Home Care In Alexandria, VA

Margaret Barthel / DCist/WAMU

City planners in Alexandria are recommending that lawmakers eliminate single-family-only zoning – a proposal that has already proven contentious among residents who oppose more densely-populated neighborhoods, and that officials project might only add up to about 178 units of additional housing over the next decade.

The proposal is part of the city’s “Zoning for Housing” initiative, a slate of recommendations unveiled Tuesday evening by the Alexandria Planning Commission aimed at increasing the production of apartments and, consequently, lowering the cost of housing.

“We are here because of an urgent and important problem that our city, our region, and our nation is facing, and that is a housing crisis, where the cost of housing has increased at a pace faster than incomes,” Karl Moritz, Alexandria’s planning and zoning director, said at a presentation on Tuesday.

“Some of the things that we will be proposing will just make it easier to produce a housing unit that fits in with the community. Others are more challenging. They’re asking us to rethink some long held truths or principles in order to expand access to certain neighborhoods that, right now, you really have to have a very high income to afford,” he added.

Officials estimate that 15,500 renter households – roughly 10% of the city’s population – are housing cost-burdened, paying more than 30% of their income on rent. The average assessed value of a single family home, meanwhile, is more than $940,000.

Mortiz’s office is suggesting that, among other measures, lawmakers move to eliminate single-family-only zoning, which accounts for one-third of the city’s land area. Depending on how aggressively lawmakers decide to relax zoning ordinances, developers would be allowed to build up to four units of housing per lot in neighborhoods currently zoned only for single homes.

Though controversial among some vocal coalitions of residents in Northern Virginia, the policy has become more popular across the country in recent years as cities grapple with how to meet a surging demand for more – and more affordable – homes. Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and Portland, Oregon have all relaxed or eliminated single-family zoning ordinances. During a protracted debate over how to develop more housing for middle-income residents, so too did Arlington, Alexandria’s neighbor to the north.

“As I had been saying all spring, if we are going to address our housing crisis, we shouldn’t take a third of the land off the table, in terms of how we hope to address the issue,” Moritz said.

City planners in Alexandria also proposed about a dozen other more modest plans that would allow for a meager uptick in density. Those include reduced requirements for off-street parking in areas close to public transit, as well as modifying building criteria in designated industrial zones requiring new development to be compatible with pedestrian-scale development.

But officials did not recommend that lawmakers relax height limits on new multifamily buildings in certain neighborhoods – a policy that would allow the city to achieve greater density – arguing that studies suggest the additional density “did not create enough value” in certain projects to pay for the affordable units required in new development.

The push to relax strict zoning requirements comes as Alexandria, along with the rest of the metro D.C. region, inches closer to a regional deadline to collectively build 320,000 new units of housing by 2030. Alexandria reported in 2019 that, since the year 2000, its stock of affordable, non-subsidized rental housing declined by 88%.

Officials’ projections for how much housing the changes could produce appear relatively low compared with that need: taken together, the relaxed zoning rules might spur only an additional 150 to 178 units over the next decade, planners said, assuming that other policies dictating things like building height and lot coverage stay the same.

Councilmember Sarah Bagley and Melissa McMahon, vice president of the city’s planning commission, asked Moritz to provide lawmakers with a tally of how much housing each individual recommendation might produce in isolation.

“I’m a tiny bit underwhelmed with the potential impact that I’m seeing in the proposals that we’ve gone over tonight,” McMahon said. “And I don’t – it’s not really a criticism. It’s more like a sense of existential disappointment that the challenges that we face are so large that everything that you have spent months looking at when it comes to land use and zoning is still barely moving the needle.”

Tuesday’s meeting kicks off a series of scheduled hearings and town halls on the slate of proposals, where the public will have the opportunity to comment. The next community meeting is scheduled for Sept. 14.

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Santa Claus will don a kilt and bagpipes this weekend for the Scottish Christmas Walk in Old Town. Here’s what you need to know about the annual event.

Congressman Don Beyer (D-8th) and his wife, Megan, are the grand marshals of the 52nd annual Scottish Christmas Walk Parade. Thousands of parade watchers are expected to attend the free event, and the weather is forecasted to be cloudy and cool — perfect for taking pictures.

The parade lasts from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. and includes dozens of Scottish clans, dancers, bagpipers and the City of Alexandria Pipes and Drums.

This year, the parade also features a number of entertainers, including champion Scottish fiddler Seán Heely, singer SHENNA, LEGO master builder Andrew Litterst (with one of his creations on the route), and the parade’s newest participant — the Ethiopian Community Support Center.

The one-mile-long parade starts at 11 a.m. at the intersection of Wolfe and St. Asaph streets, and travels north to Queen Street, then turns right (east toward the Potomac River) on Queen for three blocks, turns right on Fairfax Street, right on King Street and then concludes at the reviewing stand in front of City Hall (301 King Street).

Also, don’t miss the end of the parade, where three bagpipe bands — the City of Alexandria Pipes and Drums, St. Andrew’s Society’s Washington Scottish Pipe Band and Kiltie Band of York — play a massed concert at Market Square (301 King Street).

Taste of Scotland

While the parade is the main attraction, the weekend of events is capped off Friday night (Dec. 1) with the Campagna Center’s Taste of Scotland at The Atrium Building (277 S. Washington Street).

Single tickets for the event cost $200, and the event includes “whiskey-tasting stations, hors d’oeuvres, beer and wine bars and a custom art exhibit,” according to the Campagna Center. The evening is sponsored by The Goodhart Group, starts at 6:30 p.m. and ends at 10:30 p.m.

Proceeds from the event benefit Campagna Center core programs for Alexandria children and families.

Santa at The Torpedo Factory

Also on Saturday, the Torpedo Factory Art Center will host its annual holiday festival.

The event starts at 2 p.m., and art enthusiasts will have an hour-and-a-half before the arrival of Santa and Mrs. Claus, who will be ferried to the event by an Alexandria fireboat at around 3:30 p.m.

Holiday Boat Parade of Lights

Saturday’s events will conclude with the 23^rd Annual Alexandria Holiday Boat Parade of Lights sponsored by Amazon.

The boat parade starts at 5:30 p.m. with more than 50 brightly lit boats cruising one mile along the Potomac River.

According to Visit Alexandria:

Enjoy dockside festivities from 1 to 8 p.m. in Waterfront Park including a pop-up beer garden from Port City Brewing Company, holiday music and giveaways from 97.1 WASH-FM,hot chocolate from Dolci Gelati, pizza by the slice from Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana, American comfort food from Mason Social cookies, snacks from Together We Bake and more.Also at Waterfront Park, from 1 to 5:30 p.m. enjoy hands-on activities from independently owned Alexandria businesses Shop Made in Virginia, Penny Post and AR Workshop Alexandria.

In Alexandria, Virginia, located across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C., a public-private partnership helped transform an undeveloped 33-acre site long owned by the Fairfax County Redevelopment and Housing Authority into a new, mixed-income community featuring affordable rental housing, including housing for seniors; townhomes for sale at market rates; and a 12-acre public park. Transforming the site was possible thanks to Virginia's Public-Private Education Facilities and Infrastructure Act (PPEA), which facilitates the private development of certain projects that further the public interest on publicly owned land. The new development consists of 454 new units of housing, including 175 townhomes, 63 units of independent-living affordable apartments for seniors, and 216 units of affordable multifamily housing. The affordable units, known as the Residences at North Hill, are helping to achieve the county's goals for increased access to housing and opportunity across income levels with construction wrapping up in September 2023.

Mixed-Income Housing at North Hill

Philadelphia-based developer Pennrose partnered with Virginia-based Community Housing Partners to open the Residences at North Hill in June 2023. The units are spread among five 4-story buildings and include one-, two-, and three-bedroom units. All apartments in the development are affordable to households earning between 30 and 60 percent of the area median income (AMI). Sixty-eight project-based vouchers are available to offset rental costs for extremely low-income households. Funding sources for North Hill include both 9 percent and 4 percent low-income housing tax credits, bonds, and funding from the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) and HOME Investment Partnerships programs, among other sources. In addition, proceeds from the sale of the market-rate townhomes, which sold for between $700,000 and $850,000, helped offset the costs of the affordable units. In total, redevelopment of the site cost $174 million, of which the affordable multifamily portion cost $124 million.

From Undeveloped Tract to New Neighborhood

The Fairfax County Redevelopment and Housing Authority first acquired the North Hill site in 1981 for $5.8 million, purchased in part with $5.4 million in CDBG funds. The original site was just under 50 acres, 15 of which were eventually dedicated to the Woodley Hills Mobile Home Park. In 2010, the county adopted a master plan for the site, articulating a vision for housing alongside a new public park.

Several years after adopting the master plan, serious new proposals began to emerge. Facilitating the development of the North Hill site was PPEA, which authorizes Fairfax County to enter into public-private partnerships that will help speed up (or reduce the costs of) creating certain qualifying projects. Crucially, PPEA allows developers to submit unsolicited bids, and, in 2012, the North Hill site received such a bid. Under PPEA, when the county receives an unsolicited bid and wishes to advance the process, it must seek out competing conceptual proposals from other private entities. Pennrose and Community Housing Partners responded to that call with their own proposal in 2015, and the county ultimately selected the two development partners to complete the transformation of North Hill. Although the site was undeveloped, the development team encountered challenging soil conditions and environmental contamination from an unidentified subterranean tank discovered onsite. Construction of the townhomes began in 2020, followed by the affordable units. The 12-acre park was developed by the Fairfax County Park Authority and includes trails, an open lawn area, courts for basketball and pickleball, a playground, and an exercise area.

North Hill incorporates significant environmental features. Before its development, the site was heavily wooded; in creating the new townhomes and apartments, the developers exceeded mandated targets for tree preservation and for the tree canopy on the site. The buildings themselves were constructed to meet EarthCraft certification standards. Pennrose and Community Development Partners incorporated drought-tolerant native plants into its landscape design; used environmentally conscious waste management and recycling protocols during construction; and installed high-efficiency water heaters, appliances, lights, and fixtures. In addition, the buildings’ heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems are ENERGY STAR^® certified and incorporate an energy recovery ventilation system.

As in many jurisdictions in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, the Alexandria area of Fairfax County lacks adequate affordable housing for its residents. The addition of more than 450 new housing units — including the market-rate homeownership opportunities — on the formerly undeveloped site demonstrates the efficacy of policies such as PPEA, which allow private partners to efficiently leverage publicly owned land to create and advance projects that serve the public need.

Alexandria lawmakers voted unanimously early Wednesday to eliminate single-family-only zoning in this Northern Virginia city, opening the door for the construction of buildings with as many as four units in any residential neighborhood in a functionally limited but controversial and symbolically weighty vote.

The move, which further extends a hotly debated trend in urban planning to another corner of the D.C. region, was one of several zoning changes approved as part of the city’s ongoing “Zoning for Housing” initiative.

As housing stock in the D.C. area has failed to keep up with demand, Alexandria officials cast the wide-ranging plan as an effort to increase housing supply and lower costs in their mostly suburban community — specifically, by amending rules on what can be built where.

But much of the public’s attention focused on one piece of the package: a set of changes that will make it easier to build townhouses and small apartment buildings in neighborhoods long reserved for one house with a yard on each lot.

A growing number of local governments across the D.C. region and around the country have debated whether to adopt their own versions of this policy, which has divided residents over whether it would destroy their neighborhoods or make them more inclusive.

“We’ve all been talking past each other on this issue,” said Mayor Justin M. Wilson (D). “I think both sides don’t understand the fears and worldview on the other side.”

He said the plan would start to add housing while incorporating the “necessary guardrails” to address worries about change coming too quickly.

“These proposals are good ones. They’re modest,” he added, as the six-hour meeting stretched past midnight. “But I believe they’re ones that move the city forward.”

In nearby Arlington, a similar plan for more “missing middle” housing prompted a fiery, drawn-out discussion earlier this year between residents who said it would either destroy their neighborhoods or open them up to more people. (Arlington’s policy is now the subject of an ongoing lawsuit against the county.)

Alexandria’s effort was less ambitious — at its most expansive, it allows for four-unit buildings rather than six-unit buildings — and it will affect fewer neighborhoods because much of the city is already zoned to include townhouses and tall apartment towers. Even as the plan always seemed on track to get the green light from the city’s all-Democratic council, it drew similar kinds of debate throughout the fall.

Advocates for the policy argued that it would undo the legacy of exclusionary rules and provide less expensive housing options in some areas, although some also called on the city to go further. (The median home price in Alexandria was $617,500 last month.)

Opponents called on the city to slow the process, charging that it had failed to inform residents about a policy that could overwhelm city infrastructure and would increase profits for developers rather than producing affordable housing.

Many neighborhoods will largely keep the same standards around height, lot coverage and other specifications, and planners project that the new zoning rules will have a relatively modest effect on the city. The new policy is expected to lead to the redevelopment of about 66 properties and add 150 to 178 units over the next decade, according to estimates from Alexandria city planners.

As part of the “Zoning for Housing” plan, lawmakers also voted to roll back city rules that require off-street parking at residential buildings near Metro stations or rapid bus transit stops. This change will apply to single-family-only neighborhoods such as Seminary Hill, a leafy collection of cul-de-sacs, as well as areas that are largely filled with townhouses, such as historic Old Town.

Elsewhere, the existing parking rules will be loosened, depending on the number of housing units on the property: One- and two-unit buildings will be required to have at leastone off-street parking spot and three- and four-unit buildings will be required to have at least two spots.

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