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ALEXANDRIA, Va. — The developer of Braddock West will hold a community meeting Sept. 9 to update neighbors on the project across from the Braddock Road Metro station, according to a notice posted at the site and on the company's engagement portal.
The meeting is at 7 p.m. at the Charles Houston Recreation Center, 901 Wythe St., in the multipurpose room. All Braddock Metro community members are welcome, the notice says.
CRC Companies, an Arlington-based developer, plans a seven-story mixed-use building on about an acre at 727 N. West St. Plans describe 180 apartments, including 14 affordable units, ground-floor retail and flex space, and one level of underground parking.
The site has been cleared since 2023. On the developer's project tracker, off-site utility construction is marked complete. Vertical construction is not.
The Alexandria Brief has asked CRC when vertical construction will begin, what has held it up, whether the unit and affordable housing counts have changed, what a condition council added in November requires, and how the company relates to West Street Acquisitions LLC, the applicant named in city filings. The company had not responded as of publication.
How the project got here
The Planning Commission approved Braddock West 6-1 in December 2020. The City Council denied the project in March 2021, then approved it two months later.
Off-site utility work began in November 2022, closing stretches of Wythe Street while crews installed a sanitary sewer line and moved overhead utilities underground. The 10 houses on the site were demolished in March 2023, along with the trees. Crews began driving structural piles that April.
The developer told neighbors at the time that the second phase would begin once off-site infrastructure was finished in 2023, with the building delivered in 2025.
At its June 14, 2025, public hearing, council granted a short extension of the development special use permit through Oct. 18 and directed staff to return in the fall with more information on stormwater management and on building height and setbacks.
Casey Nolan, an attorney for the applicant, told council in June that his client had installed 650 linear feet of sewer piping, some of it 30 feet below ground.
What staff found
In an Oct. 10 memo to Mayor Gaskins and council, Planning and Zoning Director Paul Stoddard wrote that the development would cut peak stormwater runoff rates by 30% beyond what is required, lowering runoff into the adjacent right-of-way.
Flooding at Braddock Road, West Street and Wythe Street comes from 65 acres of off-site runoff and is unrelated to the project's requirements, the memo says. Staff is weighing a near-term spot improvement project at the intersection, starting with whether the existing storm sewer network is in good repair and, if so, adding or upsizing inlets.
Longer-term options carry rough cost estimates of about $35 million. Staff said it would suggest including a large-capacity flood mitigation project at Braddock and West in the later years of the fiscal 2027 to fiscal 2036 Capital Improvement Program.
The applicant submitted a 100-year storm exhibit modeling ponding at 29.19 feet, against finished floor elevations of 29.25 feet for the retail space and 29.50 feet for the residential units. The property is not in the FEMA-mapped 100-year regulatory floodplain.
The building would reach a maximum of 95 feet including a rooftop trellis, with the roofline at no more than 85 feet. That includes 25 feet of bonus height granted for affordable housing. Along Wythe Street, facing lower-scale homes, the building steps back roughly 5 to 16.5 feet above the third story.
Staff recommended approval, saying the height is consistent with city policy and the Braddock East Master Plan height map.
The November vote
The item was deferred from the Oct. 18 hearing and returned to council Nov. 15, where Councilman John Taylor Chapman moved approval with amendments. The extension passed 7-0.
The amended conditions included space for Lincoln Lodge, the fraternal organization whose earlier litigation over club space contributed to the project's delays, while keeping all 14 affordable units.
Dino Drudi, president of the West Old Town Citizens Association, spoke in opposition. The association has opposed the project since its approval. Drudi told council in June that the area floods quickly.
"That area floods," Drudi said at the June hearing. "The West Old Town Citizens Association does not believe that it is safe from a public safety standpoint to put all that development and all those additional people into an area that very rapidly floods, where vehicles, including emergency vehicles, have stalled out because of the flood waters, traffic jams, etc."
Devery Travers of Lincoln Lodge spoke in support of the alternative condition language.
Across the street
The meeting comes as Metro advances plans for the block opposite the site.
WMATA has proposed permanently closing the Braddock Road station's Kiss & Ride lot and reconfiguring the bus loop for joint development on the Metro-owned parcel. Some replacement curbside pickup and drop-off spaces would go on N. West Street, across from the Braddock West site.
Metro held a public hearing on the proposal in April at the same recreation center, where flooding dominated resident testimony.
Ryan Belmore is an Alexandria resident and the founder and publisher of The Alexandria Brief. Send tips, feedback, and story ideas to ryan@alexandriabrief.com.
