North Hill community meeting is tonight

North Hill, as seen near the intersection of Richmond Highway and Dart Drive.

A public hearing will be held Wednesday night at Walt Whitman Middle School to discuss a development proposed for the North Hill site on Route 1, long a source of controversy in the Richmond Highway corridor.

The hearing, hosted by Mount Vernon District Supervisor Dan Stork, is scheduled to run from 7 p.m.-9 p.m.

North Hill, a 33-acre patch of woods that sits north of Dart Drive on the east side of Richmond Highway, once housed the Woodley-Nightingale trailer park. Fairfax County bought the land in 1981 through a grant provided by the federal government, and since then North Hill’s fate has been through numerous twists and turns:

• The Woodley-Nightengale trailer park was slowly removed from the property in the late 80s.
• Woodley Hill Estates, a smaller trailer park, was built on 13 acres of the property in the early 90s.
• Virginia passed the Public-Private Education and Infrastructure Act of 2002 (PPEA), which gave the county the opportunity to pursue a public-private partnership to develop the remaining 33 acres of North Hill.
• A 2007 plan to build manufactured housing (trailers) and a public park on North Hill was fiercely opposed by some community members and never came to fruition.
• In 2012, a company made an unsolicited proposal to build apartments on the land, with a percentage set aside for lower-income residents. In response to the bid, the county sent out a request for proposals.
• A plan by CHPPENN I, LLC, was selected in 2015 to turn North Hill into a development that included multifamily housing, town houses and a public park.
• In March, the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors amended the county’s comprehensive plan to allow such a development to move forward.

CHPPENN plans to build 278 rental units and 195 townhomes on North Hill. According to information provided by Fairfax County, the rental units will be in six buildings, and tenants must fall into the following income brackets:

• 10 percent of the units reserved for households with income at or below 30 percent of the area median income (AMI).
• 20 percent of the units for households with an annual income at or below 50 percent of the AMI.
• 70 percent with an annual income at or below 60 percent of the AMI.

An unspecified portion of the townhomes for sale will offer “market affordability” for first-time buyers.

Documents related to the North Hill project can be found on the Fairfax County website.