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For a Board that talks a lot about the affordability of housing, Plan Forward, the update to the Policy Plan, should have been a golden opportunity to address the cost of housing units. The Policy Plan is part of Fairfax County’s Comprehensive Plan, and it includes the regulatory framework for County operations and developments. Instead of lowering costs or addressing process delays, the adopted amendment significantly increases the cost of housing and doing business in the county by adding to the current requirements, increasing timelines and adding studies. The requirement to increase from LEED Silver to LEED Gold for multifamily residential will alone add 10 – 15 percent to the cost of a multi-family housing unit. While there were some things to like in the update, I voted against it because of its impact on the affordability of housing and doing business in the County.
The Board direction to staff was to incorporate over 15 Board approved plans, policies, and initiatives including One Fairfax, the Community-Wide Energy and Climate Action Plan (CECAP), and Resilient Fairfax, into the Policy Plan. While the plans have good intent, none of them are fiscally constrained. The Board also failed to give staff the guidance on retaining or improving the affordability of housing units.
In addition to new LEED requirements, a few other examples in the adopted plan include the replacement of “encourage” language in the previous Policy Plan with prescriptive “ensure” and “should” requirements in many places, eliminating flexibility based on site and development conditions and resulting in a shift of the plan from a visionary document to a regulatory one typically found in the Zoning Ordinance. The Plan Forward language also requires additional studies and documentation, one with the notable goal of retaining or relocating small businesses, but at the risk of project uncertainty and increased cost and process time.
When the Fair Lakes development was approved, the entire plan was 10 pages. A typical plan now has 10 pages for landscaping alone. Each page and requirement must be prepared, reviewed, submitted, reviewed by staff and then returned to the applicant to go through the cycle again. The more prescriptive the policies and requirements are, the more pages required, the greater the cost, and the longer the delay.
What the Board should have done is take a look at the development planning requirements where the benefits do not match the impact of the cost increases, for example, the onsite urban parks requirement, which drives up the cost of housing units for underutilized pocket parks and expensive streetscape requirements that often result in more bike and pedestrian capacity than will ever be needed.
While I do not support the previously mentioned aspects of the amendment, I was happy to see that the plan emphasized the Board’s commitment to protecting the Occoquan Watershed, the respect for established neighborhoods, and the preservation of industrially zoned land.
Although there were several things to like in the plan update, I ultimately voted against it because of its significant impact on the affordability of housing and doing business in the County.
For more information on my proposals to make housing in Fairfax County more affordable, see my previous newsletters here:
September 18, 2025: Housing Affordability--A Shift Towards Common Sense/Energy Reliability
April 17, 2024: Affordability in Housing
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