Kings Crossing, a proposed development hoped to be the flagship of revitalization efforts on Route 1 in Fairfax County, has been scuttled amid a sour economic climate that made the project far less lucrative than when developer JPI proposed it.
In a letter this week to community leaders and Fairfax County officials, JPI Senior Vice President Aaron Liebert said the long-awaited town center wouldn’t move forward “after more than four years of hard work and significant expense,” spelling out a major setback in a broader campaign to rejuvenate the stretch of south-county highway.
Liebert, explaining the decision,cited the decline in the national financial market, loss of interest from retailers, regulatory hurdles, the trickle of the housing crisis into the apartment market and an inability to reach an agreement on price and terms with one of the property owners.
Kings Crossing, which would have joined together a handful of parcels at the intersection of Richmond Highway and N. Kings Highway, is the second major planned development in the area to be canceled after Kettler yanked its Midtown Springfield project last summer.
Mount Vernon District Supervisor Gerald Hyland called JPI’s Monday letter “very disappointing.”
“It was the major object of our revitalization effort all up and down Route 1,” he said. “That was the site we zeroed in on as the preferred large site to try to revitalize; now it goes back to the drawing board.”
The $600 million development would have included 180 housing units and retail space on an assemblage of about 40 acres, said Lara Fritts, executive director of the Southeast Fairfax Development Corp.
“We knew that with the economy changing, that it would be difficult for a town center of that magnitude to move forward,” Fritts said.
No one from JPI who could speak about the project could be reached Wednesday.
Theshelving of Kings Crossing has “slowed down, but not stalled” revitalization in the southeastern reaches of the county, Hyland said.
Officials said they hoped the arrival of 19,000 military jobs to Fort Belvoir by 2011, part of Base Realignment and Closure, would spur a glut of economic development around the base.
Also, a county panel has recommended a developer to convert 80 acres of the former Lorton Prison into a mixed-use center.
