New home development off Rt. 234 a step closer to construction

After eight years of delay, there’s been some movement on developer Mark Granville Smith’s next housing development.

Prince William County officials this month initiated an amendment of the county comprehensive land-use plan that calls for the rezoning of 346 acres of land near Classic Springs Drive and Counselor Road, near Colgan High School on Route 234, from agricultural to semi-rural residential, and parkland.

The comp-plan amendment request will now go before the county’s Planning Commission for review and recommendation. If approved, it will clear the way for Granville Smith’s Classic Concept Builders to construct the new Mid County Park and Estate Homes project.

It’ll be a mix of about 40 118 single-family homes and a public park that will sit on 208 acres of land. The neighborhood density is one home per three acres and is lower than the surrounding density in surrounding neighborhoods of one home to every 2.5 acres.

And, he should know as he’s built many of those surrounding neighborhoods, to include Classic Oaks and Classic Hallow.

The land on which Granville Smith wants to build is in the county’s Rural Crescent — a protected area of land from Quantico Marine Corps Base to the Manassas National Battlefield Park — where development is limited to one home per 10 acres.

Since 2013, the Rural Crescent has been the focus of a major land-use study, looking for new ways to develop and preserve some of the last remaining rural lands in Nothern Virginia. Granville Smith needs the comp-plan amendment to build his new homes, and he urged county leaders to ask for a comp-plan amendment despite a land-use study process that’s still ongoing.

Environmentalists want to keep the Rural Crescent policy adopted in 1998 in place, which limits development. Others want to see the area opened up to new development to increase the number of homes in the county officials with the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments say is needed to handle the region’s anticipated growth over the next 20 years.

It was this project eight years ago, Mid County Park and Estate Homes, that trigged a years-long study of the Rural Crescent and the land-use policies that govern it. Multiple recommendations have been made for new land-use policies in the Rural Crescent, including building “cluster” subdivisions — high concentrations of homes on small parcels of land.

The new Board of County Supervisors will meet for the first time on Jan. 7, 2020, and will be charged with creating a new land-use policy for the area.