Pursuing a Historic Overlay District for Holmes Run Acres
Update, 04/19/2021
On Monday, March 22, 2021 at 6:30PM, the Holmes Run Acres Historic Overlay District (HOD) Community Meeting was held virtually via WebEx. Nicole Brannan, Fairfax County Heritage Staff in charge of this project, reports that around 40 folks attended at the time of the WebEx meeting (plus Fairfax County staff. Supervisor Palchik also attended briefly), and 59 viewings have happened since the video was posted. The video is available online: search HRA HOD Community Meeting on fairfaxcounty.gov website.
At this time, Nicole is still preparing the Question and Answers from the Community Meeting, and we will post them here when she forwards them to us.
On Monday, March 22, 2021 at 6:30PM, the Holmes Run Acres Historic Overlay District (HOD) Community Meeting was held virtually via WebEx. Nicole Brannan, Fairfax County Heritage Staff in charge of this project, reports that around 40 folks attended at the time of the WebEx meeting (plus Fairfax County staff. Supervisor Palchik also attended briefly), and 59 viewings have happened since the video was posted. The video is available online: search HRA HOD Community Meeting on fairfaxcounty.gov website.
At this time, Nicole is still preparing the Question and Answers from the Community Meeting, and we will post them here when she forwards them to us.
Below are several documents that chart the main steps in this effort:
The process involved launching the inquiry - asking every household in the neighborhood (one vote per household) to vote yes or no via a survey - collecting a clear majority of “yes” votes in order to move forward (we collected 72% in favor), and asking our Providence Supervisor to make the motion to the Board of Supervisors to allow a study to begin, to assess the potential establishment of an HOD for our neighborhood.
Why did we decide to pursue this?
For years, there has been steady development pressure on our little neighborhood. The majority of us like our little area of peace inside the beltway, and prefer to hold onto it rather than see it flipped to larger homes that eat up the gardens and tree coverage on our lots, and replace these with bigger and taller, inward-focused, walls of structure. The larger home flips are especially egregious in a Mid-Century Modern neighborhood because the architecture of the MCM house - with its relatively low roof, large expanses of windows and its garden-like setting - depends on nature and view corridors for sense of space, and the houses are pleasant and inviting because of it. One of the enduring and beloved tenets of MCM architecture is its connection with nature. If we pave over this nature and disrupt our view sheds into this garden-like setting, if we instead look out of our windows at the wall of a neighbor’s McMansion, or into the windows of our neighbor whose house is now in close proximity, we will quickly seal up our glass to gain privacy, and our homes will feel tiny indeed. The character will change irreparably.
The majority of those fortunate to live in a MCM house usually arrive at the desire to protect them from those big builds. And this was exactly the sentiment expressed by a majority of our neighborhood after we lost a few of our homes to tear-downs and large builds that are completely out of character with our historic, MCM neighborhood. One could argue that this attitude is NIMBYism (Not In My Back Yard). But with the ever increasing spotlight on our utter dependence on nature for our health and well being, it is also the conscientious thing to do, to make every effort to save our trees and the ratio of ‘nature’ to ‘built structure’ in our little corner of this world. We now know, through scientific studies and reports, what common sense has told us for millennia: we are in a symbiotic relationship with trees and nature. They provide oxygen, they clean the air, they soak up water, they provide shelter for birds and animals that are beneficial to and part of the ecosystem, they provide shade from the heat of summer, and they lower our blood pressure. The list of nature’s benefits parallels that of trees. Once we chop the trees down and pave over our natural environment to put more building up, we lose our best friends in health. So it is more than just saving a few homes. It is a critical pushback to bad planning, with health as its underpinning.
We successfully fought several efforts to build multi-family homes across Gallows Road in what is zoned a Residential area. We had less successful impact on INOVA’s proposal to build out the old Exxon Mobil site (and bring with it attendant traffic that some have argued will amount to 50,000 trips per day more than we see now). Closer to home, we see that our homes in HRA are being courted by developers and would-be flippers. As mentioned above, two home sites have already fallen to this. We felt we had to do something.
An HOD will not prevent development around us, and it will not prevent tear-downs, but what it seeks to do is to put into a mandate, more modest renovations and additions that will allow us to maintain the nature and garden-like setting of our historic neighborhood for generations and years to come. Some see this as trying to stop progress. But is it progress when you ruin something good to make room for something else? Is it progress when you create built density in every single family residential neighborhood, at the expense of nature, landscape, habitat, trees, oxygen, and a peaceful quality of life? Perhaps an HOD can provide the gentle hand of reason, putting parameters in place to allow modernizing and progress while continuing to respect the garden-like setting that connects us currently, and while respecting one’s neighbor by staying sympathetic to modest scale.
The Fairfax County Board of Supervisors approved the HOD study in January of 2020. A group of 6 volunteers from HRA (a mixture of ‘for’, ‘against’, and ‘on the fence about’ an HOD) and Fairfax County Heritage staff are currently meeting monthly to flesh out the answer to, “what makes an HRA house?” Then, this same group will work with the County to come up with guidelines that, if adopted, would create the guidelines for the HOD for HRA.
The meetings are monthly. During the pandemic they are held via WebEx. The schedule and the link to listen to the meetings can be found here:
https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/planning-development/plan-amendments/holmes-acres-run-hod
Many thanks to our Friends of Holmes Run Acres (FoHRA) committee, many thanks to the neighbors who helped FoHRA go door to door, and many thanks to our remarkable neighborhood for once again heeding the call when a critical matter was put before them.
Edith MacArthur,
Architect
Chair, Friends of Holmes Run Acres (a committee of the HRACA Board),
Past President, HRA Civic Association
- The flyer that launched the petition drive
- Meeting minutes from the November, 2019 Community Meeting at Woodburn Cafeteria
- Official motion made and approved at the Board of Supervisors meeting on January 14, 2020 by Providence Supervisor, Dalia Palchik
The process involved launching the inquiry - asking every household in the neighborhood (one vote per household) to vote yes or no via a survey - collecting a clear majority of “yes” votes in order to move forward (we collected 72% in favor), and asking our Providence Supervisor to make the motion to the Board of Supervisors to allow a study to begin, to assess the potential establishment of an HOD for our neighborhood.
Why did we decide to pursue this?
For years, there has been steady development pressure on our little neighborhood. The majority of us like our little area of peace inside the beltway, and prefer to hold onto it rather than see it flipped to larger homes that eat up the gardens and tree coverage on our lots, and replace these with bigger and taller, inward-focused, walls of structure. The larger home flips are especially egregious in a Mid-Century Modern neighborhood because the architecture of the MCM house - with its relatively low roof, large expanses of windows and its garden-like setting - depends on nature and view corridors for sense of space, and the houses are pleasant and inviting because of it. One of the enduring and beloved tenets of MCM architecture is its connection with nature. If we pave over this nature and disrupt our view sheds into this garden-like setting, if we instead look out of our windows at the wall of a neighbor’s McMansion, or into the windows of our neighbor whose house is now in close proximity, we will quickly seal up our glass to gain privacy, and our homes will feel tiny indeed. The character will change irreparably.
The majority of those fortunate to live in a MCM house usually arrive at the desire to protect them from those big builds. And this was exactly the sentiment expressed by a majority of our neighborhood after we lost a few of our homes to tear-downs and large builds that are completely out of character with our historic, MCM neighborhood. One could argue that this attitude is NIMBYism (Not In My Back Yard). But with the ever increasing spotlight on our utter dependence on nature for our health and well being, it is also the conscientious thing to do, to make every effort to save our trees and the ratio of ‘nature’ to ‘built structure’ in our little corner of this world. We now know, through scientific studies and reports, what common sense has told us for millennia: we are in a symbiotic relationship with trees and nature. They provide oxygen, they clean the air, they soak up water, they provide shelter for birds and animals that are beneficial to and part of the ecosystem, they provide shade from the heat of summer, and they lower our blood pressure. The list of nature’s benefits parallels that of trees. Once we chop the trees down and pave over our natural environment to put more building up, we lose our best friends in health. So it is more than just saving a few homes. It is a critical pushback to bad planning, with health as its underpinning.
We successfully fought several efforts to build multi-family homes across Gallows Road in what is zoned a Residential area. We had less successful impact on INOVA’s proposal to build out the old Exxon Mobil site (and bring with it attendant traffic that some have argued will amount to 50,000 trips per day more than we see now). Closer to home, we see that our homes in HRA are being courted by developers and would-be flippers. As mentioned above, two home sites have already fallen to this. We felt we had to do something.
An HOD will not prevent development around us, and it will not prevent tear-downs, but what it seeks to do is to put into a mandate, more modest renovations and additions that will allow us to maintain the nature and garden-like setting of our historic neighborhood for generations and years to come. Some see this as trying to stop progress. But is it progress when you ruin something good to make room for something else? Is it progress when you create built density in every single family residential neighborhood, at the expense of nature, landscape, habitat, trees, oxygen, and a peaceful quality of life? Perhaps an HOD can provide the gentle hand of reason, putting parameters in place to allow modernizing and progress while continuing to respect the garden-like setting that connects us currently, and while respecting one’s neighbor by staying sympathetic to modest scale.
The Fairfax County Board of Supervisors approved the HOD study in January of 2020. A group of 6 volunteers from HRA (a mixture of ‘for’, ‘against’, and ‘on the fence about’ an HOD) and Fairfax County Heritage staff are currently meeting monthly to flesh out the answer to, “what makes an HRA house?” Then, this same group will work with the County to come up with guidelines that, if adopted, would create the guidelines for the HOD for HRA.
The meetings are monthly. During the pandemic they are held via WebEx. The schedule and the link to listen to the meetings can be found here:
https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/planning-development/plan-amendments/holmes-acres-run-hod
Many thanks to our Friends of Holmes Run Acres (FoHRA) committee, many thanks to the neighbors who helped FoHRA go door to door, and many thanks to our remarkable neighborhood for once again heeding the call when a critical matter was put before them.
Edith MacArthur,
Architect
Chair, Friends of Holmes Run Acres (a committee of the HRACA Board),
Past President, HRA Civic Association
archived documents
HISTORIC OVERLAY DISTRICT articles / links
- "Mid-Century Modern Revival: To Many Millennials, Frank Lloyd was Right" - Anne Pyburn Craig, October 8, 2019 - Chronogram
- "Millennials Don't Want to Buy Baby Boomers' Sprawling, Multi-Bedroom Homes, and It's Creating a Major Problem in the Real-estate Market" - Katie Warren, March 27, 2019 - Business Insider
- "Downsizing the American Dream: The New Trend Toward 'Missing Middle Housing'"- Haisten Willis, February 14, 2019 - Washington Post
- "Your House Is In A Historic District: Does That Raise Or Lower Its Value?" - Regina Cole, August 20, 2018 - Forbes
- "Hollin Hills Plan Amendment 2018-IV-MV4" - July 31, 2018 - Fairfax County
- "10 Benefits of Establishing a Local Historic District" - Julia Rocchi, December 8, 2015 - National Trust for Historic Preservation
