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The Middleton Farm tract is on the south side of West Ox Road, stretching from Monroe Street to New Parkland Drive.

See also the local meetings page - some of these meetings have to do with Middleton Farm - and the Toll Brothers web site. The Middleton Farm section on the Toll Brothers web site shows available models, including floor plans and pricing.

9/26/2000

Many homes are complete and under construction; several now have residents. The West Ox road widening in the immediate vicinity of Middleton Farm Drive is more or less complete.

Traffic light proffer: last we heard, VDOT had not yet decided at which intersection (Monroe Street, New Parkland Drive, or McLearen Road) to put the light.

The following is a summary as submitted by Roy Hand, BFHOA Board Member, on 8/18/98

MIDDLETON FARM DEVELOPMENT APPROVED

As everyone has heard by now, the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors last month approved the Middleton Farm Rezoning Proffer submitted by Toll Brothers developers. There was no public hearing before the vote as the public hearing was held the previous month when the proffer was placed on indefinite hold due to a issue involving an old holly tree in the middle of the property. The actual proffer approved was amended as follows:

1. The development will contain 239 homes when completely finished. Mr. Middleton, who resides in one of the brick homes on the property boarding West Ox Road, has stated that he does not plan to move in the near future. Consequently, it appears that this portion of the Middleton Farm property will not be developed for several years.
2. There will be 12 ADUs located toward the middle of the development.
3. There will a 17-acre neighborhood park on the southwest corner of the property adjacent to Horse Pen Run. The park will be constructed under the guidance of the Fairfax County Park Service and both Toll Brothers and the Park Service will construct "access" walk-paths to the park from the surrounding neighborhoods.
4. The land in the designated EQC/wet land area (the wooded area along both sides of the stream from the Bradley Farm Drive stub street to Horse Pen Run) will be donated by Toll Brothers to the Board of Supervisors for park land use (approximately 2 acres).
5. A "pocket" park (approximately ½ acre) will be created around the old Middleton Farm holly tree to help preserve it. The pocket park represents the difference between the previous 240 homes sites and the approved 239 home sites.
6. Toll Brothers will donate a traffic signal to be placed on West Ox Road by VDOT to help control and manage vehicle traffic. The location of the traffic signal will be decided by VDOT prior to the start of home site construction this fall.
7. The main drive into Middleton Farm, which will only have one primary egress, will be Middleton Farm Drive. This street will exit onto West Ox Road at the current intersection of Monterey Estates Drive and West Ox Road. To accommodate the new intersection, West Ox Road will be widened between New Parkland Drive and Monroe Street. Both Monterey Estates Drive and Middleton Farm Drive will given a left and right hand turn into those streets from West Ox Road.
8. The Board of Supervisors petitioned VDOT to seriously review the county's Five Year Road Improvement Plan for the purpose of decreasing the time before West Ox Road is widened to a four-lane road from Fairfax County Parkway to Centerville Road.

The grey area marked "AT&T property" is just that - a long, narrow strip of land that Mr. Middleton sold to AT&T a number of years ago (in the late 1970s, I believe). Buried along (under) this property is a major fiber-optic cable which carries a huge amount of data up and down the East Coast. The grey area marked "AT&T easement" is land which AT&T is allowed to use in order to maintain their property. When walking the terrain, you'll know this as the long gravel road along the side of the Middleton property.

The bluish-green area (see sketch) is land Toll Brothers proposes to donate to the Park Authority. Some of this would become protected, as it is an "EQC" (environmental quality corridor) and/or wetlands. Most of it is wetlands. Some, just south of the drainage pond marked on the map, would become a "neighborhood park". In Fairfax County Park Authority terms, this means there would be trails and some facilities, but no parking (except for a spot or two for a maintenance vehicle to use to collect trash, etc.). The park would attract people from the surrounding neighborhoods. As I understand it, Toll Brothers is donating the land (about 17 acres) and will pay for the trail work and the facilities. Why? Well, developers are required to provide some sort of recreational facilities in or near new developments. I don't know the exact regulations, but they have an option of creating private facilities (such as The Barns/pool in Bradley Farm and the tennis courts in Spring Lake Estates - the rectangle on the top left of the map, by Running Pump Lane) or public facilities. Public facilities would benefit all of our neighborhoods, as well as - in this case - the Park Authority.

Lot size: the average lot size for the latest proposal is around or over 10,000 square feet. The smallest lots - and there are only a handful of them on the site - are around 6,000 square feet. The Middleton Farm lots immediately adjacent or backing to Spring Lake Estates and the other neighborhoods are larger than the lots they adjoin. One Spring Lake Estates homeowner harped on the smaller lot sizes in Middleton Farm as compared with the average lot size in Spring Lake Estates, but this is not a fair comparison, as Spring Lake Estates' R1 and R2 areas (one home per acre and two homes per acre, respectively) are not immediately adjacent to the Middleton Farm tract. The houses proposed for Middleton Farm are on lots comparable in size to, or larger than, the lots in the immediately adjacent neighborhoods. The handful of 6,000 square foot lots - in the upper left corner as seen in the diagrams on this web page - are irrelevant in the big picture. They're not all that much smaller than nearby homes in Spring Lake Estates, Bradley Farm, *or* Borneham Wood. There are plenty of homes in the Middleton Farm plan which are on lots much larger than those in the three adjacent neighborhoods.

Traffic light: the placement of the new traffic light on West Ox will decided solely by VDOT. It would be put at either Monroe Street, Monterey Estates Drive/the new Middleton Farm road, or at New Parkland. At the moment, VDOT seems to feel that New Parkland is and/or would be the busiest of those three intersections; however, the light placement decision is still a ways off. As a totally separate study from the one involving Middleton Farm, VDOT has already been looking at improving the West Ox/Monroe Street intersection. Once West Ox is widened to four lanes (which is on the comprehensive plan, but has not been funded yet), we might end up with lights at all three intersections. By that time, one would hope, the West Ox/Fairfax County Parkway intersection (now a light with turn lanes) would be changed to a full or partial interchange or overpass system to ease traffic flow. This is not an insignificant proffer by Toll Brothers - installing such a traffic light apparently runs around $100,000 to $120,000.

Back around 4/16/98, the webmaster spoke with people from the Office of Comprehensive Planning/Zoning Commission (324-1314) and the Housing Authority (246-5100) by phone about the ADUs.

Items gleaned from those conversations (emphasized are my comments on their information):

• The minimum number of ADUs depends on the number of dwelling units (DU) per acre. The number will probably end up being between 6% and 12-1/2% of the total dwelling units on the property. 12-1/2% is the maximum required by the ADU ordinance.
  The ADU ordinance was "recently" revised. I don't know if the above numbers are for the old or for the "revised" version of the ordinance.
• The builder has the option of building duplexes or quad-plexes that *look* like their single-family homes, or can even choose to build smaller or less expensive single-family homes, to fulfill their ADU requirements. The OCP/ZC/HA encourage the builders to do so rather than building townhouses.
  But in our market, townhouses tend to be more desirable as neighboring properties than are either duplexes or quad-plexes.
• The Housing Authority has the *exclusive* right to buy a third (1/3) of the ADUs that get built. If the HA does choose to buy those ADUs, the source of the money used to purchase the ADUs determines who gets to live in the ADUs.
  i.e. different colors of money.
• Out of the 600+ ADUs built in the County thus far, the Housing Authority has only bought 15.
• There are 12 families living in The Greens in Herndon whose units the Housing Authority wants to renovate. However, given the time scale of the Middleton Farm plan, that renovation will likely be long over well before the Middleton Farm ADUs are even built.
  At previous meetings, some residents had wondered if low-income Herndon residents would be relocated to the Middleton Farm ADUs, so I asked about that.
• The developer is allowed to build 75% of the market-rate units before the ADUs have to be built. It would take at least a year to build the entire Middleton Farm development, if not two to three years. So even if that work started September 1, 1998, no ADUs would *have* to be started before June 1, 1999 *if* development were slated for a single year.
• The Housing Authority is "very strict" about the people who live in HA-owned units taking care of that property. Current area residents' worries about the ADUs not being kept up nicely are probably not an issue, at least not for HA-owned ADUs.