Our Holiday Gift to You: YouTubes Videos of Seasonal Reston Fare

For lazy "web loggers," YouTube is the gift that keeps on giving all year round. In the spirit of the holidays, here's some fancy videos you may have missed.

Did you miss the Reston Holiday Parade? Here it is:

Next up is a "holiday wish" from our BFFs at Rescue Reston. You'll never guess what that wish is! (Spoiler: It's not a set of cufflinks.) If you want to give Rescue Reston a present, you could sign up to go to their fundraising "winter gala" on Jan. 26, if you're so inclined.



This isn't particularly Christmas-y, but it 1) is from Reston and 2) we think we saw a Christmas tree in the background at one point.



Finally, please to be enjoying this fancy video of Reston's best (and most DRB-pleasing monochrome) household light display, straight outta fashionable North Reston. The home's owners are asking everyone to donate to St. Jude's, which sounds seasonally appropriate to us. Enjoy, and happy holidays.

At Tall Oaks, a Blue Christmas (Sign)

This artsy photo from the Twitter machine captures the spirit of the season at our ersatz downtown. On the odd chance you haven't stopped by in the past month or so, it's actually quite pretty!

But we're writing with the exciting news that that RTC is not the only place to get into the last-minute Christmas spirit! Confidential Restonian Operative "Joel" shared these exciting and festive photos of the Tall Oaks Stucco Wasteland Shopping Center.

"Joel" writes:

Crowds of shoppers will find the holiday spirit alive at Tall Oaks Village Center, where light posts are festooned with new seasonal banners.

"All four seasons are represented," "Joel" adds, and indeed they are. We'd like to think that Susie de Los Santos would be proud.

We hope that this inspires you to go out and do some last-minute Christmas shopping, except that there aren't really any establishments at Tall Oaks to shop from per se, unless you want a gift card from one of its (seriously excellent) restaurants, or maybe to do some Christmas dry cleaning, the end.

Everything's Coming Up Bollards: JBG Buys Another Reston Apartment Complex

We know what Reston's getting for Christmas: more bollardy goodness! JBG, owner of the soon-to-be-redeveloped Fairway Apartments complex, apparently rolled double ones on the Reston Monopoly board and has purchased Charter Oak, the garden apartment complex closest to Park Place Fairway on North Shore Road. Give us some good blockquote, BFFs at Patch:

Charter Oak is a 262-unit complex off of North Shore Road near Lake Anne.

JBG, which also owns the Reston Heights mixed-use development and nearby Fairway Apartments in Reston, says the complex's location near Hidden Creek Country Club, Reston Town Center and Metro's upcoming Silver Line, presents a "terrific opportunity."

A JBG spokeswoman also said that there are "no redevelopment plans at this time."

However, Charter Oak, a garden-apartment complex built in 1970, is smack in the middle of other affordable housing developments slated for redevelopment.

Also, the move is furthering the consolidation of a handful of big developers with an outsize stake in Reston (re)development: Along with Fairway and Charter Oak, JBG owns Reston Heights, itself slated for further redevelopment. Lerner has dibs on the Spectrum, plus maybe the proposed Reston National Golf Course redevelopment, or so the folks at Rescue Reston have alleged. By acquiring the original buildings earlier this year, Boston Properties now owns much of the present (and future) Reston Town Center. And who knows who will wind up the "winner" of the county's Crescent Apartments redevelopment RFP.

Maybe it's time to resurrect the Game of Reston. We call Macaroni Grill Marvin Gardens!

Reston: The Maps

Confidential Restonian Operative "Ryan" shared this eye-catching map he created with us:

I've been living in Reston for about 6 years now, and I've always noticed how Reston has the coolest looking neighborhood signs. I came up with an idea to photograph all of the neighborhood signs I could find and arrange them onto a map of Reston.

Or if you like your maps with actual streets and bodies of water and whatnot, our BFFs at the Reston Association have updated Reston: The Map. Download the PDF at this link, print it out, roll it up, and put it in the stockings of your loved ones. Your kids will love hanging their official map of Reston next to their Bobby Sherman One Direction poster, the end.

Flashback Monday: Homes for 70s Hep Cats in Their 20s

Set the controls of the Earth-Toned Wayback Machine to 1972, when this fancy advertisement told hip young people, presumably wearing Wavy Gravy-style tie-die shirts, that they could own a "home" in a place called "Reston." The image is tiny, but you can see Bearded Dad sitting on a sofa that we can thank our lucky stars was photographed in black-and-white, to spare us its mauve and orange horrors. He's watching as his wife and their child luxuriate in the thick pile of the earth-toned shag carpeting, contemplating a tiny tree and a disturbing bust of a human head on top of what is either a large microwave or small tevee. Behold the horror:

The breathless marketing copy reads:

Sanibel Townhouses: Reston's newest addition priced from $28,000. A value within reach even for a young couple in their twenties. And a Sanibel townhouse means an investment for the future, bringing you all the tax savings and equity accumulation advantages of full home ownership.

Way to talk to the Laugh-In crowd. Sock it to me... with more marketing copy!

And Sanibel owners will also own a part of Reston's leisure life.

To go with their leisure suits.

Close to your home are open green spaces, wooded pathways, swimming pools, tennis courts and playing fields. For convenience, a full range of shops and services is offered nearby in the Hunters Woods Village Center and Reston's new International Center. And Reston's Express Commuter Bus System brings the office and home closer together than ever before.

Sweet, Daddy-O! We'll spare everyone the mental math and share the depressing thought that the pioneering young folk who bought into the Reston dream in their 20s back then are now in their 60s, having aged just like the rest of us. And that cute kid? He's now a middle-aged man. Happy holidays!

As the Shadowood Turns: Post Runs Article Day Before Board Elections

The fancy Washington Post "news-paper" ran an article this morning about Shadowood's date with the state Supreme Court earlier this year. The stuff about the high court's ruling and its Serious Implications on how and when condo associations can fine their residents aren't new, but there are lots of fun details about life in South Reston's most litigious condo complex. Fines for calling the management office! Cars being towed en masse on (or right before) Thanksgiving! Air conditioning cutoffs! $75,000 for consulting services! Water damage left unrepaired for years! A board election to be held… tomorrow!

For years, the Shadowood Condominium Association imposed fees for things like calling the management office or having the wrong color blinds. It towed tenants’ cars for unpaid fees — on the day before Thanksgiving. It turned off the heat or air conditioning to apartments of owners who were in arrears or in violation of its many rules.

Last year, a Fairfax County judge permanently enjoined Shadowood from doing any of that stuff. The association appealed to the state Supreme Court, using its own members/victims’ money to pay its lawyers. This summer they lost there too, enshrining Shadowood in Virginia law under the concept that you can’t make up rules and impose fees if they are not in the development’s original master deed.

So many of the owners of the 450 condos in Shadowood, at the intersection of South Lakes and Soapstone drives, are interested in changing their association leadership. But the officers who run Shadowood, in particular longtime board president Brian Olivia, are still in charge. An election is scheduled for two of the five officers on Saturday, but with an interesting set of rules for who may run, and it will be interesting to see if the vote changes anything.

The article also provides a rare public airing of the Shadowood board's point of view.

Olivia is the target of a lot of ire, but he defends his positions calmly and in detail. He, and his lawyers, believed that state law allowed condo associations to impose fees in order to keep people from dumping trash or paying late, but that the Virginia courts reached a new, different view. Now, Olivia says, he has no way to enforce the rules in Shadowood, late fees are not being charged, and “it’s the Wild West around here.”

…Olivia felt like he and his board were merely trying to enforce rules to keep the place neat and orderly. Now, “we don’t have an effective means of enforcing our rules. We have to expect people are following the rules. They’re not.” He said Shadowood now couldn’t even charge a late fee or interest for late monthly maintenance payments.

…Olivia, who noted he and the other directors are unpaid, sent over a two-page list of the condo board’s accomplishments in the last three years, including electric heat pumps in all 450 units and extensive exterior improvements.

The Post article's a terrific read, full of "fun" stories (assuming you don't live there). Follow the link to read them all, but we'll share the one about how Fairfax County got involved in legal action against the complex:

For many years, Fairfax County has been one of the largest condo owners in Shadowood, having bought 16 units back in 1975 to rent to low-income folks. But when their tenants began having problems with fines and fees, the amounts quickly added up. In one month of 2010, Fairfax County was told it had rung up more than $10,000 in fees, for having incomplete forms on file, making improper calls to the management office and having invalid parking stickers. A Fairfax housing official tried to attend a hearing to challenge, brought a court reporter with her, and was ejected, court records show.

The county said a number of its tenants’ cars were towed on Thanksgiving morning one year despite discussions about pending obligations. Olivia said Fairfax had been late paying its bills, had been given a grace period granted to no one else, and still wouldn’t pay on time. He said utility bills needed to be paid for the entire complex, and all owners needed to pay their share. He said “parking privileges were suspended” and the vehicles towed on the day before Thanksgiving, not Thanksgiving morning.

So it's hardly surprising the upcoming board elections are generating equal amounts of drama:

So now comes Saturday’s election for two new board members, and a set of rules sent to possible candidates last month, including: “have no past, pending, probable or current litigation” against Shadowood and “have no more than three Shadowood governing document violations” in the past year.

This raised some eyebrows among the disgruntled owners. But Olivia said they were only voluntary guidelines, suggested by the association’s lawyer, and that several of the candidates already lined up to run are involved in lawsuits but are still on the ballot.

Jim Peters, an owner who wants new management, said Shadowood’s financial records were still being “concealed,” which he theorized was connected to the “extraordinary legal embarrassment and the court striking down our fines and late fee income. Shadowood’s owners should not have to vote from a position of ignorance.”

Saturday ought to be an interesting day at Shadowood, that's for sure.

Update: It appears the two incumbent board members up for re-election Saturday both lost their seats.

Reston Master Plan: Task Force With Unpronounceable Name Completes Report Draft as Metro Nears

Wow, did Christmas just come early to those of us who love land use debates focused on transit-oriented development! Our BFFs at Reston2020 have posted a draft of the fancy report that the Reston Master Plan Special Study Task Force With the Unpronounceable Acronym (¶) has spent the better part of three years putting together. It has a "vision for Reston in the 21st Century!" And "traffic issues!" (Don't we all!) And visions for the areas around the three future Metro stations! Just don't look for conclusions or performance standards, because those aren't done yet. And none of the work thus far involves the much scarier "Phase 2," which is where recommendations will be made about the extent to which Reston's existing righteous stucco strip malls village centers can be redeveloped into bollardy midrise goodness.

The other thing that's been going on sub rosa has been a quiet dialing back of proposed maximum development levels, due to a traffic analysis that suggested that Reston traffic would melt down for most of the daylight hours some key intersections would be completely jammed at "peak hours." Some inside-baseball changes could lead to more flexible development options, balanced by a greater mix of residential development and caveats that office space should be closest to the Metro stations to minimize the traffic impact. Not everyone is pleased, says an anonymous commenter to Reston2020:

You should’ve heard the crescendo of outraged cries from developers and land use attorneys at the last meeting as some of us did. This plan would mean no “tear down” and re-building, just less desirable infill construction—if any!—they said. Limiting development for traffic reasons is “the tail wagging the dog!”—they added. This will prevent Reston from achieving the visions laid out by the task force’s committees!—they raged. In the only counterpoint offered, one task force member noted that congestion is a major Reston problem now, not a hypothetical one for the future.

The real problem is the time that this process has taken, as developers continue pushing through proposals in the absence of guidance from a master plan. As RCA President Colin Mills wrote a few months back:

This timeline is, to say the least, disappointing.  The whole point of splitting the Master Plan Special Study into two phases is so that Phase 1 would be completed before the Silver Line got here, so that we'd establish the ground rules for development before the Metro-related proposals started coming in.

But as we've seen in the case of the notorious 23-story office tower, Metro-related development plans are already rolling in.  And by voting to approve a tower that violates the Task Force's planning principles, Supervisor Hudgins has indicated that she won't follow the Task Force proposal until it's approved by the Board of Supervisors.  Now we know that it's going to be at least a year before that proposal is in place.  That means another year of uncertainty in Reston's planning, which is frustrating for developers and the community alike.

I'm not blaming planning staff or the FCDOT for the schedule; the planners are working diligently, and the transportation analysis will take as long as it takes.  But the Task Force's deliberations have always been, well, deliberate.  Now we're seeing the price of that slow progress.

Meanwhile, Metro is coming, as this photo from the Toll Road taken by a Twitter Operative last week can attest:

What will arrive in Reston first -- a complete master plan or the first Silver Line train? Betting on Metro doing anything on schedule is a sucker's game, but we're definitely leaning in that direction at this point.