By Lisa Rein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 24, 2006; B01
A red Hummer rumbles behind Mount Vernon Parkway, a showy hulk charging through humble rows of Cape Cods and ramblers.
Debbie Goram slides out of the driver's seat, a real estate agent clutching a potential windfall for an unsuspecting homeowner. She crosses the modest front yard at 8036 Washington Rd. and shoves six pages under the front door.
"Enclosed is a sales contract to purchase your property in Hollin Hall Village," reads the cover page from Jobin Realty in Alexandria. "Please call me to discuss."
For $700,000 cash, a corporation named Hall Hollin LLC is offering to purchase Mark and Nancy Welch's brick Cape Cod, built after World War II in one of Fairfax County's oldest neighborhoods. No contingencies, no inspection, immediate closing. As is, because the house would be knocked right down.
In its place would rise not just one four-bedroom manse with granite countertops, ceramic tile, hardwood floors and a two-car garage, but two -- towering 3 1/2 stories on the 13,000-square-foot lot and selling for $1.4 million apiece.
This exponential development on a third of an acre will be possible through a quirk in Fairfax's zoning. The Welches' home and 64 others in the oldest section of Hollin Hall were built in the 1940s, each straddling two lots. Thousands like them are scattered on zoning maps from Falls Church to Kensington, older suburbs where land was priced inexpensively after the war for returning veterans.
Few homeowners in Hollin Hall knew that the original buyers had combined two narrow 5,000-square-foot properties, the minimum for a single-family home at the time and half of today's minimum lot size.
That left the door open for the lots to be divided 60 years later by developers who smelled a land rush in the neighborhood, 10 miles south of Washington and a quick drive from the wave of jobs that will soon wash over Fort Belvoir. As long as they meet county codes for setbacks from the road and from neighbors -- 12 feet -- two houses can be built just 30 or 40 feet wide where once there was one.
"I think it's going to be a beautiful neighborhood," Goram said.
But to many residents of this tree-lined community with a creek, coveted schools and a woodsy park steps away, Hollin Hall is beautiful right now. Tall, skinny McMansions will not make it more so, they say. The rutted lawns along Washington Road, where bulldozers flattened four houses last month and cut old sewer lines, have altered the landscape. Six families have taken the county to court, each donating money to cover legal fees.
A dozen houses on double lots have sold so far, and developers are eyeing about 40 more -- a bonanza for builders meeting buyers' demands to live close in.
With little land for those buyers, some developers are razing entire neighborhoods -- most recently 56 homes next to the Vienna Metro station -- to create dense mini-cities in their place. Or scraps of empty land have sprouted mansions, forming self-contained communities of identical estates. But the prospect of such a transformation lot by lot has left Hollin Hall Village, a bucolic enclave of 600 homes named for patriot George Mason's family estate, at war with itself.
"People like living here," said Nancy Welch, 41, a substitute teacher who, with her husband, did not bite at the $700,000. "It's quiet. We don't have sidewalks. We don't have traffic. Our initial reaction was, 'How can you do this? You're doubling the density.' "
County leaders said they're appalled at what will happen. "This community is going to be transformed into something it is now not," said Supervisor Gerald W. Hyland (D-Mount Vernon), who represents the area. "The result is atrocious."
Hyland said there's nothing he can do, given two decisions by the county zoning administrator and Board of Zoning Appeals affirming the developers' right to build.
But members of the Concerned Citizens of Hollin Hall Village are not accepting his word. They're fighting the two-for-one plans every way they can: with protests, community meetings and glares at the neighbors who've sold. Like many residents watching old suburban values clash with new real estate values, they feel helpless.
"It's a quality of life we're looking at," said Catherine Voorhees, a lawyer who is leading the residents' group. "The county's looking at it like, 'You're going to gain financially -- what's your problem?' " She called the planned 4,000-square-foot houses tacky: "They're basically townhouses disguised as single-family homes." Even priced at $1.4 million, the new houses will cause her home value to plummet, Voorhees said. Houses in her neighborhood now are assessed in the $400,000s.
Joe Francone, an Alexandria builder who is one of the Hall Hollin buyers, said he could not comment because the case is in court. The group's attorney, Jerry K. Emrich, said his clients "have a right to do what they're doing" and predicted that the new homes will increase the value of the old ones.
The buyers are three limited-liability corporations: Hall Hollin, PFK and PJB. The developers behind them have stayed anonymous, which rankles some residents. When asked who besides Francone is represented, Emrich replied: "I don't think I'd better tell you. They simply don't want to talk about these issues." Goram said Francone "is pursuing subdivisions throughout Fairfax County" to find houses built on double lots to buy.
It has already happened on Dupont Avenue in Kensington, where neighbors admired a grassy, landscaped corner lot with a Japanese cherry tree until last year, when the owner sold it and his 100-year-old, three-bedroom house as separate quarter-acre lots. Stuart Cohen, who with his wife bought the house, saw the blueprint for the 34-foot-tall Arts and Crafts-style house that was to be wedged next door.
"In retrospect, I should have paid more attention to the plans," he said. But he and his wife, relocating from Dallas, faced a red-hot housing market with multiple bids and felt they had to act fast. Today, the five-bedroom, 4 1/2 -bath home is on the market for $1.2 million, more than twice what the Cohens paid.
Dupont and a cluster of streets off Plyers Mill Road lie at the edge of Kensington's historic district, where preservationists, anticipating a developer's frenzy to grab double lots, moved recently to stop them. But on Dupont, "we're on the wrong side of the tracks," said Phil Breen, a civil rights lawyer whose rambler is one house down from the Cohens. Behind the Breens, another house was built on a double lot five years ago. Breen said the view from his bedroom "was like looking at the country." Then he pointed wistfully toward the Cohens' place. "That Japanese cherry was gorgeous in the spring."
In Hollin Hall, some homeowners worry that so much building will worsen a long-standing flooding problem in the low-lying area. Because the new construction is allowable under the area's zoning, the developers are not legally required to provide extra systems to drain storm water.
Goram knows she's not entirely welcome in the neighborhood. On Memorial Day, Concerned Citizens of Hollin Hall Village held a balloon raising in the Welches' yard, releasing helium balloons attached to strings 35 feet long, equal to the height of the new houses. Goram said she doesn't knock on doors anymore and instead takes refuge in phone offers -- although one homeowner put her on hold and left her dangling.
Goram looks at the planned redevelopment and sees only progress. "A lot of those houses don't even have carports," she said. "They're old and small. The basements are wet and moldy."
Nancy Tompkins, another agent, said the homeowners should realize how lucky they are. "Drive in the neighborhood and look at some of those tired little houses," she said. "No way could they have gotten so much money."
The standoff began last summer when Gorham began making the rounds. The offers started in the $600,000s and then edged up. Moving vans arrived at the homes of retired military workers, widows, some young families. But none of the houses sold had the familiar "Under Contract" signs on their lawns. Those staying put started to pull up land records on the county's Web site to see which of their neighbors had sold.
Not everyone bristled. Bill Woods and his wife have gotten several offers by mail, phone and personal visits to his ranch house on Yorktown Road. After 20 years, it has become their dream house, with stained glass in the eaves and Japanese-style topiaries on the lawn. They're staying. But Woods, a contractor, is eager to see what rises in place of the brick rambler that sold next door. "I don't see anything that could be negative toward us by them building," he said. "It's not the house; it's the people living there."
Farren Ross, 43, said that at first, neighborhood pressure weighed on her when she and her husband decided to take the money and put it into a bigger house in a nearby subdivision off Fort Hunt Road. When they told a neighbor that they were selling, the woman broke into tears, envisioning the McMansion she would have to look at.
Ross said she's annoyed by the interference. "I think it's outrageous that someone would want to have power over what you should do with your equity," she said. "The bottom line is we cashed out our equity and bought a bigger home. I made sure I could sleep with my conscience at night."
Selling has made some homeowners pariahs. Karen Stein said one neighbor moved out in secrecy on a Sunday morning. "They loaded up their truck so fast, and they were gone. Maybe they were embarrassed."
Concerned Citizens of Hollin Hall Village v. County of Fairfax is awaiting trial in Fairfax County Circuit Court. Last month, the court denied the plaintiffs' request for a restraining order to stop the demolition of the 12 houses under contract, saying they were unlikely to prevail at trial. The court seems likely to follow the logic of county zoning officials, who ruled that just because a house was built straddling two lots doesn't erase the land's legal boundaries.
Ernie Stagnaro has watched the neighborhood war from the Cape Cod on Yorktown Road he bought for his wife and two children 44 years ago when he left the Air Force and took a job at a brokerage firm in Washington. He pointed to a Chevy Silverado backed up to the front door of the yellow brick bungalow across the street with a magnificent magnolia out front. A worker lugged planks of plywood out into his trunk. "That one just sold," said Stagnaro, 76.
Stagnaro is lucky, or unlucky, depending on whom you ask, to own a single lot. He said he loves Hollin Hall. "We're getting recycled. But I want to go out with my feet first."
