Expanded Cedar Terrace retail center in the works for South Riding

Some exciting news for the long suffering folks in the South Riding area who have been waiting for a major retail and restaurant center to call their own — there are some new developments at the proposed Cedar Terrace project.

We will walk you through it as best we can:

• For years, the Peterson Cos., a major developer in the area, has been trying to get the Avonlea project off the ground.
• At one time, it was supposed to be a One Loudoun-like center with a movie theater and lots of shops and restaurants.
• But trouble securing tenants led to those grandiose plans being scrapped. Instead, a scaled down retail center with office buildings and an assisted living center became the focus of Avonlea.
• Meanwhile, the Toll Brothers — another big developer that owned some of the Avonlea land and was working with Peterson — decided to break away and do their own thing.
• Their own thing is the Cedar Terrace at South Riding development.
• Cedar Terrace was supposed to be a large residential community with a small 81,000 s.f. retail center.
• But the ongoing concerns over too much housing being built too close to the noisy Dulles International Airport has led Toll Brothers to flip their plans around.
• Now, the number of residences has been greatly reduced in the plans and the retail center has been increased to 220,000 s.f. That’s nearly four times larger than was originally proposed.

That change came about in part due to the efforts of Supervisor Matt Letourneau — who represents the area on the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors. He outlined the new proposal in a post today on social media.

Here’s a look at the latest layout.

You can see that the new Cedar Terrace project would be built immediately adjacent to the existing South Riding Market Square center — with roads connecting them seamlessly.

The buildings in gray are the commercial portions. Those shapes and sizes could very well change. There are likely several revisions to go through.

You can also see that roughly 25 percent of the project would be green space and/or open space — including a public plaza and a play area.

It’s obviously too soon to know what type of retail brands we might see sign on to the new project. And yes, we know South Riding residents have seen this all before, only to be disappointed. But at least a major new commercial center is back in someone’s plans for the community.