Planning Commission Work Session on Draft Duke Street Land Use Plan - June 9, 2026
Planning Commission Work Session on Draft Duke Street Land Use Plan - June 9, 2026
This work session was a discussion of the draft Duke Street land use plan. No public testimony or formal actions were taken. Staff from the Planning Department presented an update on the plan's development, including community engagement findings, land use frameworks, building heights, mobility improvements, and open space strategies. Planning commissioners provided feedback and raised questions about flexibility, density, heights, connectivity, and phasing. The meeting date is based on the provided metadata; the transcript notes May 5, 2026, but the official meeting date per the user is June 9, 2026.
Discussion Items
- Community Engagement: Staff reported extensive outreach: over 3,500 residents, 250+ businesses, 10 community events, pop-ups, and engagement with students at ACHS and local elementary schools. A new online interactive tool was demonstrated to allow the public to view detailed maps and provide comments on specific locations.
- Land Use and Opportunity Sites: The corridor is approximately 3.5 miles long, covering about 10% of the city's land area. Draft land use themes include preserving affordable housing (over 1,275 committed affordable units, with 450 more in the pipeline; 11,000 total units, many market-rate affordable between 60-80% AMI), supporting small businesses (particularly along Wheeler and Colvin, where rent is under $30/sq ft), and creating flexibility to accommodate growth while retaining existing affordable units. Opportunity sites were identified for redevelopment, notably Fox Chase (2,000 units on 90 acres), the city campus, and other parcels.
- Building Heights: Most opportunity sites are proposed at 85 feet (currently typical for wood-frame construction). Taller heights are considered for functional uses on the city campus. Commissioners questioned whether the 85-foot limit might become outdated and whether flexibility should be built in to allow greater density to reduce market rent pressure. Staff acknowledged the need to study infrastructure impacts (traffic, sewer, stormwater, schools) and may include sensitivity analyses.
- Mobility and Connectivity: The plan aligns with Duke Street in Motion. A combination of city-led streetscape improvements and developer-provided sidewalks, bike lanes, and crosswalks is envisioned. New street grids and trails are proposed to improve north-south connectivity (crossing the rail corridor barrier), including a greenway under Telegraph Road to the King Street Metro station. Commissioners emphasized the importance of creating a cohesive but varied streetscape to slow traffic and make Duke Street feel less like a barrier.
- Parks and Open Space: The plan proposes adding neighborhood parks within walking distance of each area and connecting them via greenways. Flexible design is intended so that specific programming can be determined later. Commissioners stressed the need to view open space as a citywide network, including ecological corridors and connections to existing parks like West Taylor Run. The Virginia American Water site is under exploration for potential open space.
- City Campus and Functional Needs: Options include potential redevelopment of the police facility and Luckett Field, or keeping Luckett Field. Functional uses (bus storage, salt domes, etc.) are to be accommodated.
Key Outcomes
- Commissioners provided feedback on height flexibility, connectivity, open space networks, and phasing. They requested clearer principles to guide future developments not explicitly on the map.
- Staff will continue analyzing infrastructure capacity and sustainability (tree canopy, urban heat island, flooding).
- Next steps: Staff will present to other boards and commissions, host community meetings on housing/health (end of May) and transportation/parks (end of June), release draft recommendations in early July, followed by a draft plan in the fall, with a public hearing anticipated in December.
- No formal votes were taken; this was a work session for discussion only.
Meeting Transcript
Welcome to the May 5th, 2026 Planning Commission work session. Tonight's work session is a discussion of the draft Duke Street land use plan. Planning commissioners will have an opportunity to comment and ask questions. The planning commission will not receive public testimony, and we will not take any formal actions at tonight's work session. Members of the public are welcome to listen to this discussion, to comment on the draft plan or tonight's work session discussion. Please email plancom at Alexandria VA.gov. Immediately following the work session, the planning commission will hold its regular monthly public hearing beginning at 7 p.m. or soon thereafter. It information on public hearing items is available on the table outside of chambers. Staff may now begin the presentation. Thank you. Excellent. So I will I will kick us off and and just for the record, Jeff Farner, Deputy Director, uh Planning Department, and good evening, everyone. And this is a um really an update since we last talked to you in January. Uh at January, I think we talked about a framework and then coming back with sort of next steps. And so there's a lot to talk about tonight uh relative to a plan, and so we're excited to do that. I'm gonna turn it over to Carrie. We're gonna talk about um sort of the overall concepts. Uh she's gonna talk about a new platform we're using that we're excited about to get community engagement. Uh and then hopefully have a good discussion along the way. So again, thank you for having us. I'm not sure of this. Good evening, everyone. Um, so let's see. Let's uh we will have kind of two sections to our discussion tonight. First, we'll kind of remind you about um the process so far where we've been and what we've uh been working on since we last talked. Um and that will lead into Jeff talking about the draft um framework elements that we presented to the community in April, just a couple of weeks ago on these four main um land use topics. Um then we'll talk about next steps and then hopefully leave lots of time for questions and discussion among the planning commissioners. Quick reminder, this is the corridor that we're talking about, Duke Street from Old Town to uh the former landmark mall, about three and a half miles or West End, as Paul reminds me to call it. Um it uh this is um a large plan area for the city. It's um it's uh three and a half miles, as I mentioned, about ten percent of the city's land area um overall. And so you can see on the bottom there we've done a lot of community engagement to make sure that we're reaching out to all the various stakeholders in the area. We've had um ten different community events, we've reached out to 250 businesses plus, we've had a ton of pop-ups. Um we estimate uh more than 3500 residents, and we're also making a big push um with this project to reach out to students um at ACHS and uh the local elementary schools. And that has been um uh extremely rewarding and fun and hopefully fun for the students as well. And then in our kind of phases two and three, we developed several different kinds of work products we uh with the community. Our draft guiding principles, our draft land use themes. Then we took a lot of time evaluating all the ideas that developed out of those land use themes. We came up with corridor districts and had multiple opportunities for engagement online and in person on all of those different elements. And so where we are now, as I mentioned, is we're talking to you tonight about the draft framework plan. And then next up in the italics, there are the draft recommendations where we really start putting pen to paper about what this means for the future plan. And then ultimately in the fall, we'll have a draft plan for the public to review and ultimately go to public hearing in December is the is the anticipated schedule. So this is a reminder of what you you've already heard from us a bit. But we want to we thought it um made sense to kind of go over this again because this is really what has driven the development of the framework that Jeff is going to talk about. So we heard from lots of folks saying, you know, I feel like I feel like this corridor is a bunch of pieces that don't really fit together. And so what can a plan do to look at ways to address that kind that sense of kind of disconnection? Um, I feel like we have great um large open spaces, but we don't, they're hard to get to, and we don't really have access to smaller kind of neighborhood type of parks. So we've looked at that in our open space um approaches. Um always a consistent um message about making sure that we have enough affordable housing, um, lots of different types of opportunities for affordable housing, making sure that whatever we plan, um, we have studied the infrastructure, we've looked at um we've looked at traffic and sewer and all of the things that we need to make sure our city functions well. Lots of folks who say, you know, I love the retail that we have in our community.
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