Manassas leaders are looking at the Mathis Avenue corridor as the city’s next big activity center.
Currently home to a strip shopping mall, the city is picturing what that part of town, just outside downtown, might look like in the next 20 years.
Mid-rise buildings like the one that houses Apple Federal Credit Union, Fauquier Bank, and the city’s schools HQ, that would become more common and feature a mix of residential and commercial space.
New streetscape improvements would remake the neighborhood, next to the city’ downtown where, historically, the city has invested the majority of its resources and attention.
“Downtown is really the center of the community…but there’s really no boundary to what the downtown of a city can really look like,” said Manassas Economic Development Director Patrick Small on an episode of the Potomac Local Podcast. “So as we look for ways to push downtown out and grow that walkable, bikeable environment, add new businesses to the city’s tax base, there are, really, a couple of directions you could go.”
One of those directions is up, as new building heights are limited in downtown. And, with little developable land remaining and the city largely built out, residential developers will want to pack as many people as they can inside new, taller buildings.
The neighborhood is already changing.
- Restaurant mainstay Tony’s N.Y. Pizza is now relocating from the Mathis Shopping Center for a new home in Junction Shopping Center, where a Giant Food used to be
- A movie theater on Mathis has closed
- A Peebles store in the Mathis Shopping Center is changing its name it’s name to Gordmans, as the brick-and-mortar retail landscape continues to shrink
The city won a grant from the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments to begin early-stage planning of what the Mathis corridor could look like (a lot of it is outlined in this 2005 Mathis Avenue Sector Plan). Leaders hope another federal grant that would fund streetscape improvements could cut the redevelopment process in half, to about 10 years.
The Mathis Avenue corridor also includes a portion of Route 28 running parallel to Mathis. It’s dotted with fast-food eateries, a car lot, and a trailer park.
The city is also looking at streetscape improvements to South Grant Avenue, at the site of its new police station, and the Georgetown South neighborhood. There, city leaders want to put the street on a “road diet” and reduce the number of lanes from four to two, with some turn lanes into neighborhoods along the way.
Improved sidewalks are also apart of the overall plan to make the southern portion of Grant look more like its cousin, north of Church Street near the Prince William County Courthouse.
