Fairfax County’s Aging Strip Malls Could Become Entire New Neighborhoods — Here’s What That Could Look Like

Aug 28

7 min read

For decades, much of Fairfax County has followed a familiar suburban formula: a grocery store or anchor tenant, a row of shops and restaurants, and an enormous surface parking lot surrounding everything. Now Fairfax County is laying the groundwork for something dramatically different.

On August 25, 2026, the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors directed county staff to prioritize work on a new “Suburban Village Center” concept. The idea could eventually allow selected aging shopping centers and commercial properties to evolve into mixed-use neighborhood centers with housing, stores, restaurants, services, pedestrian spaces and better connections to transit. The initiative was moved to Tier 1 priority status, although no final list of shopping centers has been selected and redevelopment would be evaluated individually. (FFXnow)

Above: The type of suburban commercial environment that dominates many parts of Fairfax County today. The countywide policy does not mean every shopping center will be redeveloped.

From Giant Parking Lots to Places Where People Actually Live

The easiest way to understand the concept is to imagine your neighborhood shopping center today. Perhaps there's a grocery store, dry cleaner, pizza restaurant and several smaller businesses surrounded by acres of asphalt.

Now imagine keeping many of those neighborhood services but building apartments and townhomes around them.

Instead of driving from your subdivision to a shopping center, hundreds of residents could potentially live within walking distance of restaurants, groceries and other services. Surface parking could be consolidated, new streets and sidewalks introduced, and underused commercial properties could accommodate housing.

That's essentially the opportunity Fairfax County is exploring.

The county's planning language describes Suburban Village Centers as mixed-use community focal points within suburban neighborhoods. These areas would generally be located along major arterial roads and could accommodate medium-intensity residential development while remaining less intense than places such as Tysons or major Metro station areas. (FFXnow)

What a Fairfax Strip Mall Transformation Could Look Like

These images are examples of the type of mixed-use redevelopment possible when suburban commercial properties are redesigned. They are illustrative examples, not approved Fairfax County projects.

The biggest visual change could be density. Rather than one-story retail surrounded by parking, some properties could eventually include mid-rise residential buildings, townhomes, ground-floor shops, restaurants with outdoor seating, landscaped plazas, sidewalks and public gathering spaces.

But Fairfax isn't proposing that every strip mall become another Tysons.

The concept is specifically intended to provide more flexibility within suburban neighborhoods while recognizing that individual shopping centers have very different surroundings, transportation networks and community needs. County officials have emphasized that a one-size-fits-all approach isn't feasible. (FFXnow)

Fairfax Already Has a Real Example: Pan Am Shopping Center

One reason this concept is especially interesting is that Fairfax County doesn't have to imagine the redevelopment possibilities from scratch.

The former Pan Am Shopping Center, near the Vienna Metro area, provides one of the county's clearest examples.

Fairfax County adopted a Comprehensive Plan amendment in 2023 allowing an alternative mixed-use redevelopment scenario for the property. The planning framework allows up to 585 multifamily homes while retaining approximately 140,000 square feet of existing retail and potentially adding up to 47,000 square feet of additional retail associated with residential development and stand-alone buildings. (Fairfax County)

The shopping center has since been renamed Providence Place and underwent renovations, although the larger residential redevelopment contemplated by the plan is a separate, longer-term possibility. (FFXnow)

The Stores Don't Necessarily Have to Disappear

This may be one of the biggest misconceptions about the proposal.

Turning a shopping center into a mixed-use community doesn't necessarily mean bulldozing every business and replacing it with apartments.

Fairfax County's planning language specifically says that as legacy neighborhood shopping centers evolve, efforts should be made to incorporate grocery stores and other neighborhood services into redevelopment. (Fairfax County)

Think less:

SHOPPING CENTER → APARTMENTS

and more:

SHOPPING CENTER → SHOPS + RESTAURANTS + HOMES + PUBLIC SPACE

That distinction matters.

A grocery store that currently sits behind 500 parking spaces could theoretically remain an anchor while residential buildings, structured parking, sidewalks and public spaces occupy portions of today's parking lots.

Mixed-use developments elsewhere demonstrate how grocery stores and neighborhood retail can coexist with housing and pedestrian spaces.

Townhomes Could Be Part of the Equation Too

Not every site needs six-story apartments.

Fairfax County's planning framework describes Suburban Village Centers as areas that may be appropriate for medium-density multifamily housing and townhouses, potentially allowing developers to transition gradually between commercial centers and existing lower-density neighborhoods. (Fairfax County)

That could create an interesting development pattern.

A shopping center facing a major road might have mid-rise apartments over retail. Buildings could then decrease in height moving away from the commercial core, eventually transitioning into townhomes closer to surrounding neighborhoods.

Franconia Triangle Could Become Another Model

County officials also pointed to the Franconia Triangle as an example of the type of redevelopment that could inform future Suburban Village Centers.

The area includes the former Franconia Governmental Center site and surrounding properties near Franconia Road and Beulah Street. Planning efforts envision housing and a more connected neighborhood pattern rather than maintaining disconnected suburban parcels.

FFXnow reported that county officials specifically identified development in the Franconia Triangle as one of the previous site-specific efforts that could provide lessons for the broader Suburban Village Center strategy. (FFXnow)

Planning and development imagery from the Franconia area illustrates another approach to introducing housing and neighborhood amenities into an established suburban environment.

Why Fairfax County Is Looking at This Now

Fairfax County has a basic land-use problem that many mature suburbs eventually encounter: most of the easy land has already been developed.

Unlike Loudoun or Prince William counties, Fairfax doesn't have enormous amounts of undeveloped land available for new subdivisions.

But it does have something else in abundance:

commercial land and surface parking.

That creates an opportunity to accommodate future housing without necessarily expanding farther outward.

Fairfax's broader Plan Forward initiative has been updating countywide land-use policies that hadn't undergone a comparable comprehensive update in decades. The first phase was adopted in December 2025 and introduced the Suburban Village Center concept as a way to provide more flexibility for commercial areas inside established suburban neighborhoods. (FFXnow)

Imagine the Before and After

Picture a typical Fairfax shopping center today:

One-story stores. Giant parking lot. Six lanes of traffic outside. Almost everyone arrives by car.

Now picture the same property 10 or 15 years later.

There could be apartments above restaurants. Townhomes could sit along quieter internal streets. A grocery store could remain within walking distance of hundreds of homes. Restaurants could face a landscaped plaza instead of a parking lot. Trees, sidewalks and bike infrastructure could replace portions of asphalt.

That doesn't mean this exact scenario is coming to a specific Fairfax shopping center. But it illustrates why the policy change could ultimately have such a visible impact on the county.

The Real Estate Impact Could Be Significant

For Fairfax homeowners, buyers and investors, this is worth watching closely.

A successful redevelopment could bring new restaurants, grocery options, parks and walkability to neighborhoods that currently have relatively few destinations within walking distance.

Homes near those centers could suddenly be located near an entirely new amenity district.

But there are obvious trade-offs.

Adding hundreds of residences to an existing commercial center means more people living in an already developed area. Schools, intersections, parking, stormwater systems and public infrastructure all have to accommodate that growth.

That's why the county isn't automatically rezoning every shopping center.

The August 25 action prioritizes development of the framework. County staff still need to determine criteria and eventually identify which locations might actually make sense as Suburban Village Centers. There is currently no deadline for staff to return with recommendations, and implementation could occur in multiple phases. (FFXnow)

This Does NOT Mean Your Strip Mall Is Being Demolished Tomorrow

This point is important, particularly because the concept is likely to generate strong reactions on social media.

Fairfax County has not announced that all strip malls will become housing.

It hasn't even announced a final list of shopping centers.

The Board's action essentially moves development of the policy framework higher on the county's planning priority list. Individual redevelopment proposals would still have to go through the applicable planning, zoning and development processes.

So if someone says, “Fairfax just approved apartments at my neighborhood shopping center,” that's probably getting ahead of what actually happened.

What Fairfax did do is create a pathway that could make these transformations easier to consider in the future. (FFXnow)

Could Fairfax Become More Walkable Without Becoming Tysons?

That may be the most interesting question surrounding the entire strategy.

Fairfax doesn't necessarily need another Tysons at every intersection. But there is an enormous amount of territory between a one-story strip mall surrounded by asphalt and a skyline of 30-story towers.

The Suburban Village Center concept appears designed to occupy that middle ground.

Think four-to-six-story residential buildings, townhomes, neighborhood retail, grocery stores, restaurants, trees, plazas and sidewalks rather than skyscrapers.

Done well, these developments could allow people to live closer to everyday necessities while adding housing without consuming additional undeveloped land.

Done poorly, they could simply add hundreds of cars to already congested roads.

And that's exactly why this could become one of Fairfax County's biggest development debates over the next several years.

The Bottom Line

The August 25 vote didn't approve thousands of apartments or authorize bulldozers to start tearing down shopping centers.

What it did was potentially much more consequential over the long term: Fairfax County made creating a countywide framework for transforming certain aging suburban commercial centers into mixed-use neighborhoods a planning priority. (FFXnow)

For a county filled with older shopping centers and enormous parking lots, the real estate implications could eventually be substantial.

The Fairfax County of the future may not grow primarily by building outward.

It may grow by rebuilding places we've been driving past for decades.

So DMV: would you rather keep the neighborhood strip mall and parking lot—or replace some of that asphalt with homes, restaurants, shops and walkable public spaces?