Project Mixing Data Centers And Affordable Housing Faces Rejection In Virginia
Officials in Loudoun County, Virginia, are set to nix a proposed mixed-use project that would blend two data centers with hundreds of units of affordable housing near Dulles International Airport.
Loudoun County Supervisors say any inclusion of data centers will almost certainly lead to the denial of Innovation Gateway, a development proposed by a joint venture between San Diego-based Fairfield Residential and Washington, D.C.'s The BlackChamber Group on 30 vacant acres east of Route 28.
The impending decision, first reported by the Washington Business Journal, is the latest move by Loudoun officials to reign in the spread of data center projects in a county that has more than anywhere else in the world.
First proposed in May 2022, plans for Innovation Gateway include a pair of data centers totaling 700K SF alongside a multifamily building with 300 housing units, all of them affordable. The site would also include 80K SF of office space. The exterior of the two data centers would be designed to look like office buildings.
But plans for Innovation Gateway have run headlong into the county’s goal of steering development away from data centers, particularly in the area around its new Metro stations. The property is about a mile from the Innovation Center station, part of the Silver Line Phase 2 extension that opened in late 2022.
The site is in a district that the county’s most recent land use master plan explicitly targets for transit-oriented development projects with residential, commercial and office uses. It is close to high-profile mixed-use projects like Waterside and Rivana at Innovation Station. Citing these reasons, county planning officials recommended denial of the project late last year.
Although changes were made to Innovation Gateway’s design in the months since, any data centers on the site are a non-starter, Board of Supervisors Chair Phyllis Randall told attorneys for the developers Wednesday, according to the WBJ. The board is scheduled for a final vote on the project in September.
While the developers have argued that data centers are needed to make any kind of project on the site economically feasible, Randall and others said they would rather see no project than new buildings that they see as undermining the long-term vision for the area. They hope it can become a suburban, mixed-use destination like Reston Town Center or Reston Station in neighboring Fairfax County.
“Sometimes you can think about what’s good for today, what might be even profitable for today, but the legacy we want to leave is not a legacy of what we can just do today,” Randall said, according to the WBJ.
Loudoun’s political climate over the past 20 years has been famously friendly toward the data center industry, but the will to further regulate data center development has grown steadily in recent years as the market has become saturated.
County supervisors’ comments about Innovation Gateway came just two weeks after the board voted to advance legislation that would eliminate by-right zoning for data centers. If passed, that bill would likely have a significant impact on the future of data center development in a county that is home to Data Center Alley and boasts the highest concentration of these facilities in the world.
