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Amazon-watchers, mark your calendars: Arlington County officials will host a public meeting July 10 about the tech behemoth’s forthcoming “HQ2” headquarters, which is proposed to be initially developed at the Metropolitan Park site in Northern Virginia. The meeting is set for 7 p.m. until 8:30 p.m. at the Trades Center–Park Operations Building at 2700 S. Taylor Street.
“Learn about the proposed development, planning background and how the review process will work,” a notice for the meeting says. “County staff and the applicant will be available to answer questions.” Amazon is partnering with Chevy Chase, Maryland-based developer JBG Smith on the development. Their plans call for two 22-story office buildings containing over 2 million square feet of space, plus approximately 67,000 square feet of ground-floor retail.
The county’s planning commission must approve the project as it involves a change in use from previous plans for Metropolitan Park that were green-lighted in 2016. The commission is expected to begin reviewing the project at the committee level July 15. The development team is also proposing “an amendment to the Pentagon City Phased Development Site Plan ... to convert the allocated residential density to office density, to permit office buildings at heights of up to 22 stories and additional commercial/retail density on [Metropolitan Park],” according to the county’s description of the project. This phase of HQ2 will take up roughly 6.2 acres of the 16-acre Metropolitan Park site, located near the Pentagon City Metro station.
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Portland, Oregon-based architecture firm ZGF is designing the project. Recently, Amazon in a release noted that it anticipates “a significant amount” of its employees will “commute via mass transit, carpool, bike, or alternate forms of transportation” to the campus. Home prices in Arlington have already started to increase significantly since the HQ2 site was announced.
This post has been updated with the location of the meeting.