When Karen Wright moved into the area, she was surprised at the proximity of the houses packed in her Burke Centre neighborhood, four to an acre. A "For Sale" sign popping up on the 6-acre wooded area behind her house didn't surprise her.
"Everybody has a house in their back yard. It doesn't matter. I quit worrying about it," she said, although having a wooded area between her and the Fairfax County Parkway is nice.
Amy Baldi lives on a pipestem around the corner from Wright. She's been watching the progress on the land as well as talking to neighbors.
"When we first moved here, we heard that land couldn't be sold. We thought it would always be trees," Baldi said.
Plots of forest don't last long around this area, though. With houses selling as fast as they go on the market, Baldi won't mind houses being built on the land according to current zoning restrictions of one to an acre.
"I'd rather see six houses than a bunch of houses," she said.
Another neighbor, Lonny Rosenberg, heard it was slated for 10 or 11 houses. He doesn't want to see something else go up that isn't consistent with his neighborhood, though.
"As long as they’re putting houses there, it's fine with me. It would be nicer if they didn't do anything," he said.
The 6-acre plot of land is between The Landings neighborhood in Burke Centre and the Fairfax County Parkway. It is owned by a church but can only be accessed via Steamboat Landing Lane, and not the Parkway. It used to have access to Pohick Road before the Parkway was built, according to Florence Naeve in Supervisor Sharon Bulova's (D-Braddock) office.
Although there has been interest in the land by developers, "there isn't anything in the works," Naeve said.
Tom Wade, executive director at the Burke Centre Conservancy, said any houses that are built on the land would have the option to utilize some of Burke Centre's facilities at a cost but wouldn't be officially part of Burke Centre. It's a similar situation with eight townhouses going in on Oak Leather Court.
"Our declaration requires a 75-percent vote to make the houses part of Burke Centre," Wade said.
Although the land is still officially Mormon church land, if it was sold, it couldn't be rezoned through the county process until the fall of 2005, Wade said.