Del Ray
Del Ray is a hip, quirky neighborhood in north Alexandria, with a bustling retail corridor situated mostly along a 1½-mile-long stretch of Mount Vernon Avenue, surrounded by residential streets. The businesses are mostly independently owned and run the gamut from coffee shops to small restaurants and cafes to hardware stores and boutiques.
This charming neighborhood is bounded by Braddock Road to the south; Russell Road to the west; West and East Glebe Road to the north; and Jefferson Davis Highway and Leslie, Glendale, and Mount Vernon avenues to the east.
The housing stock in Del Ray largely consists of detached single-family homes with a smattering of townhouses, older row houses, and some boxy brick apartment buildings scattered throughout the neighborhood too. The detached homes are a quirky and varied mix of Cape Cods, colonials, bungalows, and some Victorians. Some even started out as Sears kits back in the early part of the 20th century. By suburban standards, yards to tend to be small, which might account for Mount Vernon Avenue always seeming to be full of shoppers and diners!
Can’t find what you need in the small shops in Del Ray? No worries! Additional shopping and retail are nearby in the Potomac Yard Shopping Center, which has a Regal Cinema, Target, Best Buy, and many other chain stores.
Commuting to and from Del Ray is a breeze. The neighborhood is very close to the George Washington Parkway and to I-395, and the Beltway isn’t too far to the south. The Braddock Road Metro station on the Blue and Yellow lines is located at the south end of the neighborhood, and the forthcoming Potomac Yard station, with expected completion in Fall 2022, will add another option near the community’s northeast corner. The neighborhood is also served by Alexandria’s DASH bus system’s lines AT3, AT4, and AT10.
Del Ray home prices in 2020-2021 ranged from $161,000 for a one-bedroom, one-bath condo unit up to $2.3 million for a 6,400-square foot Georgian-style home, with six bedrooms and six baths on nearly a half-acre. The average home sale price during that period was $808,612, with days on market (DOM) averaging just 13.
