The History Behind Reston Virginia real estate
If you are familiar with
Reston, Virginia real estate and would like to know more about the towns history please read on. Reston is located in Fairfax county, Virginia, and according to the 2000 census there has a population of roughly 56,407 residing there. The goal for this town was to revolutionize the concept of the post World War II concepts of land use and residential/ corporate developments in suburbia. Reston, Virginia was originally purchased in the early 1960s by Robert Simon, Jr. from the Bowman Distillery. His original vision for this
Virginia real estate was to develop a town with a town center and seven village centers, each with its own plaza and church. Robert Simon, Jr. envisioned bistros, markets, and recreational facilities that future residents of the town would be able to enjoy. Simons wanted to bring urban living to the suburbs by inviting commercial real estate developments in an attempt to turn Reston into an area where you could work close to home. Another way that he wanted to bring urban living to Reston was by developing the residential townhome and apartments in clusters, therefore preserving the trees. An interesting fact to note about Reston is that this was the first post war community to cluster townhome developments, thus preserving open space while having a higher density community.
All of the goals that were set for the town of Reston in the long run allowed the town to be developed as a new urbanism community. The town was planned before the term New Urbanism was coined. The town was developed on a network of paths, and recently Fairfax County has constructed many sidewalks. These paths and sidewalks allow you to be just about anywhere in town and get to the downtown area with roughly 15 minutes by bike. The Downtown area of Reston is composed of mostly mixed use developments. There is a future metro station planned for downtown Reston, and with this comes plans to add even more mixed use real estate around the metro station.
Even with all the similarities that Reston has in common with the concept of New Urbanism there are a couple of factors that sets it apart from a typical New Urbansim development. They are the following:
- Majority of the buildings are oriented away from main streets
- Few major arteries have completed sidewalk networks
