wamu.org/story/19/01/30/amazons-arrival-should-force-real-action-on-affordable-housing-advocates-say/#.XFSr16ROnYU
Amazon’s Arrival Should Force Real Action On Affordable Housing, Advocates Say Housing advocates in Northern Virginia are sounding an alarm: With Amazon on its way to Arlington, local leaders need to seriously commit to creating and preserving more affordable homes in the area.
“The announcement by Amazon that Crystal City was selected for HQ2 will provide significant benefits for the region,” says a recent report from the Northern Virginia Affordable Housing Alliance. “However, this announcement should create a regional sense of urgency and commitment to address our housing supply and affordability gap.”
Become a sponsor ? Speculation over the company’s arrival has already begun to raise home values in the Crystal City area, real estate data show.
The affordability gap exists throughout the Washington area — not just in Northern Virginia — but Arlington’s housing market is already the priciest in the region, according to multiple analyses. To solve the problem, advocates say increasing public subsidies is important, but not the only solution.
Here are a few more ways the housing alliance says local officials could spur development of more affordable and “missing middle” homes in Northern Virginia.
Loosen Up Zoning Rules
In Northern Virginia and across the country, zoning and land use policies have historically been shaped by “the intertwining of explicit racial segregation policies with economically exclusionary policies,” the report says.
Explicitly racist policies like restrictive covenants, which for decades barred African Americans and other minorities from buying homes, combined with practices like racial steering and redlining to perpetuate segregation. The 1968 Fair Housing Act cracked down on legal segregation, but affordable housing advocates say racial and economic segregation is alive and well in places where certain types of housing are restricted.
Take Arlington and Fairfax counties, where most residential land is zoned for single-family, detached homes — the most expensive form of housing to build and occupy.
Making it easier to build less costly forms of housing, such as apartments or townhomes, chisels away at a roadblock to affordable housing. “At a minimum, allowing more diverse housing types in detached single family neighborhoods reduces the barrier to entry into those neighborhoods,” the report says.
Most developable residential land in Fairfax and Arlington counties is set aside for single-family homes, limiting development of more affordable housing types, such as apartments.Northern Virginia Affordable Housing Alliance It also recommends easing restrictions on alternative forms of housing, including “accessory dwelling units” such as tiny homes and in-law-suites. (Responding to a shortage of affordable housing, lawmakers in nearby Montgomery County, Maryland, have proposed relaxing regulations on accessory dwelling units to make them easier to build.)
The report acknowledges, though, that building more housing won’t solve the affordability problem on its own, especially for the most vulnerable low-income residents. In fact, it says, building more can actually raise home prices on the neighborhood level, which is why jurisdictions also have to preserve existing affordable homes and raise more money for housing subsidies. The report gives kudos to Alexandria, Virginia, which recently increased its meals tax to help pay for affordable housing.
Build On Community-serving Land
There’s not much land left to develop in Northern Virginia, and competition over it is fierce. That’s why the report recommends that jurisdictions find ways to put housing on community-serving land controlled by entities like hospitals, faith-based institutions, universities and charities.
The report cites several examples of this practice, including a recent development that put 70 affordable rental units on the same site as Clarendon Baptist Church. It also mentions The Residences at the Government Center, where 270 units of affordable housing share space with the Fairfax County Government Center.
Incentivize Growth
When communities resist growth through exclusionary policies like restrictive zoning, the report says, they effectively raise housing prices and deepen segregation. That’s why it recommends that governments reward communities that accommodate “equitable supply growth.”
Massachusetts has done this well, the report says. If a jurisdiction isn’t hitting its own affordability goals, a state program lets it override local zoning to build more affordable homes. The state also offers increased school funding for municipalities that embrace “smart growth” development plans.
But advocates know well how politically fraught “upzoning,” or allowing more density, can be — which is why they also call on leaders to change the narrative around development.
Change The Way People View Growth
“Awareness of the socioeconomic bias that shaped low-density and exclusionary zoning is not widespread,” says the report, and residents routinely fight new development for a perfectly legitimate reason: They think it will worsen traffic, crowd schools and generally make their lives harder.
Because there’s a link between building more housing and reducing housing prices overall — and many new developments are required to provide some affordable housing — it’s important for residents to understand how they can benefit from growth, the report says.
Governments can do that by being fully transparent about the development process and offering up lots of data to the public, so residents and leaders are working from a common set of facts.
“Important data points for consideration can include property tax revenue generation, school capacity, new student generation, infrastructure capacity [and] the costs of building and maintaining new infrastructure,” the report says.
That transparency should be the norm at all times, not only when new development projects are pitched, the report says. Residents should always have access to information about how existing housing relates to infrastructure capacity, public finances and schools.
“This more holistic approach may mitigate the tendency to view existing development as an asset and new development as a potential liability,” the report says.
Always Keep Transit Front Of Mind
But for any of this to work, jurisdictions must also show they can handle growth, the document says. When roads are already clogged, Metro is struggling and schools are crowded, residents have good reason to believe that ramping up housing construction will only worsen those problems.
That calls for behind-the-scenes changes within governments, such as better cross-departmental coordination to make sure infrastructure capacity is in line with development plans. But it also demands a “forward-thinking” approach to planning.
One of those methods is called “transportation demand management,” which tasks leaders with understanding why people get around the way they do. If residents are choosing car travel because their other transit options are too inconvenient or expensive, growth will continue to be unmanageable, and residents will continue to fight development they believe could worsen traffic or take away their parking.
Getting this part right, the report suggests, is crucial to building neighborhoods that are sustainable, centrally located and above all, accessible to a broad range of people — not just highly paid tech workers who move to the D.C. region to work for Amazon.
Mary Bolton 202-390-1208