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Tonight, the Alexandria Planning Commission will accept public testimony and act upon a series of proposals designed to expand Alexandria's housing production, improve affordability and address past and current barriers to equitable housing access.
The Planning Commission's hearing will begin at 7 PM and it will be held at City Hall in the Council Chambers. Any resident can address the Planning Commission in-person or virtually. You can sign-up in advance online.
With Planning Commission action this evening, the City Council will take up this proposal later in the month. While the City Council will cast our final vote on the evening of Tuesday November 28th, given the importance of this issue, we are providing two separate public hearing dates for residents to provide testimony.
Residents will have the opportunity to provide public testimony on the package before the City Council on either the evening of Tuesday November 14th or Saturday November 18th. The meeting on the 14th will begin at 5:30 PM in City Hall. The meeting on the 18th will begin at 9:30 AM in City Hall. Testimony can be provided virtually or in-person and you may sign up online once the docket is published.
These actions are the culmination of a year of engagement with residents around our City. Whether you have been supportive of the City's effort or have been generally skeptical of our approach, your input in this process has been valuable, and I am hopeful you will continue to provide it as we conclude this phase. In an effort to be fully responsive to the input we have received, our staff has posted the specific input and their responses to the input on our website.
Two months ago, our staff formally presented the specific proposals in a joint worksession with the Planning Commission. You can watch the full joint work session, including our Planning Director's presentation online. Our staff has also prepared an estimate of the net impacts of these proposals and the infrastructure requirements.
The specific land-use proposals made by our staff address these areas:
This effort is prompted by an urgent reality: Alexandria has become largely inaccessible to those of low and moderate incomes.
In all likelihood, next year Alexandria's housing stock will reach a important, albeit largely psychological, milestone: The average single-family home in our City will be valued at $1 million.
So far this year, 8 newly-constructed detached single-family homes have been sold in our City. The average sales price was $2.1 million, with the lowest price at $1.9 million.
With two-third's of Virginia homeowners' mortgage rates under 4% and another third with a rate under 3%, low supply and astronomical sales prices has made homeownership all but impossible in Alexandria for anyone but the upper-middle class.
The average 1 bedroom apartment now rents for $2,186 per month, requiring a salary of nearly $90,000 to afford renting a small apartment in our City.
If you own a home on a fixed-rate mortgage, without adult children or aging parents in your lives, it can be easy to ignore these realities and the corrosive impact on our community.
It is that benign neglect, coupled with policy inaction, that leads to a community that rapidly becomes inaccessible to the diversity of people who have made Alexandria their home for generations. That inaction stifles economic growth as employers hopelessly chase a workforce disappearing from our community.
You can watch my comments at our kick-off event at the beginning of the year, and leading into presentations from Richard and Leah Rothstein, the authors of the recently released book, "Just Action,' a follow-up to Richard Rothstein's seminal tome "The Color of Law."
All of the sessions have been recorded and are viewable online.
While this effort has a pair of motivations, a foundational acknowledgement is that for much of the 20th Century, wide swaths of Alexandria housing was off-limits to Alexandrians that were not white. That reality was enforced by a patchwork of ordinances, restrictive covenants, intimidation and lending practices that served to effectively segregate our City for generations. While de jure policies that explicitly enforced segregation were made illegal long ago, the legacy of these policies live on today. In fact, in recent years, Alexandria has grown MORE segregated. These realties are detailed in the Draft Regional Fair Housing Plan that I wrote about a few months ago. This plan was formally received by the City Council recently.
The question before our community is what can be done about it. It was generations of intentional acts that led to our current reality. It will require intentional acts to change it.
In September of 2019, the Board of Directors of the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments (COG) unanimously adopted new regional housing creation targets. This was the first-ever regional commitment to accelerate the development of housing supply as a means to address our affordability crisis.
These targets, while voluntary, commit the City to the creation of additional units, with most of those units committed to be affordable for low to middle income households. To ensure that this housing creation does not exacerbate existing transportation challenges, most of this new housing must be located near job centers and high-capacity transportation infrastructure.
In 2013, while adopting our Housing Master Plan, City Council had set an ambitious goal to create or preserve 2,000 affordable units by 2025. We are on track to meet this goal. In March of 2020, the City Council became the third jurisdiction in the region to endorse new housing targets in conjunction with the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments (COG).
With the adoption of the new COG housing targets, the City has committed to an additional 11,500 housing units, with 4,250 as committed affordable or workforce housing.
Over the last three years, the City has achieved the preservation or creation of just about 1,000 units of committed affordable housing.
The housing non-profit HAND has begun an annual report to measure the work that each jurisdiction in the region is doing to achieve our commitments. HAND recently released the annual update of this measurement. The HAND "Housing Indication Tool" report shows that Alexandria has made significant progress, with more work to do.
While there is a broad agreement in our community about the problem and the need to focus on solutions to our affordability challenges, bringing together agreement on the correct solutions to pursue is a little more challenging.
While the City's Housing Master Plan contains a variety of tools in our housing "toolbox," the options the City has are generally limited to:
- Raising and Spending Tax Dollars: To develop and preserve housing as well as assist residents in obtaining housing.
- Using land-use policy (zoning) to create and preserve housing
In the budget the City Council approved in May, we expanded the tax dollars we have committed annually to affordable housing. One cent from the real estate tax rate now goes to affordable housing, which generates $4.6 million annually. One percent of Alexandria's dining tax rate also goes to affordable housing, yielding another $4.9 million annually. Together this generates $9.5 million of annual revenue that is used to fund the creation and preservation of committed affordable housing, with an aggressive project pipeline planned years in advance.
This year has been very busy in putting those resources to work:
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Last month, we broke ground on "Sansé and Naja," a new affordable housing development being built by the Alexandria Housing Development Corporation (AHDC), the City's housing non-profit developer. This is the site of a former Safeway and an office building bought by the City 2 decades ago, demolished and used as a parking lot as an interim use. This is the largest-ever City affordable housing development and it will include 474 units of committed affordable housing, including many deeply affordable units.
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In September of last year, we gathered at the corner of King and Menokin to celebrate the opening of "The Waypoint at Fairlington." This partnership with Wesley Housing and Fairllngton Presbyterian Church created 81 new units of committed affordable housing where there used to be an asphalt parking lot.
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A year ago, City Council approved an application for the construction of 94 units of committed affordable housing on the site of a car dealership at 2712 Duke Street. This project is being proposed by Community Housing Partners, a housing non-profit based in Christiansburg.
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In February, the City Council approved the redevelopment of the Samuel Madden Homes. Samuel Madden is currently a 66-unit public housing development owned by the Alexandria Redevelopment and Housing Authority (ARHA). This redevelopment will replace this property with 532 total units, 326 of which will be committed affordable units and 206 market-rate units.
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Last year, the City' Council approved an application by another housing non-profit, Wesley Housing Development Corporation, to build 373 committed affordable housing units at Parcview on Holmes Run Parkway.
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In December of last year, the City Council unanimously approved a separate proposal by AHDC to develop 36 affordable homeownership units (31 townhomes and 5 condominiums) and 3 flats to be operated by Sheltered Homes of Alexandria for 12 residents. This project is located on Seminary Road just east of the City's Fire Station.
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Earlier this year, the City Council approved an application from Community Lodgings, an Alexandria non-profit, to redevelop an existing 28-apartment affordable housing complex into a new 91-unit affordable-housing development.
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Last year, Wesley Housing used resources from Amazon's Housing Equity Fund and a loan from Housing Partnership Fund, to purchase 66 private units in Arlandria and preserve them as affordable, with future redevelopment plans to come.
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Early next year, the City Council will consider a proposal for redevelopment of the Ladrey High Rise, another ARHA property. The current Ladrey is 170 units of committed affordable units, affordable for those at 30% of Area Median Income (AMI). The new Ladrey would be 275 units of committed affordable units, with 170 remaining for those at 30% of AMI, joining 27 new units affordable for those at 60% of AMI and 78 new units for those at 80% of AMI.
During the summer, the City was awarded a grant of $60,000 from the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, funded by Amazon's Housing Equity Fund, to explore two possible affordable housing developments, one on the site of the Van Dorn Metro station and another on property owned by WMATA next to their new office building which just opened last week in Carlyle.
Yet, the City cannot raise and spend enough money to make an appreciable impact on this problem. The City's power to determine how land is used, our land-use authority, provides a critical tool to spur the creation and preservation of both committed affordable housing as well as market-rate housing. Said another way: building additional housing supply, whether committed as affordable housing or market-rate housing, helps address our housing affordability challenges and reverse generational impacts.
Somewhat inexplicably, local governments have been reluctant to use the single most effective tool to increase the supply of affordable housing: build more housing. The reluctance of local governments has been even more surprising giving that a supply-based approach has been the policy of the last three Presidential administrations, two Democrats and one Republican. It's the policy of our current Republican Governor. It has been the approach of the Sierra Club and the National Association of Home Builders. It has been the approach of the Brookings Institute, the Hoover Institution and the Cato Institute. It is that policy basis that has driven our Zoning For Housing initiative.
The City will continue to seek creative partnerships, new land-use tools and innovative financing to preserve and create affordability in our City. I look forward to your input as we conclude this latest reform effort.
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