If you live or work in McLean just outside of the glass towers of Tysons you may have noticed a new mid-rise building under construction on Beverly Drive. The new building sits across the street from a mixed use high-rise, which gave me hope as a big fan of the new McLean revitalization concepts that this might be a step forward to recreating a town feel to the road bisected McLean.
Well you can’t get everything in life, and while improvements are continuing along Old Dominion on main street McLean, it appears this new structure will be a mixed use… storage and office building. With so many affluent neighbors near by it seems like an odd choice for a building, using valuable ground floor for one of the lowest income forms of redevelopment (outside of parking of course). The project is following all the rules, it is redeveloping what was pure parking before, so I guess it’s an improvement.
The building itself looks pretty nice (especially considering the bottom floor use), and I assume it won’t be your typical storage unit of old lawn equipment if its located in McLean… likely overflow parking for some nice cars until that new garage elevator is installed.
Ok that was a bit of a cheap shot.
Let’s hope some of the floor space could be retrofitted in the future for much needed residential and retail space, especially units that are affordable for people who want to buy in McLean but don’t have the $1 million to shell out for a townhouse, afterall industrial retrofits are sometimes the sturdiest and easiest to retrofit. I bet the developer would get a pretty good turnaround in price if and when that day comes.
