Magnolia Green developer seeking to amend development rules for commercial tracts

Developer Starfield wants to loosen existing restrictions on retail and office development in the commercial tracts of the Magnolia Green project, which front Hull Street Road and are shown in red. (County documents)

As the massive Magnolia Green project nears the halfway point on its residential side, its developer wants to better position its unfinished commercial areas for potential construction.

New York-based Starfield Cos. is seeking to amend the prior zoning approval tied to Magnolia Green to eliminate existing square footage restrictions on largely undeveloped commercial tracts that front Hull Street Road.

While a golf course and hundreds of single-family homes, townhomes and apartments have been built at the 3,900-acre development in the Moseley area of Chesterfield, commercial development hasn’t yet taken off. A daycare building is the only commercial project to be completed at Magnolia Green since it secured zoning approval more than 30 years ago.

Historically, Magnolia Green has been a tough sell to commercial users because it is essentially the westernmost development on Hull Street Road. But more recently, interest on the commercial front has picked up, and Starfield says the decades-old agreements put in place as part of the project’s original zoning request are too restrictive to build out commercial sites.

“Commercial guys like to be surrounded with thousands of rooftops. And right now, you got Mag Green and stuff to the south, but nothing to the west,” Starfield Senior Vice President Tom Page said. “We’re finally starting to get some interest in our commercial. Not a lot, but a little bit.”

The project’s current zoning limits it to a total of 20,000 square feet of retail and office uses across the entire site, which the developer sees as a hurdle to fully realize the site’s commercial potential. Of that 20,000-square-foot limit, retail development specifically is limited to being no more than 12,000 square feet and no single retail or office building can be larger than 5,000 square feet, per a staff report.

Starfield wants to do away with those restrictions on 88 acres across several tracts on Hull Street Road designated Community Center (CC) in the project’s overall conceptual plan, which are envisioned as sites for future shopping centers, mixed-use development and office buildings.

Under the new zoning proposal, the overall square footage cap on commercial development and building-size restrictions would be retained only for the tracts at Magnolia Green designated Activity Center (AC). The AC tracts are intended for retail and personal service businesses that cater to nearby neighborhoods.

Magnolia Green is a 3,900-acre development in the Moseley area. The site was rezoned in 1991, and since then more than 2,000 dwellings have been built on the property. Pictured is the development’s overall conceptual plan.

Starfield anticipates it will sell off portions of the commercial tracts to other developers, who would then go on to actually build out the project’s commercial areas.

Page said it hasn’t been determined yet exactly how many square feet of commercial development will rise at Magnolia Green. A staff report about the amendment request refers to a target of 1.9 million square feet, which Page said is the number that was used by traffic engineers to estimate how many vehicle trips the project would generate.

Starfield is also seeking to amend language around the phasing of residential development in CC tracts to make the process clearer, and allow the start of construction on an apartment complex planned next to Magnolia Academy Children’s Center.

The current restrictions that Starfield wants changed were put in place as part of the 1991 zoning approval that cleared the way for Magnolia Green. Page, who came onto the project in 2010, said it was unclear to him why the limitations were established in the first place.

Page said Starfield hoped to bring the zoning amendment to the Board of Supervisors next week. Supervisors deferred consideration of the request in November and January to allow further work on the zoning case. The Planning Commission voted to recommend approval in October.

The proposal wouldn’t increase residential density at the project. Magnolia Green is zoned for a maximum of nearly 4,900 residential units, which includes about 1,500 apartments.

By late January, the project had seen 2,100 houses and apartments built, with more dwellings actively underway. Page estimated that Magnolia Green’s residential areas could reach full build out in three to four years.

Aside from the commercial amendment, Starfield is also pursuing a separate zoning request to alter a proposed senior living facility project that was OK’d for Magnolia Green in 2019.

That effort involves a revision of The Summit project to decrease the number of units to 900 independent-living apartments, remove skilled nursing and memory care units, and eliminate 40,000 square feet of commercial development previously planned for the 100-acre site. Page said that the pandemic and its impact on senior living facilities motivated the changes to the project. The Planning Commission is expected to review the case Tuesday (today).

“COVID really hammered that business bad. And so we decided we’re not going to do that,” he said.

Starfield was formed by the 2023 merger of iStar, which took over Magnolia Green’s development in 2009, and Safehold.

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