Arlington advances contentious housing proposal to build more multifamily units

MARGARET BARTHEL WAMU/DCist

The Arlington County Board voted unanimously on Jan. 25 to advance a controversial proposal to open up the single-family residential areas of the county to multifamily buildings up to six units, but they eliminated an option to consider seven- and eight-unit buildings from the final policy discussion.

The Missing Middle plan — named after so-called “missing middle” housing, which falls between high-rise apartment buildings and single-family detached homes — now moves to a series of final public meetings and a final vote in March.

If passed, the policy would change zoning restrictions for 75% of the county’s residential areas, which currently only allow single family dwellings (plus accessory dwelling units).

On Jan. 25, following two days of public hearings, the board approved a “request to advertise” the plan, which triggers a final series of meetings and public hearings by the board and the county planning commission.

Last-minute changes dial back key provisions

In the vote to advertise, the county board set the parameters of final discussion and debate on a dozen unresolved areas of the policy, including the significant step of limiting the number of units allowable in missing middle-type buildings at six. (Previous staff proposals and analysis had included buildings with up to eight units.)

Other edits to the policy options in the request to advertise similarly took the most expansive, unrestricted possibilities off the table, or appeared to be attempts to add more moderate options. The board removed an option that would allow missing middle construction with no additional on-site parking, and added a minimum property size option for construction that would limit five- to six-unit buildings to either sites near transit or sites of more than 12,000 square feet. That would mean many areas of the county would only support construction of two- to four-unit homes.

Both edits split the county board 3-2, with members Matt de Ferranti, Takis Karantonis, and Libby Garvey supporting them.

Board members also split over a proposal regarding a possible annual cap on the number of missing middle units developed per year. The group approved Katie Cristol’s suggestion to increase the proposed cap from 42 to 58 and add a three-year sunset clause to the measure — but ultimately expanded the sunset period to five years, a recommendation from Karantonis, from which Christian Dorsey and Cristol dissented.

In crafting the final policy, board members will only be able to work within those parameters. They could set the number of units allowed in missing middle construction lower than six, but no higher; and similarly, they could ultimately lower the proposed cap number, but can’t expand it past 58.

Other aspects of the request to advertise were much less contentious, including design considerations like garage placement, requirements to preserve or plant trees, regulations around accessory dwelling units.

More debate ahead

“We’re setting the scope. This is the most we can enact in March,” de Ferranti said before the vote. He said the Missing Middle plan represented a needed “change from a hard-andfast sense of ‘we will have density only in the corridors,'” referring to Arlington’s long-standing planning tradition of creating highly dense neighborhoods around transit.

Karantonis also hailed progress towards ending exclusive single family zoning, which he called “a huge drag on our economy and our future.” He also said the advertised policy advanced racial equity and justice goals.

Garvey praised the advertised policy as “sensible and measured change.” She also defended the board’s public process in crafting the policy, which opponents have criticized, and expressed exhaustion and concern over the fierceness of the public debate on the policy. “I’m tired of warring experts,” she said.

Dorsey and Cristol struck a different note after the vote. While both said they remained optimistic heading into the final round of policy discussions, both expressed serious disappointment in their colleagues’ choice to remove larger buildings from final consideration, which they said would take away the most attainable homes deliverable under the policy. Both suggested that the desire to impose the limit came out of “false hope,” that doing so would calm community outcry over the larger policy, as Cristol called it.

“Despite the extensive analysis that has shown the limited viability of seven- and eight-plexes … we still hear apocalyptic concerns about them on every block, and we’re going to hear it about five- and six-plexes,” Dorsey predicted.

De Ferranti, Garvey, and Karantonis argued back that imposing the six-unit ceiling could help make the final round of community debate more constructive.

Members of the public had similarly mixed feelings after the vote.

“3 board members chopped 8 from MMH, which has the same impact of excluding Black people from owning in modern time,” tweeted Mike Hemminger, president of the Arlington NAACP. “How dare board members say this action begins to right the wrongs of the past. This is de facto segregation and our leaders missed the mark on such a historic vote.”

The group Yes In My Backyard’s (YIMBY) of Northern Virginia said it was “pleased” with the county’s decision to advance the proposal, but warned that limiting the policy could mute its ultimate impact.

“The litmus test for Missing Middle housing’s success or failure will be whether it actually produces new homes,” the group wrote in a statement released Thursday. “Further narrowing of the final Missing Middle housing plan would risk yielding a policy that produces very little new housing.”

Opponents, meanwhile, were far from appeased. Arlingtonians For Our Sustainable Future, one of the groups leading the opposition to the plan, labeled it the “Missing Middle Mess” and called it “hopelessly confusing and inconsistent.”

“MM is a destructive departure from thoughtful planning,” the group said in a Twitter thread. “Because of the County government’s painfully weak civic engagement efforts, many thousands of Arlington residents still have no idea that MM could newly enable 6-plexes next door, across the street, and behind them.”

Arlingtonians for Upzoning Transparency, another opponent, also took early aim at six-plexes in a tweet response to the request to advertise.

Vote comes after lengthy public hearings

Wednesday’s deliberation and vote was delayed after public comment at the Jan. 21 board meeting ran about six hours, with more than 150 people testifying. The disagreements were dramatic, but the hearing, mostly, was not, with few disruptions to public comment. (People in the room voiced their agreement to speaker comments by raising their hands and wiggling their fingers in silent applause.)

By the spillover public comment period on Tuesday, tensions were higher and louder. Dorsey threatened to throw a man out of the room for disrupting the comments of Jane Green, a founding leader of the YIMBYs of NoVA group.

On both days, opponents — many of them older, longtime homeowners — argued that the Missing Middle plan would not deliver relatively affordable housing or greater socioeconomic and racial diversity. Many said they believed supporters of the plan — “righteous YIMBYs,” as one commenter labeled them — had been misled by the county board, who they accused of pushing zoning reform in pursuit of greater property tax revenues and at the behest of ambitious developers.

In fact, opponents argued, the Missing Middle plan would be a harbinger of displacement, pushing out low- and middleincome residents and seniors and others living on fixed incomes. (That population is already struggling with existing property tax and rent increases as the value of Arlington’s land continues to rise.) They pointed to the rapid development of the Columbia Pike corridor as an example of the ills development can bring. about the capacity of the county’s pipes and concerned that added on-street parking from residents in apartment buildings would spoil the character of her neighborhood.

“You’re going to have all these cars on the street where the kids used to be able to get out and get along and play basketball and know each other,” she told WAMU/DCist.

County estimates suggest that the pace of new missing middle housing would be fairly slow, adding around 150 new residents to the county’s single-family, detached neighborhoods each year. As such, county officials have said that they believe the county’s existing infrastructure and plans for growth will accommodate new residents benefitting from this construction.

Grappling with a legacy of racism

Many supporters of the Missing Middle plan said the measure would mark the end of decades of racist exclusionary zoning in the county, which priced out families of color. (The county’s legacy of explicitly and implicitly racist housing policy has created “islands of disadvantage” that persist today in otherwise wealthy, healthy, high-opportunity areas, according to a 2021 Virginia Commonwealth University analysis of Northern Virginia census tracts.)

“This is a racist past, and we continue to live in it, and we want out of that system,” said Rev. Ashley Goff, the pastor of Arlington Presbyterian Church, who also owns a home in Green Valley. She was at the hearing Saturday with a large contingent of Arlington clergy and parishioners from local congregations Virginians Organized For Interfaith Community Engagement, a group that advocates with and for low- and middle-income communities.

“We have built tons of new housing, but prices keep rising because development, especially on the Pike, is changing the dynamic of our most affordable areas,” Anne Bodine said at Saturday’s hearing, citing the example of an Iraqi-American resident who worked with the U.S. military abroad — and was pushed out by rising prices in Arlington a few years ago. “Missing Middle will make this worse.”

Bodine and others noted that the Missing Middle plan would not deliver immediately attainable housing — some units, even in multifamily buildings, would cost close to $1 million, when first built — and suggested the county should explore other options for creating truly affordable housing. (We looked in-depth at arguments about the Missing Middle plan and affordability here.)

Supporters, many of them younger, and some of them renters as well as current homeowners, pointed out that land values in Arlington will continue to rise, making it more and more expensive to live there. They argued that the promise of building more dense housing would eventually create a wider array of more affordable options. They also said the Missing Middle plan would be an alternative to teardowns, a trend where builders in Arlington buy a smaller, older home, raze it, and put up a much larger house, some of which sell for close to $2 million.

“Missing Middle housing options will improve overall affordability in the long term, but we can’t get there unless we start now,” Randy Rosso told the board Saturday. Rosso grew up in Arlington and said his childhood home has since been torn down and replaced by a much larger home far out of his price range.

Opponents suggested that added density would create broad problems with parking, stormwater infrastructure, the county’s tree canopy, and school overcrowding. One commenter suggested that denser housing would bring “urban blight” to Arlington’s quiet suburban neighborhoods, and several raised concerns about charm and design.

Kathy Mirro, a longtime homeowner in Westover who owns a local plumbing business, said on Saturday she was worried

Several opponents of the plan, meanwhile, argued that talk of structural racism did not square with their experience of Arlington as a welcoming, inclusive place. They pointed to existing diversity in single-family home neighborhoods as evidence that the effects of exclusionary zoning are no longer relevant to the present day.

“I dislike all this talk about racism in this county because we never had it,” said Mirro, who is white. She remembered how a neighbor called her house “the United Nations” because of the racial diversity of the neighborhood kids always coming in and out.

Other opponents said Arlington’s existing communities of color would be further pushed out by the plan, striking against its promise of ending a racist practice.

Age was another dividing line. Several younger supporters said they loved living in Arlington, but would never be able to afford a home in the county — and they believed the Missing Middle plan could provide at least slightly more attainable homes.

Mirro and several other commenters took issue with the stories told by younger Arlingtonians about their futile search for homeownership opportunities in the county. Their own homeownership successes, they said, were the result of hard work and patience.

“People just didn’t turn 25 and were able to buy a house,” Mirro said. “You saved for it. You lived in other areas until you found that you had the money and the credit to buy a house. Nobody hands you anything. You have to work for it.”

Ashley Archila-Ventura, a 21-year-old community advocate at Casa Mariflor and community college student who grew up in committed affordable housing in the county, took a different view.

“As a young person, I’m just like, ‘Okay, well, like, now where do I go? Like, what do I do with my life?’ If I want to stay in my hometown, I feel like I’m being pushed out of it a little bit.”

This story was originally published by WAMU/DCist