Missing Middle Housing Plan Stirs Up Lengthy Debate At Arlington County Board Meeting

ARLINGTON, VA — More than 160 residents spoke Saturday at an Arlington County Board meeting on the Missing Middle housing zoning proposal, with the number of supporters speaking in favor of the proposal to revamp the county’s general land use plan and zoning ordinance slightly outnumbering opponents of the plan.

After presentations by a county staff member and the vice chair of the Arlington County Planning Commission Saturday morning, the county board opened the floor to members of the public to comment on the proposed request to advertise the Missing Middle housing plan.

Several hours later, after hearing comments from the long list of speakers, Arlington County Board Chair Christian Dorsey announced that further consideration of the proposal would be held Tuesday night at a recessed meeting, when the county board is expected to vote on whether to advertise public hearings by the Planning Commission on March 6 and the County Board on March 18.

If the board votes to hold those hearings, the county board could hold its final vote on the Missing Middle housing proposal as early as late March.

The proposed zoning changes would allow the construction of duplexes, three-unit townhouses and multifamily buildings with up to six or eight dwellings on lots of up to one acre in almost all of Arlington’s neighborhoods zoned for single-family homes.

Many of the speakers who argued against the Missing Middle proposal on Saturday said the plan would do little to remedy the scarcity of affordable housing in a county where its teachers, first responders and other employees find it extremely difficult to own a home.

Some opponents called on the county to conduct a pilot project on building duplexes, three-unit townhouses and multifamily buildings in certain areas of the county to gauge whether it will produce the proposed benefits of creating more affordable housing.

Natalie Roy, a 32-year resident of Arlington who announced her candidacy to the county board on Friday, said the board should, at the very least, launch a pilot program to evaluate the impacts and outcomes of allowing by-right construction of these multiple units in areas of Arlington currently only zoned for single-family homes.

Zoning Ordinances and White Supremacy

Arlington introduced its first General Land Use Plan in 1961, a plan that reinforced the first zoning ordinance introduced in the county in 1930, which favored the construction of single-family housing throughout the county.

Arlington began to shift toward higher-density and mixed-use zoning with the arrival of the Metrorail in the 1970s. The county repealed its ban on row houses in 1969 and implemented zoning specific to townhouses to aid in redevelopment.

Today, Arlington remains dominated by single-family neighborhoods, with dense multifamily development around Metro stations — and very few buildings that fall in between these two densities. The term "missing middle" refers to the lack of townhouses, duplexes and other types of multifamily housing between single-family and apartments and condominiums.

Several speakers who support the Missing Middle said they believe increasing the stock of these types of homes in Arlington will create more affordable housing. For example, building two townhouses on a lot currently zones for single-family home would create two homes costing $800,000 each rather than one home that costs $1.6 million, they said.

Julius (JD) Spain Sr., former president of the NAACP Arlington Branch, who like Roy is seeking the Democratic nomination for county board, said groups like the NAACP, the Sierra Club, YIMBYS of Northern Virginia and others that represent "thousands of vulnerable citizens, and just citizens in general, have spoken out" in favor of the Missing Middle housing proposal.

"We are attempting here today to unwind historically discriminatory and exclusionary zoning," Spain said. "It's a start in the right direction."

Tia Alfred, another supporter of the Missing Middle proposal, argued that its adoption would put an end to developers having a monopoly on housing in Arlington. Alfred, who said Arlington needs more equitable housing, emphasized that the county has become a “developer’s dream cornucopia.”

A statute in the Virginia Constitution of 1902 allowed localities to define “segregation districts,” which were defined borders between Black communities and white neighborhoods. These policies, along with neighborhood-level segregation through restrictive covenants, led to patterns of racial segregation across Arlington.

In the 1930s, the white community of Woodlawn Village — now known as Waycroft-Woodlawn — erected a separation wall to avoid mingling with Black residents in the Hall's Hill neighborhood. Most of the Hall's Hill Wall was removed by the mid-1960s, but a small portion of the wall still stands at 17th Street N. and N. Culpeper Street, two blocks east of the Virginia Hospital Center.

In a report submitted to the Arlington County Planning Commission last month, Arlingtonians for Our Sustainable Future, which opposes the Missing Middle proposal, said times have changed since the days of segregation and Jim Crow laws.

The group notes that some policymakers and activists claim the Missing Middle proposal should be expanded "to address the abhorrent racially- and ethnically-exclusionary zoning policies that were outlawed more than 50 years ago."

"But adopting the county government’s current [Missing Middle] plans will accelerate displacement of minority and low-income groups and raise the cost of Arlington housing," the report said.

At Saturday's county board hearing, opponents of the Missing Middle proposal also argued that developers overseeing the building of new types of "missing middle" homes on plots previously zoned for single family homes would benefit the most from adopting of the zoning change.

Brian Casabianca, speaking on behalf of a group of Ph.D. economists who live in Arlington, told the board that "no serious economic analysis" has been conducted about the Missing Middle housing proposal.

"The few premises put forward do not stand up to scrutiny," Casabianca said. "The plan should be called an increased density plan, not a plan to improve affordability, equity, or inclusion. ... Developers will seek to maximize profit. The result: The prices for existing homes will be more out of reach for those who could have previously afforded them."

Terri Armao, speaking to the board, said the citizens of Arlington County were misled to believe that Missing Middle would provide homeownership opportunities for middle income earners and would retain and increase diversity."

"We were expecting this plan but didn't get it," Armao said. "Instead, diversity means the type of housing and not actual people."

Missing Middle and Climate Change

Another speaker, Mete Uz, argued the county should take a more gradual approach, perhaps by initially allowing by-right construction of townhouses and multifamily dwellings only in single-family zoned neighborhoods near Metro stations in the county.

"My concern is if we do this all at once for everywhere, that is going to be a policy we can never change, and then we might see unintended consequences, like buyers of a small property having to compete with builders who can pay higher prices because they can spread the costs of those higher prices over multiple units," said Uz, who works on climate change issues as a federal government scientist.

"So it might actually end up hurting the buyers we want to incentivize rather than helping them," he added.

Filling plots of land in single-family neighborhoods with either over-sized homes, as Arlington has been seeing for more than 25 years, or multifamily homes, as proposed in the Missing Middle plan, would create hard, often paved, surfaces that influence the runoff patterns and may put greater pressure on the county's already taxed stormwater systems, according to Missing Middle opponents.

The local Sierra Club chapter, which supports the Missing Middle proposal, responded to those concerns in a letter to the county board last June.

"The county’s stormwater challenges are very real and are worsened by climate change. However, the Missing Middle Framework is clear that any new buildings will be limited to the size already allowed, making the proposal essentially neutral in terms of impact on stormwater," the Sierra Club chapter said. "It is up to the County, with community support, to ensure that new construction of all kinds does not contribute in any way to Arlington’s stormwater problems, which are caused primarily by poor practices of the past."

Speakers at Saturday's board meeting also argued that creating more Missing Middle housing in Arlington will do little to halt the suburban sprawl in areas like Loudoun and Prince William counties, which is a huge contributor to the climate crisis and a disruption to ecosystems and habitats in those areas.

But Laura Watchman, who said her lifelong passion is environmental conservation, countered that Arlington will not be able to attract more jobs to the county without implementing the Missing Middle proposal.

"Forcing those people to move farther out takes a toll on our climate," Watchman told the county board.

At Saturday's meeting, Arlington County staff recommended that the board adopt the resolution authorizing advertisement of public hearings by the Planning Commission and the board on the Missing Middle proposal.

The County Board's Tuesday evening session, where it will resume hearing public comments on the Missing Middle proposal, will begin at 6:30 p.m. The public can attend the hearing in person at the County Board Meeting Room on the third floor of the Bozman Government Center at 2100 Clarendon Blvd. in Arlington, or watch the meeting online.

RELATED:

• Hundreds Protest 'Missing Middle' Housing Zoning Plan In Arlington
• Missing Middle Opponent Natalie Roy To Run For Arlington County Board
• Arlington's 'Missing Middle' Housing Debate Looms Large In Election