Location, Amenities Add to the Appeal

Kingstowne:
Location, Amenities
Add to the Appeal

Jerry Rathbone gets around. He teaches a Sunday school class for Korean-American teenagers at Virginia Presbyterian Church on Franconia Road, coaches a Fairfax County girls' basketball team in the winter, is active with the Annandale Rotary Club and commutes 23 miles each way to Shelter Mortgage Corp. in Reston, where he is a loan officer.

The full life he has chosen, Rathbone said, is the reason he lives in Kingstowne.

"If you boiled it down to one thing, I think this is an exceptional location for convenience," he said. "We're less than two miles from two exits on the Beltway, and when the Metro station near Springfield Mall opens its gates, we'll be near three Metro stops."

Rathbone and his wife, Hacha Pearson, have lived in the planned community south of Alexandria since 1989, when they bought their new town house for $226,000.

"It's a community where you have people looking out for your best interests," Rathbone said. "From that standpoint, you don't have time to go around making sure people are keeping their property up." His neighbors' attentiveness, he said, "helps preserve the property values for everyone."

The town is prized for its convenience and affordability, said Lisa Outlaw of Mount Vernon-Weichert Realtors in Springfield. A new single family home in Kingstowne sells for about $254,000. Town houses are priced from $182,000 to the $230,000s, with the average new town home priced in the $190,000s.

Outlaw said Kingstowne attracts young families and busy professionals who don't have time to maintain a single-family home, but want the same amount of space in a townhouse." And they're all after the same thing: location. Single-family homes are now being introduced in Kingstowne and they will fill a "much-needed niche," she said.

When completed in the next five years or so, the 1,170-acre community will include about 5,700 homes, and a population of up to 20,000.

"We are at a little past half buildout," said Kathleen Snyder, president of the board of trustees of Kingstowne Residential Owners Corp. "It's hard to say how many people live here, because we count units. But we usually estimate 6,000 to 8,000 residents."

She lives with her husband Craig in the Derbyshire neighborhood. The Snyders paid slightly more than $200,000 for their town house in 1988. "So many town houses are being built because nobody can afford land in Fairfax County," Snyder said.

Indeed, town houses are the main style of home in Kingstowne, with a something-for-everyone range of about 1,500—to 3,500—square—feet in size.

Kingstowne's three villages soon will be served by an elementary school—scheduled to open in the fall of 1995—and a shopping center including a Super Giant supermarket, gasoline station, dry cleaners and a Chinese restaurant. Also planned is a town center, with 2 million square feet of office space and movie theaters.

For a homeowners' fee of from $39 to $46 each month, Kingstowne residents can use pools and tennis and basketball courts. Two recreation centers are in full swing and a third is being designed. There are jogging and biking trails along Kingstowne Village Parkway and a 14-acre lake waits next to the information center in North Village, eventually to be used for fishing and paddle boating.

On a sunny weekend afternoon, guests browse around displays of floor plans and a miniature model of the community in the visitor center.

There is a sea of dirt around the lake—no landscaping yet—but someone already has stocked it with fish, and no one seems to mind the long wait for a bite.

The main community issue in Kingstowne is the proposed extension of South Van Dorn Street in Alexandria from its terminus south of Kingstowne Boulevard to Telegraph Road.

"That issue is the big guy," Snyder said. "The bottom line is this: We feel very strongly that [the road] is very necessary for our community, because it was planned as the back door in and out of Kingstowne. Without it, there are vast amounts of local traffic cutting through the community to get to Van Dorn Street and the Beltway."

The road extension has been postponed by an environmental group hoping to save Huntley Meadows, a park and wetlands on the other side. "We're less than two miles from two exits on the Beltway, and when the Metro station near Springfield Mall opens its gates, we'll be near three Metro stops."—Jerry Rathbone of Kingstowne. The whole issue is under review by the Army Corps of Engineers.

"We were thinking of having T-shirts made up that say, 'We live in Kingstowne and we can't get out!'" Snyder said.

Kingstowne is "a very active community," Snyder said. "We work very hard to solicit views and input from the residents on what they want to see where they live. And we get a great deal of response."

The board sends out newsletter articles and holds public meetings on various subjects.

"The community really demands a high degree of information from us. And, in fact, we get a lot of flak," which Snyder said she takes as a good sign.

"It's an incredibly convenient area," Snyder said, "because there are a lot of new roadways that have opened," including the Springfield-Franconia Parkway, and a new interchange in the works at Interstate 395, Interstate 95 and the Beltway. The Metro station at Van Dorn Street is about two miles away, and in two years or so, a new subway station will open across from Springfield Mall, about a mile and a half away.

Rathbone's only regret about his full schedule of working, teaching and coaching is that he doesn't know many of the people who live nearby.

"You don't know all the neighbors like you'd like. If we did, then we could find out what their problems are, and we could help each other more," he said. "That's one of the problems in our society."

Snyder credits "so many good people in Kingstowne who have gone out of their way" to make the community something to be proud of.

"Remember that Kingstowne was basically a gravel pit, a quarry," Snyder said. "We have had all kinds of problems just with developing the land, because it was really just a hideous hole in the wall.

"We have seen some of the original aerial photographs, and we said, 'Wow, you made this out of that?'"

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