West Broad Village, the large mixed-use development underway on West Broad Street, rates cover story treatment in the Metro Business of today’s Times-Dispatch. The 115-acre project, which is rising upon one of the few remaining undeveloped tracts in the Short Pump area, will contain about 550 town houses and 340 apartments, 420,000 square feet of retail space and 668,000 of office space.
It’s hard to imagine that western Henrico County needs more retail space – especially so close to the 1.2 million square feet in nearby Short Pump Town Center, not to mention the big boxes lining West Broad and Pump Road — during an economic slowdown that has bit deeply into consumer pocketbooks. But “Village” officials profess optimism.
One of the very things crimping the economy – rising gasoline prices – should help the residential component of project.
With gasoline prices at $4 per gallon, people want to simplify their lives, maintains Patrick Ashley, a sales and marketing manager for Ryan Homes. “People are telling me that the higher gas prices, the more attractive West End Broad gets,” he told Louis Llovio with the Times-Dispatch. “Residents will be able to walk to the grocery store and to work: go to dinner and shop, all without leaving the area.”
Continued Ashley: “For someone who lives in, let’s say, in Goochland and works in Innsbrook or even downtown, this is a great spot because the commutes are shorter. After work and the weekends, they can just park their cars and not have to worry about it.”
Are higher gasoline prices enough to goose sales at West Broad Village? Will households forsake their single-family dwellings with big lots just to shave a few bucks off their weekly gasoline bill? The Villages at West Broad could provide an interesting test of consumer preferences — at least in the Richmond metropolitan region.
“Live, work play” is the new mantra in real estate development as rising gasoline prices prove punishing to Richmond-area road warriors. The project literature calls upon the vocabulary of the New Urbanism school of urban design, which calls for mixed uses, people-friendly streetscapes and a balance between accommodating the interests of pedestrians and automobiles. While West Broad Village makes concessions to the surrounding auto-centric landscape of Henrico County — it surrounds its retail stores with the usual vast parking lots — it provides parking decks for apartment dwellers and homeowners, and it has paid keen attention to creating designing “walkable,” pedestrian-friendly streets. As the website explains:
There are seamless transitions from neighborhoods, to the “main street,” to the public spaces and even to the adjacent school and park. Collectively, these spaces create a dynamic community framework, a community of neighborhoods social interaction can take place. …
Tree lined streets with comfortable sidewalks bring back the small town feeling of a community in West Broad Village. Streets will be designed to a pedestrian scale without compromising the automobile. Intersections will consider the pedestrian, bicycle and vehicular movement. Multiple connections and traffic calming will be integrated into the network design.
The developers are saying all the right things. How well the project will work in practice, wedged as it is into a classic landscape of “suburban sprawl,” is another question. West Broad Village is sealed off from neighboring development by a combination of wetlands, forested areas, upland reserves and parks, a “continuous natural edge.” The project map indicates little connectivity between the “village” and surrounding communities — other than the six-lane highway on West Broad Street. Traffic in and out of West Broad Village will add to the already horrendous congestion along West Broad.
Unlike the genuine urban environments that the project emulates, the Village’s streets and sidewalks do not knit the village into the fabric of surrounding neighborhoods. West Broad Village is a pedestrian oasis in a sea of auto-centric, big boxes, shopping centers and cul-de-sac residential development. The village cannot create an authentic urban experience. Still, with gas prices rising, retailers and homeowners may find even a faux-urban oasis preferable to the auto-dependent, suburban alternative.
(Cross posted with R’Biz.)