.

w Redevelopment opportunities: Rockville Pike in Montgomery County, Maryland, is recognized nationally as the pre-eminent example of traditional retail strip centers, providing first-tier national retailers the opportunity to enjoy some of their highest sales volume stores. “The Pike” serves more than 900,000 residents. Aging developments provide tantalizing opportunities for redevelopment, such as Cohen Companies’ Congressional Village. It was designed with high-end residential apartments and a mixture of lifestyle retail, service retail and restaurants. The Washington Metro area will see clones of this project in the future as “smart” growth capitalizes on this region’s attractive demographics.

Philip T. Ruxton handles retail site selection and leasing for NAI KLNB in McLean, Virginia.


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