Missing Middle Housing Supporters Rally To End Single-Family Zoning In Arlington

ARLINGTON, VA — About 200 people gathered in Courthouse Plaza Saturday afternoon to show their support for Arlington County's Missing Middle Housing plan, with speakers arguing that undoing single-family zoning will create more affordable housing, help the environment, and address racist and exclusionary housing policies.

Members of the Arlington chapters of the NAACP, League of Women Voters and Sierra Club joined local clergy and other Arlington residents to explain why they believe the Arlington County Board should vote to approve the Missing Middle Housing plan at its March 18 meeting.

The goal of the major zoning change, according to Arlington County, is to increase and diversify the county's housing supply and ultimately provide more housing options for residents to choose from, either as rentals or homes to purchase. The term "missing middle" refers to what supporters believe is a lack of townhouses, duplexes and other types of multifamily housing between single-family and apartments and condominiums in the county.

Arlington County Board Member Katie Cristol kicked off the rally on the snowy afternoon by telling the crowd that it is "a little unconventional" for a board member to speak at an advocacy event on an issue still under consideration by the board.

READ ALSO: Arlington's Missing Middle Plan Moves Forward After County Board Vote

"But I am here because you all are here," Cristol explained. "We would not have come this far on this vision for the community without you all and all that you have done to show up. Because as much as my colleagues and I make decisions based on our own moral center and our deep study of the issue, at the end of the day, our job is to represent the people of Arlington."

Cristol said the county board is doing its best to recognize its own "contributions and complicity in the national housing shortage."

"This is an intergenerational coalition that you have built," she said. "This is a coalition that has brought together renters and homeowners, people across the political spectrum and all gender identities. It is, to borrow a phrase from that old protest rally song, what democracy looks like."

Jane Green, president and co-founder of YIMBYs of Northern Virginia, a group that advocates for denser housing and infill development, served as emcee of the event. She said the rally organizers are demanding that the board, in its vote next month, allow up to six-unit homes through by right zoning on residential lots across Arlington.

"On top of that, we want no parking mandate for lots near transit, we want maximum flexibility, and we want no caps," Green said.

Under the county's proposal, the cap on the number of Missing Middle units that could be built in a year would be 58, a number that would have a sunset period of five years, when the board could consider lifting the cap.

In response to the rally, Arlingtonians for Upzoning Transparency, a group opposed to the Missing Middle Plan, said YIMBYs of Northern Virginia and speakers at the rally "falsely portray" the county’s Missing Middle Housing plan as helping low and moderate-income residents.

"It has become clear that YIMBYs and the County Board are on the same page, wanting residents to think that the MMH Plan is about affordability, when in reality, those who will benefit are developers and upper-income earners, many from outside Arlington," Arlingtonians for Upzoning Transparency member David Gerk said in a statement Saturday.

READ ALSO: Housing Reparations Policy Viewed As Better Option Than Missing Middle

"The County’s last-minute rebranding of its MMH Plan to ‘Expanded Housing Options’ (EHO) is smoke and mirrors," Gerk said. "Instead, let’s call it what it is — Exclusive Housing Options."

On Jan. 25, the Arlington County Board voted unanimously to approve a “request to advertise” the Missing Middle Housing plan, a vote that moved the board into the final phase before it could approve the plan. The Arlington County Planning Commission is scheduled to hold a public hearing on the plan on March 6, followed by the County Board hearing on March 18.

In the plan adopted for consideration, the expanded housing options would include two-family dwellings, such as duplexes and semidetached (two side-by-side units separated by a common wall); townhouses with three units (three side-by-side units separated by common walls); and multiple-family buildings with at least three and no more than six dwelling units (triplexes, fourplexes, and other multiplexes).

In his speech at Saturday's rally, Bryan Coleman, second vice president of the NAACP Arlington Branch, said, "We need expanded housing options up to and including six-plexes by right across the county without restriction."

The NAACP Arlington Branch and other supporters of the Missing Middle Housing plan contend the zoning changes are needed in part to address the lasting impacts of past housing policy decisions that excluded people of color from many neighborhoods through racially restrictive deed covenants and the banning of rowhouses, which were popular among Black people.

Coleman, in his remarks, emphasized that housing opportunities and the integration of communities in Arlington "are still stifled, not explicitly on the basis of race, but instead by income."

"Our current zoning laws are a reflection of those efforts to perpetuate segregation within Arlington County," he said.

Pamela Quanrud, speaking on behalf of the local League of Women Voters chapter, said her group fully supports "the expansion of Arlington's affordable housing options."

"We believe in higher-density zoning in low-density areas," Quanrud said. "We believe we need to reverse historic systemic racism in our residential zoning."

Quanrud said the new types of housing that would be built in Arlington under the Missing Middle Housing plan would give new opportunities to anyone "in a modest paying job who wants to live where they work."

But opponents of the Missing Middle Housing plan said it has nothing to do with affordable housing or with fair housing.

Some economists estimate that the plan will cause housing prices to increase, will lead to further gentrification in the county, and will displace lower income residents, all undermining the goals of fair housing, according to Arlingtonians for Upzoning Transparency.

Speaking to the crowd, Gail Perry, a retired Arlington Public Schools teacher who supports the Missing Middle Housing plan, was not as appreciative of the County Board as other speakers. She accused the board of modifying the plan in January to "accommodate the powerful voices" in Arlington.

At its Jan. 25 meeting, the County Board voted to adopt an amendment offered by Board Member Matt de Ferranti that removed seven- and eight-unit dwellings from the Missing Middle proposal.

"The needs of those who have no power continue to be minimized," she said. "If this county is so progressive and committed to racial equity, where's the commitment to affordable housing?"

In a comment that drew cheers from the crowd, Dean Amel of the Potomac River Group of the Sierra Club said the only species native to Virginia that would be harmed by the Missing Middle Housing plan would be "Jim Crow," a reference to the codified system of racial apartheid in Virginia and other parts of the U.S. from the 1870s to the 1960s.

"The Sierra Club stands with the other organizations and citizens represented here today in supporting the strongest possible Missing Middle proposal, with six-unit dwellings everywhere in Arlington allowed by the County Board's advertisement, minimal parking requirements, and the cap that the county board has set at 58 units that expires within five years," Amel told the crowd.

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