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Board approves Crystal Drive adaptive reuse: two vacant office towers to become housing and a hotel
Summary
The County Board unanimously approved an adaptive reuse application to convert two nearly vacant office buildings on the Crystal Drive plaza block into a 195-unit apartment building and a 344-room hotel. The approval uses Arlington's recently adopted adaptive-reuse pathway and keeps most existing below-grade parking.
The Arlington County Board on July 19 voted 5-0 to permit adaptive reuse at 2100 and 2200 Crystal Drive, converting two largely vacant 11-story office towers into a 195-unit residential building and a 344-room hotel.
The project was filed under the county's adaptive reuse provisions, adopted in late 2024 as part of a commercial market resiliency initiative to give owners a streamlined pathway for converting underused office stock to housing, hotels or other uses. Staff and the applicant said the buildings are well-suited to reuse: the existing structure, parking and floor plates enable a faster conversion than ground-up development, avoid demolition of embodied carbon and add housing and hotel capacity close to the Crystal City Metro station and new public investments.
The Board heard public comment on the project and questions about the future of the Crystal City 'underground' pedestrian concourse. The application includes closing two access points from Crystal Drive into the underground concourse to make space for hotel and residential lobbies; staff noted five other access points on the block will remain. County staff committed to study the long-term viability and options for the underground and to bring findings to the Board prior to certificates of occupancy for the residential building.
Parking and loading will use the existing below-grade garage; the applicant committed to a 0.3 spaces-per-unit parking ratio consistent with the county's residential parking guidance. The applicant also described plans to reuse the existing garage and to pursue LEED and other measures to limit embodied carbon.
Why it matters: Staff said the conversion would remove roughly 523,000 square feet of vacant office space from the county's market and could drive the countywide office vacancy rate down by roughly 1.1 percentage points. The conversion also creates housing near transit and adds hotel capacity in a neighborhood where room supply has declined since the pandemic.
Board action: Motion to adopt the adaptive reuse ordinance moved by Susan Cunningham, seconded by Julius 'JD' Spain; approved 5-0.
