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A (fictional) young family is looking for a suitable home in its newly-adopted city. It seems to have found one at the 419 Town Center.
It’s a bright summer afternoon in 2049 at Roanoke County’s 419 Town Center, the thriving city-like development celebrating 30 years since its inception. Growth has been slow and steady with the installation of an infrastructure that features transportation options from bicycles to buses to cars, many of them electric.
What was a congested, slow-moving experience three decades ago has turned into wide boulevards, easy access lanes, bicycle paths connecting to the Roanoke Valley greenway system and multiple bus stops, all in service of a wide range of multi-family housing, entertainment venues, grocery stores and a wide range of shopping alternatives. It has the look and feel of a city center.
Into this mix, our fictional family, Jon and Emily Harrison and their two young children, listen as real estate agent Eric Wannamaker describes the benefits of county/city living. The Harrisons represent a little over a quarter of the types of people who live in the town center: the traditional family. Mostly the residents are young singles and couples, empty nesters and retirees, people with good jobs and solid incomes.
About 70% of residents live in rented apartments and the remainder are buying townhomes and condos. The Harrisons have just moved to Roanoke from Boston to start new jobs and don’t want to commit to a purchase until they get the feel of the Valley, so they’re looking for a four-bedroom rental in one of the several complexes interspersed throughout the Town Center.
Eric emphasizes the convenience and safety of the 419 Town Center, pointing to U.S. 419, a highway designed as part of a Roanoke Valley circumferential rout. It developed into a shopping corridor with the opening of Tanglewood Mall in 1973, but that faded in the first two decades of the 21st Century and the County re-thought the concept, looking for a residential/commercial mix that would be attractive to those looking for the city experience.
Adding to the lure of the area has been the steady development of sidewalks with each new development and the large bike/walk path through the village. Initially the goal was to introduce flex-space, shared workplace and incubator space in the Town Center, along with the live-work housing.
Tanglewood remains at the center of what planners dreamed of years ago as “diverse new housing options, job opportunities, shopping, dining and entertainment choices and chances to enjoy art and music—all within a short walk. Our Town Center offers people opportunities to live healthier lifestyles, reinforces our commitment to environmental responsibility and advances the Town Center’s emergence as a center for knowledge and motivation.”
The realized initial vision centers around connectivity of every facet of life. Over the years, Tanglewood Mall, Old Country Plaza and Madison Square have been steadily re-imagined and re-developed. Electric Road (U.S. 419) traffic patterns have been improved and traffic flow modernized. Intersections have become walkable and considerably safer. Fallowater Lane has been extended and developed into a residential area. Main Street retail is surrounded and intertwined with green space, a network of walkable and bikeable trails, offices and apartments.
The Town Center is often alive with flea markets, festivals and a variety of civic events, all signs of a cohesive community.
Eric points to the strengths of the area that have remained steady through the years: a good school system, proximity to the region’s superb recreation opportunities, relatively low cost of living and ease of movement among the Valley’s localities. The Town Center offers capsules of all that within its imagined borders.
“One of the real advantages of living here,” says Eric, “is that you will be exposed to new people every day, whether you’re walking, biking, shopping or just hanging out in the park. A lot of residents ride their bicycles to work, but access to all parts of the Valley is almost next door with a quick jump onto U.S. 220 North, which becomes I-581 in about a minute.
“You’ll have a library, gym, hardware store, supermarket, trampoline and traditional parks, restaurants, a bowling alley and the county government nearby. You can do stuff, hang out, be entertained, get a lot done in a short amount of time.”
It is, as the county planners imagined, “an authentic place.”
In 2019, the Roanoke County Board of Supervisors approved an ambitious plan that would basically create a town center in what has been a largely rural county. The new downtown will be hard up against Roanoke, the largest incorporated city in Western Virginia and the two would effectively serve as extensions of each other without the specter of consolidation.
County Economic Development Director Jill Loope, who worked with the county planning team on the 419 development says the model is being replicated in the Hollins and Oak Grove areas.
“It’s a trend,” she says. “We need to grow the population. Younger families support the economy and with an unemployment rate less than three percent, it is hard to build a talent pool.
“The 419 Town Center plan serves as a catalyst for economic growth, the impact of which will be incremental and realized over many years. … Investments are already being made in the 419 corridor and developers are taking note of the county’s commitment to planned infrastructure improvements. Many of these improvements will be constructed within the next several years and announcements have been occurring since the plan was adopted.”
Good transportation will be at the center of the new community, Loope insists.
“Bike lanes, sidewalks, transit stops, extra traffic lanes will make everything move fluidly and safely,” she says. “We’ll move more people more efficiently.”
The area also offers a golden opportunity for both commercial and real estate developers to use their imaginations in creating a new community from one that has grown rough around the edges.
“There is a delicate balance of owners, developers, residents and investors and they must create the right magic, the secret sauce,” says Loope. “If it were easy to do, it would have been done years ago.”
In late 2019, Carilion Clinic announced it would place a children’s medical facility in the vacant J.C. Penney and Miller Mott Technical College spaces at Tanglewood Mall, filling 150,000 square feet of space. That seemed to be the start of something big. Loope says the placement of the facility “is compatible with the intent and the spirit” of the plan recently adopted by the County Board of Supervisors.
“It will create density and density drives commercial retail growth. We saw this coming in general. Big box retail is a thing of the past and repositioning big boxes is in perfect alignment with the community’s long-term goal. We are already seeing a cadence of announcements like this.”
The estimated completion date of the town center is about 30 years out, says Philip Thompson, Roanoke County’s acting planning director. It will become, he says, a gateway to the Roanoke County.
Transformation Underway
Carilion Children’s new pediatric care operation will begin seeing patients in October this year with 14 pediatric specialties. The operation, when fully functional is expected to bring up to 1,500 patients, family members and staff per day to Tanglewood, serving patients from a 60-mile radius.
Businesses are taking note and responding to the new energy and market demand. Tanglewood recently announced the construction of two new 8,000-square-foot buildings on outparcels at the front of the Carilion Children’s operation on Route 419. A total of eight new businesses have announced they are locating at Tanglewood, with others in negotiation.
To date, nearly $50 million in state and federal funding has been secured for transportation and streetscape improvements in the 419 corridor. Specifically, those are widening of Route 419, the new construction of the Fallowater access road, and the interchange reconstruction, all supporting interconnectivity, mobility and safety.
Roanoke County Economic Development Director Jill Loope says that at the end of the day, the area plans serve as a catalyst to drive infrastructure investments, which, in turn drive economic development. “We are making strategic investments now for the growth that will come over the next five to 10 years.
The story above is from our May/June 2021 issue. For more stories, subscribe today or view our FREE digital edition. Thank you for supporting local journalism!