Las Urbanistas

By Alejandro Lazo Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, October 1, 2007; D01

The shells for what will be some of the biggest big-box retailers Columbia Heights has ever known are rising along 14th and Irving streets and Park Road NW. They include Target, Best Buy, and Bed Bath & Beyond.

Yet below these retail giants, space has been reserved for the little guys.

A Peruvian restaurant has signed a lease, as has a local African American franchiser of the Quizno’s sandwich chain. A Vietnamese grocer is negotiating to bring a Pho restaurant to the development. A locally owned spa may also come.

The $149.5 million DC USA project is being developed by Grid Properties of New York. President Drew Greenwald said the firm will reserve 15,000 square feet, or about 11 percent, of ground-floor retail space for local and minority-owned businesses, under an agreement with the District to buy and develop the land. He will reduce rents by 30 percent to encourage smaller tenants.

“With all the projects, it is going to be a nice mix,” Greenwald said. “It kind of has a little bit of everything.”

Throughout the District, developers are carving out space for locally owned or small businesses. While small businesses tend to be riskier bets than their better-financed corporate counterparts are, mixing local and national retailers is a goal of city officials when selling or leasing public land.

Mayor Adrian M. Fenty has made these set-asides for small and local businesses a priority in many negotiations with developers who seek to build on public land.

At the site of the former convention center on New York Avenue and Ninth Street NW, the city has struck one of the biggest of such agreements. The development team of Hines and Archstone-Smith has agreed to set aside 82,500 square feet, or 30 percent, of retail space for local or “unique shops.” It defines unique shops as operating fewer than six locations nationally. The development team will adjust rents accordingly to meet the mandate, said Howard J. Riker, a vice president in Hines’s Washington office.

“Local doesn’t necessarily mean small or local doesn’t mean new; it doesn’t necessarily mean ‘put at a disadvantage,’ ” Riker said. “The way that we will approach the leasing is that we want to make sure that all the retail tenants will succeed.”

Yet questions remain as to whether small and local businesses can compete in an environment of national brands.

“We may want to support the little guy in the neighborhood, but if his coffee doesn’t taste as good as Starbucks, if his clothes fall apart when you wear them or his furniture is out of fashion, are you going to go his store? You’re not,” said John A. Asadoorian, founder of Asadoorian Retail Solutions, a District brokerage firm.

Asadoorian added, “They should be viable businesses, and if they are viable, the property owners will want to put them in their projects anyway.”

Others question whether driving up the cost of these projects is worthwhile. In the short run, a few small businesses benefit from a program, but the cost is distributed across the entire tax base, said David H. Downs, a professor of finance and the director of the Kornblau Institute at Virginia Commonwealth University.

“If the taxpayers aren’t properly monitoring what is going on with these programs, they can be inefficient,” Downs said.

Mixes of national and small retailers already exist in the District. When Horning Brothers sought to renovate the Tivoli Theater, the original 1998 request called for the inclusion of at least one local business, said David Roodberg, chief executive at Horning Brothers. The project is also in Columbia Heights.

The project, anchored by a Giant grocer, includes several minority-owned and local businesses, including the Rumberos restaurant, Mayorga Coffee cafe and the Destiny De’ve hair salon and spa. Ruby Tuesday and Wachovia are the other national chains that are part of the mix.

“There is some risk,” Roodberg said. “But you have to evaluate the individual retailers and their experience.”

In the case of the DC USA development, the Development Corporation of Columbia Heights has played the role of recruiter for neighborhood businesses, overseeing an application and selection process and making recommendations to Grid. Robert Moore, chief executive of the group, said start-up costs for small businesses can be one of the biggest hurdles, particularly for businesses that are not franchises.

“When you walk down the street, the smells that you smell are the smells of the neighborhood: Ethiopian food, Peruvian kitchen, so I really think it’s going to give cachet to the place, and you’ll know you’re in someplace special,” Moore said.

Alejandro Lazo covers commercial real estate. His e-mail address islazoa@washpost.com.

By David A. Fahrenthol Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, September 30, 2007; C01

The Washington area produces more carbon dioxide than several medium-size European countries, according to a new estimate of local emissions, as the region’s crawling traffic and coal-fired power plants give it a pollution “footprint” out of proportion to its size.

The estimate, by the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, seems to be the first official attempt to put a number on the region’s contributions to climate change. And the number is big: 65.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide were emitted here in 2005. That was more than in all of Hungary, Finland, Sweden, Denmark or Switzerland, each of which has more people.

Within the region, the estimate shows that the Maryland suburbs — often stereotyped as green-leaning and blue-voting — produce more carbon dioxide than either the Virginia suburbs or the District. One major reason: It is home to three coal-burning power plants.

The region is now in a period of changing light bulbs and policies as residents and governments rush to rein in the pollution blamed for climate change.

The estimate shows how big the task really is. The region is polluting on a globally significant scale, it shows, and getting steadily worse.

“It’s not a surprise that we compete with entire countries in Scandinavia,” said Mike Tidwell, who heads the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, an environmental group. “What this data does is point up just how huge America’s contribution to climate change is . . . if our one capital region is emitting on par with other industrialized countries.”

Generally, most anything with a smokestack or tailpipe — anything burning some fossil fuel for energy — emits carbon dioxide, which accounts for about 84 percent of all U.S. greenhouse-gas pollution.

To calculate how much carbon dioxide the area emits, a sum called a carbon footprint, COG staff workers added up emissions from power plants, cars, airplane engines, home heaters and other sources.

Such pollution inventories have been done for states and some U.S. cities in recent years, but this effort seems to be one of the first to look at an entire metropolitan area.

One point of comparison was a study of the San Francisco Bay area. It produces more carbon dioxide than greater Washington, 69.7 million metric tons a year. But it also has more people, 6.8 million, so Washington produces more on a per capita basis.

Calculations were rough: For some emission sources, detailed local data were not available, so COG staff workers extrapolated numbers from state-level figures. They also did not include other pollutants, such as methane, that play a role in climate change.

“It’s not a full-blown inventory” of carbon emissions, said Jeffrey King of COG. “It’s estimates. We’re trying to estimate greenhouse emissions for the region based on available data.”

But, rudimentary as it is, the estimate makes one fact obvious: The Washington region may be only a pixel on the world map, but it is a significant player in its pollution.

“We’re kind of like a country — you know, a small country,” said Judi Greenwald, director of innovative solutions at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, a nonprofit group. She saw that as a bad thing and a good thing, in that if Washington cleaned up, the world would notice. “We can take action that is globally significant,” Greenwald said.

For example, greater Washington’s carbon dioxide emissions are 25 percent higher than those of Sweden, which has 9 million people, compared with the Washington region’s 5 million. Emissions are 42 percent higher than in Switzerland, a country of 7.5 million.

The reason that greater Washington pollutes a great deal, scientists say, is that Americans in general pollute a great deal.

In fact, the region’s residents — who can take mass transit and live in pedestrian-friendly urban centers — produce less carbon dioxide per capita than the average American. At last count, the total was 13.2 metric tons a year, compared with close to 20 metric tons a year per person nationally.

But the region still has many of the country’s bad carbon habits. Washington’s cars and trucks, which sit in traffic recently judged to be tied for second-worst in the country, account for 34 percent of area emissions. In total, transportation in the region accounts for 22.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, the equivalent of all of Lithuania’s emissions and roughly five times what Nicaragua emits.

Also, the area is home to several coal-burning power plants, the type of plant that supplies nearly half the country’s electricity. Together, power plants in the region produced about 20 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2005, or two times the output of Armenia.

“We rely heavily on coal,” said Montgomery County Council member George L. Leventhal (D-At Large), who has been active on environmental issues. “And coal is dirty.”

The impact of coal seems especially evident in the figures for Maryland, which has emissions almost equal to those of the District and Northern Virginia combined.

The main reason, according to King — who worked on the data — is the amount emitted from such coal-fired plants as Dickerson in Montgomery, Chalk Point in Prince George’s and Morgantown in Charles counties. Virginia also has several coal-fired plants, environmentalists said, but they are located mainly in other parts of the state.

Cleaning up the emissions from these coal-fired plants is, for now, a tall order because technology to capture and store carbon dioxide is not in wide use. For the moment, climate activists would like to see states reduce their overall energy use so that less coal needs to be burned. Eventually, they hope that cleaner energy sources will be found.

Governments at various levels are beginning their own cleanups. Arlington, Fairfax and Montgomery counties have joined a “cool counties” program that calls for such changes as more “green” buildings and more hybrid cars in county fleets. The District has mandated energy-saving features in some new buildings.

A new Maryland law will cut auto emissions, and the state has joined a regional pact to reduce emissions from power plants. Virginia recently announced an energy plan that includes a goal to cut emissions by 30 percent by 2025.

Ordinary citizens also seem to be looking for ways to help. A campaign called the Cool Capital Challenge, which asks individuals and companies to promise to reduce their own emissions, has received pledges this year totaling 265 million pounds of carbon dioxide.

In Woodley Park, environmental blogger Joseph Romm made his own changes, remodeling his home to include energy-saving appliances and an energy-generating solar array on the roof. He works from home most days and drives a hybrid Toyota Prius when he does leave.

“If you have come to the view that global warming is the biggest problem facing this country,” said Romm, who writes about climate change, “then I think you have to do something.”

But how much can really be done? Although local officials are promising to reduce carbon dioxide emissions in the coming decades, the COG report shows that pollution is actually going the other way: up. At the current pace, it forecasts, emissions will increase 35 percent by 2030.

That’s left a few local officials thinking that the region may need some solution to appear — a new technology, perhaps, that would make it possible to pollute less, even as the area grows.

“We don’t know how we’re going to meet the very, very . . . intense goal” of sharp reductions in the coming decades, said Stuart Freudberg, director of environmental programs for COG. “It’s not going to be something we figure out — you know, six months from now, we have the answer.”

Staff researcher Eddy Palanzo contributed to this report.

By Bill Brubaker Washington Post Staff Writer

Tuesday, September 18, 2007; 11:56 AM

In cell phone speak, Sprint Nextel Corp. hit a dead spot last night in its bid to build a 106-foot cellular tower — disguised as an agricultural silo — near the village of Philomont in rural western Loudoun County.

By Jonathan Mummolo Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 18, 2007; 11:30 AM

The spirit-sapping, schedule-scuttling congestion of the Washington area has grown so severe that the region is now in a tie for the second-worst traffic in the nation — a notch higher on an ignominious chart no city aims to top. Only drivers in freeway-filled Los Angeles endure rush hour delays more brutal than Washingtonians, according to a national study released today.

Washington and Atlanta pulled into a second-place tie with the San Francisco-Oakland region, which had held strong in second place for years, according to a report by the Texas Transportation Institute of 2005 conditions. Drivers in all three areas sit in gridlock for an average of 60 hours a year, equivalent to a week-and-a-half of work — or vacation.

The Washington area had been No. 3 in the previous study.

“We’re the world’s capital with world-class gridlock,” said John B. Townsend II, public and government affairs manager for AAA Mid-Atlantic.

The numbers for Washington area drivers are cringe worthy: They sat through more than 127 million hours of delays at a cost of $1,094 per rush-hour traveler. They wasted nearly 91 million gallons of fuel. A projected 218 lane miles or 74 million more transit riderswould have to be added each year just to maintain current congestion levels.

Though changes in the report’s methodology resulted in Washingtonians spending fewer hours stuck in congestion than in previous studies, things are most assuredly not improving, the authors cautioned.

On the contrary, the new analysis shows a worsening picture, with the area’s delay figures and national rank climbing steadily since the report first came out in 1984. A generation ago, Washington area drivers sat through a paltry 16 hours of congestion, placing the region at a respectable 18th in the nation. By 1985, the region had cracked the top 10 and by 1994 it was in the top five.

The Washington region is “afflicted with economic prosperity,” said the study’s co-author, Timothy J. Lomax. “Booming economies almost always see rapid growth and congestion . . . It’s a lot easier to put up an office building or a subdivision or a shopping center than it is to put in the transportation system needed to serve all that travel.”

Though increasingly difficult to thwart, the causes of congestion are not mysterious. The report cites large populations, shipping demands, slow construction of new roads and transit and such events crashes, breakdowns and bad weather that cause unpredictable delays.

Lomax noted that the delay figures account for all rush-hour travelers — whether they are riding their bikes to the corner store or sitting in a bumper-to-bumper nightmare on the way to the office — meaning that many area drivers well exceed the 60-hour average.

Overall, the study found a nation lodged in traffic jams. “Congestion . . . is getting worse in regions of all sizes,” the study states, and it reports staggering figures at the national level: 4.2 billion hours of delays, an increase of 200 million hours from 2004; 2.9 billion gallons of wasted fuel; and an annual cost of $710 per traveler, up from an inflation-adjusted $260 in 1982.

Perhaps most discouragingly for the Washington area, many of the solutions suggested in the report — using mass transit and HOV lanes, telecommuting, building new roads and relieving chokepoints — are already being done. Even with a new Woodrow Wilson Bridge, Springfield interchange and plans to expand Metro rail in Northern Virginia and build a new 18-mile highway across the Maryland suburbs, there are simply too many people to move from here to there.

“We’re not even close to keeping up, much less catching up,” said Alan Pisarski, a traffic analyst from Fairfax County, who has authored the “Commuting in America” series. “We’ve just got such a dramatic backlog of work to be done.”

Good news was hard to find in the report. Even Atlanta’s apparent improvement in certain categories isn’t cause for celebration, experts said. Yearly congestion in the Georgia metropolis dropped from a revised 73 hours to 60 hours between 2000 and 2005. While Lomax said that drop was partly due to increased service patrols, experts caution that the figures are likely due to the expanding geography of the region into more rural areas and a rapid growth in population, both of which would water down per-capita averages.

“I wouldn’t be looking to Atlanta as a model of the solution,” Pisarski said.

The study is sponsored by the American Public Transportation Association, the American Road and Transportation Builders Association and the University Transportation Center for Mobility and is based on data compiled by state and federal traffic agencies in 437 urban areas. Its results are obtained by comparing traffic counts and miles of road lanes to estimate congestion levels.

This year’s report employs a number of methodological changes and includes data from more localities and revised population estimates. For the Washington region, it also incorporates newly available data from the Virginia Department of Transportation and the Maryland State Highway Administration, Lomax said.

Ronald F. Kirby, director of transportation planning at the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments said he was hesitant to place too much weight on Washington’s shifting rank given the change in technique by the study’s authors.

“I guess my question would be, ‘Is the change in ranking real, or a result of the different methodology?’ ” Kirby said.

Kirby, whose organization has released a regional report based on aerial photographs since 1993, said Washington congestion is indeed worsening overall, but that it is very time- and location-specific and has actually improved in some spots.

There is one cause for hope: Washington is unlikely to ever overtake Los Angeles, where drivers spend a whopping 72 hours a year mired in delays.

Proposal Reflects Market’s Shift From Housing Construction

Thursday, September 13, 2007; Page GZ05

 By Bill Turque Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, September 6, 2007; Page A01

The Town of Herndon announced yesterday that it would close its 21-month-old day-laborer center next week instead of complying with a judge’s ruling that the site must be open to all residents, including those who might be illegal immigrants.

By Katherine Shaver and Amy Gardner Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, August 27, 2007; B01

The key decisions about Maryland’s proposed Purple Line — the route it takes, the type of rail cars it uses, the possibility of tunneling underground — will be determined not by public opinion or political pressure.

Rather, a single agency that controls the limited federal money set aside for transit projects will shape the rail or bus line that could eventually link Bethesda and New Carrollton.

The Federal Transit Administration, which helped sink plans for a tunnel through Tysons Corner and is demanding further cost accounting for the proposed Metro line through Dulles International Airport , will likewise dictate what any new transit line through suburban Maryland would look like and when — or whether — there will be money to build it.

“It’s the driving force behind the planning process,” Maryland Transportation Secretary John D. Porcari said of the competition for federal money. “You can have the best conceived transit project in the world, and it’s not going forward if it doesn’t qualify for federal funding.”

Toward that end, Porcari delayed consideration of the Purple Line for another year after deciding that the rider estimates were too crude to impress the federal officials in charge of doling out critical funding. Analysts are now recalculating ridership predictions using more sophisticated forecasting models.

Concerns about federal guidelines also led local officials to quickly rule out heavy rail — the type of trains used on Metro — in favor of slower, but far cheaper, light-rail trains or express buses. State officials have also rejected calls to run the line under the popular Capital Crescent Trail, saying it would be too expensive without saving travel time — another effort to satisfy federal criteria.

The concessions show just how focused planners are on pleasing officials at the federal agency. The Purple Line is estimated to cost as much as $1.6 billion, an amount state officials say they can’t afford without federal help.

Unlike federal highway funds, which states receive based on a formula and may spend as they wish, money for new transit projects is awarded at the discretion of the FTA. The agency doesn’t have much to dole out. The FTA has proposed spending about $1.4 billion on new transit projects next fiscal year, compared with $42 billion that states will receive for highway maintenance and construction, according to federal figures. More than 100 transit projects across the country are expected to compete for federal money in coming years, according to a federal report.

In deciding which projects deserve funds, FTA officials consider primarily which would attract enough riders and save them enough time to be worth the investment. They also consider the state and local governments’ ability to help pay for construction, maintenance and operating costs. Other considerations include impact on air quality, development around stations and the ability to move lower-income workers to jobs.

FTA evaluations can take years, because it rates a project — and grants permission for it to move forward — at several different points, controlling it from preliminary engineering through construction. The process has grown so complicated and time-consuming that, across the country, many local officials have begun to forgo federal money if they can secure enough local or private funds to build a project, according to a recent U.S. Government Accountability Office report.

“There’s less money, there’s tighter standards, and it’s a long, long haul,” said U.S. Rep. Frank R. Wolf (R-Va.) , one of the key leaders in securing federal money for the Dulles rail project.

Fearing they would jeopardize their $900 million in federal dollars, Virginia officials reluctantly dropped plans for a train tunnel beneath Tysons Corner this year. And although contractors expect to move dirt this fall on what would become Metro’s 23-mile Silver Line, transportation planners are scrambling to trim $275 million out of the budget to satisfy federal funding standards.

Transportation experts say the disparities between highway and transit-system funds — and how money is awarded — are rooted in outdated thinking. Highways have traditionally received more federal money because they have been viewed as connecting the country, while transit systems have been seen as serving individual cities.

“There’s still a lack of understanding of how fundamentally broken the transit program is,” said Robert Puentes, a Brookings Institution fellow.

Meanwhile, competition for that money is increasing rapidly. Many booming areas — including such traditional highway-loving cities as Phoenix, Denver and Houston — are turning to transit to curb air pollution and control their car-dependent sprawl.

“The demand for transit has never been higher,” Puentes said. “At the same time, the federal government substantially underfunds transit, so it’s very competitive to get those funds.”

To win, said Porcari, the transportation secretary, Maryland’s biggest challenge will be proving that a Purple Line would attract enough riders. He said he thinks it would beat out other proposals in its ability to serve a heavily transit-dependent population and blend into communities while “stabilizing and enhancing” them.

The 16-mile Purple Line, which could open by 2015, is designed to revitalize older communities, including such areas as Langley Park, where many lower-income residents rely on buses because the Metrorail system doesn’t take them east or west.

Unlike the Dulles project, which had little opposition beyond the Tysons Corner tunnel supporters, the Purple Line has met organized and vocal protest. Some residents in East Bethesda and Chevy Chase have complained that trains or buses would rumble past their back fences.

Efforts to save money by building most of the line aboveground also have drawn complaints. Trains or buses would pass through the Columbia Country Club’s golf course, and Capital Crescent Trail fans say the line would destroy the trail’s tranquillity while requiring thousands of trees to be cut between Bethesda and Silver Spring. Some University of Maryland officials have also argued that running trains or buses through the College Park campus would be unsafe for pedestrians.

By Sandhya Somashekhar; Washington Post Staff Writer; Tuesday, August 14, 2007; A01

In some ways, Sterling Park is the same as it was 40 years ago, when it was founded as Loudoun County’s first suburban-style planned community — a place where working-class families could find jobs, affordable homes and a piece of the American dream.

In other ways, though, the community has never been so different. One recent morning, Spanish ballads blared from the open door of Pepe’s Mexican Restaurant. A cadre of Latino children zoomed along the sidewalk on scooters in front of Sterling Elementary School, where a sign urging parents to register their children was printed in English and Spanish.

For decades, the conservative, largely white neighborhood of a few thousand families was isolated from the sweeping demographic changes that transformed Northern Virginia into one of the most diverse regions in the nation.

Today, Sterling Park is on the front line of that change. The number of Hispanics has surged since 2000 in Loudoun, the Census Bureau reported last week, with many of them settling in Sterling Park. The community is at the heart of an intensifying debate over illegal immigration that led the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors to join Prince William and several other Virginia jurisdictions last month in approving resolutions promising to crack down on illegal immigrants who use county services or commit crimes.

Many Sterling Park residents have praised the board’s action, saying the newcomers have brought with them a flood of illegal immigrants, whom they blame for everything from run-down houses to what they perceive as an increase in crime.

Immigrant advocates agree that the aging neighborhood — where nearly every block has a house with peeling paint or an unkempt yard, and gangs are a persistent problem — has seen better days. But they say the critics, and the politicians who have responded to them, are connecting a jumble of issues that have nothing to do with illegal immigration.

The debate has sharpened largely because of a backlash among longtime residents upset by the changes in the town.

“People I talk to are very concerned about degradation of their neighborhoods, property values, overcrowding, lack of maintenance on homes — that type of thing,” said state Del. Thomas Davis Rust (R), who represents Sterling Park and nearby Herndon and supports the resolutions. “Most people that have talked to me blame illegal immigration and believe there is a direct link. Do I have proof that there’s a link? No. But that is what people believe.”

One such resident is Fran Brocke, 76, of Ashburn, who lived in Sterling Park for 43 years but moved in October because her neighborhood, she said, was being “taken over by illegal aliens.” She is a member of Help Save Loudoun, a group that opposes illegal immigration.

“It really breaks my heart,” said Brocke, recalling the brick split-level house on Church Road where she raised her five kids. “People thought I’d never leave. But it just got to the point where I didn’t feel safe anymore.”

Defenders of the immigrants say many of the criticisms are not supported by statistics.

For instance, although there is a widespread perception that crime has increased in Sterling, sheriff’s office data show that nearly every kind of crime has decreased since 2000. Last year, Sterling Park saw a few high-profile shootings and gang-related incidents. But according to the Loudoun sheriff’s office, only one in 20 gang members in the county is in the country illegally, and most are U.S. citizens.

Brocke and others say Sterling has been plagued by illegal boarding houses that rent rooms in single-family homes to illegal immigrants.

From July 2006 to June 2007, officials received 198 complaints of overcrowded homes, said Keith Fairfax, head of the county’s residential overcrowding enforcement office. Only a few turned out to be boarding houses in which landlords rented homes to more than a dozen people, he said.

The county doesn’t track what percentage of inspections turn up violations, Fairfax said. The most common examples of violations were people sleeping in basement rooms with windows that were too small under Virginia law or three people sleeping in a room considered big enough for only two.

Often, inspectors found Bible study groups, people coming by to assist sick relatives, well-wishers visiting newborn babies and similar get-togethers, Fairfax said.

Laura Valle, executive director of the Hispanic advocacy group La Voz of Loudoun, agreed that Sterling Park has seen better days. But she has a different explanation for the changes. Since the community was founded in the early 1960s, the buildings are beginning to show their age, she said. And in a county where the average single-family home costs $660,000, Sterling Park has less expensive, relatively affordable houses that attract people for whom survival, not household maintenance, is a top priority.

That includes new immigrants, especially Hispanics, who were attracted to the construction jobs that proliferated in fast-growing Loudoun during the past decade, she said.

Valle believes there could be a connection, though tenuous, between some of the problems the residents complain of and illegal immigration.

“There is a connection to the extent that if you are an undocumented immigrant, your capacity to improve your economic situation and integrate into society is greatly reduced,” she said. “But in the scope of things, that’s really insignificant. Even if you were to miraculously deport every undocumented person, these issues wouldn’t go away.”

A 37-year-old Sterling Park woman, who asked that her name not be used because she came to Virginia illegally from Mexico last year, bristles at the suggestion that her neighborhood is run down and overrun with gangs.

The Sterling Park home she rents from a relative is modestly furnished but tidy. A sprinkler sits idle in her yard. Four cars are lined up in the driveway, and the lamppost is wound with Christmas lights. She said she and her husband, their three children and three other family members live there.

“All of us — my kids, too — we work all the time, and it’s sometimes hard to keep up with the house,” she said with the aid of a translator. “But I think it looks pretty good.”

Some activists believe the longtime residents’ concerns reflect a desire to return to a time when their community was more homogenous.

The Census figures released last week show Loudoun’s minority population is one of the fastest-growing in the nation. Sterling Park, in particular, has seen a striking increase in the Hispanic population: Last year, one in three students at the neighborhood’s Park View High School was Hispanic, compared with about one in 10 in 2000, according to the state.

“The community has been changing very rapidly, and maybe much to the unhappiness of some residents, many of those new people are not lily-white,” said Mukit Hossain, president of the Virginia Muslim Political Action Committee, which is based in the Sterling area and has been organizing opposition to the resolutions. “There has been an influx of a lot of immigrants into this area, which I’m sure makes some people nervous.”

The residents who called for the county’s action say they are not racist; they are simply fed up with those who show up uninvited and then treat the community with disrespect.

“The issue is coming over here illegally, staying illegally and doing things illegally. It’s about the rule of law,” said Larry Wilber, 61, a remodeling contractor who has lived in Sterling Park for 11 years.

Mike Amos, 32, a paralegal who grew up in Sterling Park, said, “I’ve seen my home town completely transformed from what it used to be, and not for the better.”

The strong anti-illegal immigrant stand among longtime Sterling Park residents is not surprising considering its political history. Until 2005, when Democrat David E. Poisson was elected in his place, Richard H. Black (R) represented the Sterling area in the House of Delegates for four terms. He was known as one of the state’s most conservative politicians.

The area’s representative on the Loudoun Board of Supervisors is Eugene A. Delgaudio (R), executive director of an anti-gay organization based in Falls Church. Delgaudio, who is up for reelection in November, was the main sponsor of the Loudoun resolution cracking down on illegal immigrants. In a note to constituents last month, he warned of “invasions of illegal aliens who turn safe neighborhoods into filthy, crowded slums.”

The rhetoric disturbs Jeanne West, his Democratic opponent. She believes illegal immigration is a distraction from the real problems of the neighborhood: its age and the lack of attention paid to it by elected officials.

“I don’t want to be this Pollyanna who says this it is not a problem, but I don’t want to lay all of it at the feet of illegal immigrants,” she said. “This is still a nice family neighborhood. Something needs to be done to make sure we get the amenities and the resources so we can keep the neighborhood desirable.”

Brocke, Wilber and others say that they’re not without compassion and that they welcome those who are in the country legally. It’s those who flout the law that bother them, they said.

“I don’t want someone coming to my country and building another dang country inside of it,” Wilber said. “It’s like if you came home and found someone in your house and you said, ‘What are you doing here?’ And they said: ‘Oh, the door was open; I just came in. By the way, I’m going to change some other things in your home, too.’ “

Researcher Meg Smith contributed to this report.

There is a dividing line in Chinatown — a narrow, inconspicuous alley that twists its way between Massachusetts Avenue NW and I Street.

The District’s recent decision to close it to make way for an office building complex estimated to cost $206 million has exposed a festering animosity between two influential Asian civic groups and launched a battle over the future of Chinatown.

In a community that rarely airs its disagreements publicly, the clash escalated until D.C. Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray (D) intervened.

“This alley closing and what came with it was a symptom of a deep-rooted and long-standing conflict,” said Gray, who has presided over four mediation sessions with the two groups.

On one side is the 25-year-old Chinatown Steering Committee, led by Chinatown’s unofficial mayor, 82-year-old Duane Wang, and powerful restaurateur Tony Cheng. On the other is the month-old Chinatown Revitalization Council, led by 54-year-old computer consultant Alexander Y. Chi.

Both sides want Chinatown to blossom. But the upstart revitalization council says that under the steering committee’s watch, Chinatown has dwindled to “Chinablock” — H Street between Sixth and Seventh streets. And there’s not much Chinese about that anymore, the critics say, other than the ornate phoenix and dragon archway on H Street and Cheng’s Mongolian barbecue restaurant.

Chi said the lack of vision has stifled the growth of the area as a destination point with uniquely Chinese attractions like other Chinatowns across the country. New office buildings, trendy restaurants and chain stores have overshadowed the family-owned Chinese shops, he said.

One of the block’s most famous restaurants, Golden Palace, was torn down to make way for Gallery Place. The block’s newest eatery is Vapiano. It will serve pizza.

Cheng, 58, said his critics are just upset that government officials have long viewed him and Wang as Chinatown’s leaders. “A lot of people are jealous because of all we have, because of all we do,” he said, sitting in his restaurant’s dining room, across from a circular tank filled with crabs.

And Chi is breaking one of the most important tenets of Chinese culture, Cheng said. “He doesn’t respect older people. Duane Wang is 82 years old,” he said. “You may have smarts, but you are not smarter than him.”

Wang said his group has made Chinatown safer and made it look more Chinese by pushing through lampposts, sidewalk bricks emblazoned with the Chinese zodiac and a requirement for Chinese lettering on the signs of all stores. Wang and Cheng say they need more support from the city to force developers to go beyond those small architectural touches.

Gray worries that without a major push to unite the civic groups, efforts to preserve Chinatown’s heritage could stall for years.

But his role as mediator has been difficult. During meetings, the groups have planted themselves on opposite sides of his office. Some people had not spoken to each other in two years. And when they do speak, their words are harsh.

Chi said it’s time for the steering committee to step aside or to at least allow others to be included in negotiations with developers and the city about what should be in Chinatown.

“They have so much passion, but it becomes the baggage,” he said. “They can’t see the forest for the trees.”

Alfred Liu, the architect who designed the archway in the 1980s, even balked at Wang’s unofficial title as the community’s mayor. “The mayor of Chinatown. . . . Did we have an election?” said Liu, who has ditched his seat on the steering committee for one with the revitalization council.

The city Office of Planning gives weight to the steering committee’s recommendations when considering developments. Wang, with Cheng at his side, represented the neighborhood in one of the biggest developments in recent history in Chinatown: a 360,000-square-foot office building with a 300-space underground parking garage along Massachusetts Avenue proposed last year by developer Kingdon Gould III.

The steering committee and the revitalization council, along with downtown business groups, liked the idea because the block had deteriorated — it’s dotted with abandoned houses — and Gould promised to incorporate Chinese motifs in the design. The hope was that the development could revitalize that area, a block from the bustle of H Street.

That’s where the alley fight came in.

As other developers have done, Gould said he offered the steering committee a “benefits package” as a good-neighbor gesture. He offered $1 million for affordable housing in Chinatown, 13,000 square feet of space for community activities, $100,000 in grants for programs and 10 free parking spots for committee members, according to documents submitted to the D.C. Council.

Gould’s pledges hinged on closing part of the alley to make a service entrance, according to documents submitted to the D.C. Council.

But the alley happens to be right behind the homes of several steering committee members. They objected, and Wang and Cheng backed them, citing inconvenience and a potential increase in crime.

At a June council hearing, Gould testified that Wang and Cheng would not compromise.

Gray stepped in to mediate the impasse behind closed doors.

Gould apparently then decided to go around the steering committee. He redesigned the plans and cut the community space to 4,100 square feet. Instead of allowing the steering committee to operate the space, as they wanted, he specified that several community groups share it when the building is completed in about 3 1/2 years.

Gould also pledged $600,000 to the Chinese Community Church for roof repairs, a discount to Asian retailers who might want to lease retail space in the new building and $850,000 to a nonprofit group in Adams Morgan for affordable housing — a couple of miles from Chinatown.

Last month, the D.C. Council approved the terms, 12 to 1. The dissenter was council member Marion Barry (D-Ward 8), a longtime friend of Cheng. “I think Tony Cheng and the old-timers have been discarded,” he said.

In the end, the deal satisfied neither side. The revitalization council, which supported Gould’s plan, says that the affordable housing money never should have left Chinatown’s borders and that the $600,000 given to the church should have been spread among more groups.

“As a community, we missed an opportunity,” Chi said.

And no one seems to share Gould’s vision of shared community space, either.

Chi and others are fighting to get it, saying Cheng and Wang monopolize the Chinatown Community Cultural Center, a 3,000-square-foot space developer Herb Miller gave the community when he built Gallery Place.

Cheng is the center’s president; Wang is vice president. Cheng’s daughter is executive director; Wang’s daughter teaches English classes there.

Wang denies monopolizing the center and argues that it has been put to good use, emphasizing the table tennis and martial arts classes.

Dwan Tai, a former member of the steering committee, wants Gray to help other groups get use of the Gould community center.

Gray said his biggest achievement so far has been to get the two groups in the same room. He’d like to create an inclusive and neutral Chinatown Advisory Planning Council to divvy up use of the new community center and create a vision for Chinatown.

Wang said he knows the two groups must unite for Chinatown to survive and flourish.

“There’s an old Chinese saying, ‘When two fish fight, who wins?’ ” he said.

He paused, then put up his fists and hit them together to show their battle. “The fisherman.”

By Kendra Marr Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 13, 2007; D01

Residents around the western edge of Woodbridge yearned for classy places to dine, shop and play. They waited and waited.

And last month their wish was finally granted. On opening night, more than a thousand residents streamed through the doors of the community’s newest elite establishment — a grocery store.

“It’s nice to finally have something upscale to go with the house values,” said Ernesto Flores, 36, who just moved from Arlington.

This is the power of a gourmet grocer in the Washington area. The new Harris Teeter near Woodbridge isn’t a five-star eatery, but it has the ability to lure the popular retailers and affluent customers that developers covet.

Developers court these grocers with plenty of facts and figures. The grocers they seek are attracted to communities with “stronger demographics,” said Christopher Weilminster, senior vice president of leasing for Federal Realty.

Translation: high disposable incomes, high education levels, high traffic and high density.

Northern Virginia typically fits the bill. Thirty years ago, the suburbs were mostly bedroom communities for military and federal employees, said Bob Kettler, a developer.

Now, as the area has diversified with such companies as Oracle and Sprint Nextel, there’s been a remarkable shift in the education and financial capabilities of the entire marketplace, he said.

“These are people with high disposable incomes,” Kettler said. “They have knowledge about the products and the ability to buy them.”

Of the 40 grocery stores under construction, both gourmet and otherwise, in the Washington area, 65 percent are in Northern Virginia, according to Delta Associates, an Alexandria retail research firm.

Arlington County illustrates the appeal. In 2006, households there spent significantly more than average U.S. households on groceries and eating out, and spent slightly more in each category than regional counterparts, according to a newly published study by Arlington Economic Development.

Harris Teeter, since arriving in the Washington area from North Carolina about a decade ago, has opened the vast majority of its stores in Northern Virginia. Another chain, Wegmans, will open four superstores in Northern Virginia and four in Maryland.

“Not one area in America can replicate Northern Virginia in the level of affluence and the broad base of that affluence,” said Jeffrey Metzger, publisher of Food World, a trade publication.

The right demographics helped Prince William County land the Harris Teeter near Woodbridge, said Don E. Stedham, vice president of investment for Regency Centers.

They had the same effect in Gainesville, where a Harris Teeter will anchor a mixed-use development, Madison Crescent, expected to open in September. The median household income is $84,930 in a five-mile radius around Madison Crescent. It will be a gateway to Prince William County, which has a median household income of $89,634, according to a 2005 census survey. Townhouses start at $299,990.

“We were able to provide them high visibility in a growing area with good opportunities for jobs, good home values and demographics of a particular income level,” said John D. Rhoad Jr. of RMJ Development Group, who is building the development.

The specialty grocery store craze took off in the Washington area in the early 1980s, when Federal Realty revamped the Wildwood Shopping Center in Bethesda, replacing the old Grand Union with a Sutton Place Gourmet, which is now part of the Balducci’s family, Weilminster said. The new store was “wildly successful,” as affluent customers and retailers flocked to the area, he said.

“That’s when we understood how powerful the right grocery operator can be,” Weilminster said.

Over the years, some communities have complained that they have waited a long time for a gourmet grocer of their own. No matter how much they begged (Wegmans received 4,800 requests for stores last year) or pleaded (Balducci’s gets frequent phone calls from developers and homeowners), a specialty store remained just a wish.

“It’s only a matter of time,” said Gregory H. Leisch, chief executive of Delta Associates. “Virtually every Zip code with above average incomes in the metropolitan area is going to be well served with upscale grocers.”

While demographics are important, other factors can influence where a grocery store is built. Not all communities have the land to handle a 140,000-square-foot Wegmans with 700 employees. Wegmans stores tend to be regional, and on weekends, shoppers from as far as Richmond and Charlottesville crowd the Fairfax store.

“You have to go when everyone else is at church or late, late at night,” said Marlene Marx, 59, of Oakton.

Whole Foods, Balducci’s and Trader Joe’s typically run one-size-fits-all operations with specific real estate, parking and layout requirements. Harris Teeter has been the most flexible, developers said. In North Bethesda a two-level store is under construction.

“An 18-story apartment building will sit above grocery store,” said Michael J. Smith of LCOR, which is developing the North Bethesda project. “Harris Teeter was comfortable with a dense, urban mixed-use project with existing real estate close by. They’re one of the few operators that’s comfortable working within that kind of an envelope.”

The grocer is able to squeeze into smaller urban locations. Federal Realty is building a 29,000-square-foot Harris Teeter in Shirlington, a store about half the size of an average food retailer.

“Traditional grocers like Giant and Safeway were not candidates,” Weilminster said. “They couldn’t figure out a way to vary their product mix in such a small space.”

Though the gourmet stores have their appeal, traditional groceries still dominate the greater Washington area. Giant led the list of top 10 supermarket chains in the area in total sales, with 133 stores totaling $3.41 billion in sales, or 37.12 percent of the market, according to a survey this year by Food World.

Safeway, Shoppers Food Warehouse and Food Lion followed. Whole Foods came in fifth with 4.06 percent of the market. Harris Teeter ranked sixth with 2.57 percent and Wegmans was seventh, with 1.71 percent. Trader Joe’s didn’t rank in the top 10.

The competition for that market share is only getting tougher, analysts said. People are eating out more. Big-box retailers, such as Wal-Mart and Target, are entering the food market. Ethnic markets are growing.

“Everybody sharpening their focus — this is what we provide and what the other guy doesn’t have,” said Metzger, noting that the Washington region has become one of the most competitive markets for grocery stores.

A Washington area grocery store serves an average of 9,700 people, compared with the national average of 8,500 people, according to Delta Associates.

As soon as a gourmet grocery store announces it will anchor a new shopping center, adjacent storefronts immediately start leasing, developers said.

Wegmans’s upcoming arrival in Leesburg sparked interest from Barnes and Noble, Borders, and Linens ‘n Things, said Kettler, the developer. “Wegmans can drive enough traffic to support a larger retail community with so many more uses,” he said. “It draws a certain type of customers, which retailers like. The combination of the two is incredibly powerful.”

Harris Teeter has become one of Madison Crescent’s main selling points. Fliers tell retailers to “Join Harris Teeter,” the development’s Web site notifies prospective tenants that the grocer is within walking distance, and maps feature the store as a prominent structure.

Starbucks, China Wok, Escape Salon & Day Spa and Subway occupy the new Harris Teeter-anchored plaza at Prince William Parkway and Hoadly Road near Woodbridge. “It made my job a lot easier when Harris Teeter came on board,” Stedham said.

Residents hope that the development will have ripples.

“We need a good sit-down restaurant,” said Thomas Burrell, vice president of the Lake Ridge-Occoquan-Coles Civic Association. “I think we have enough Burger Kings, McDonald’s and KFCs.”