It could be an uphill battle at best, but an Arlington government advisory body wants the state and local governments to loosen restrictions on religious congregations seeking to turn their parcels into affordable housing.
Members of the Housing Commission in September voted to include the proposal on a list of priorities for consideration by the County Board in advance of the 2025 General Assembly session.
Eliminating some of the current procedural steps required to rezone parcels from religious use to housing “would be transformative,” said Rev. Alice Tewell of Clarendon Presbyterian Church, the lone public speaker on the topic at the Sept. 5 commission meeting.
Tewell’s church has spent the past three years attempting to redevelop its site for housing aimed at an LGBT cohort.
The current process is “too costly” and leads to “an endless loop of bureaucracy,” she said.
But what one side would call endless bureaucracy, another might say are necessary guardrails to protect surrounding neighborhoods and assure that upzoning is accompanied by the right mix of community benefits – the same as with any other developer seeking bonus density compared to existing zoning.
While the proposal would “reduce barriers and speed up the process” for development of affordable housing, it could face stiff opposition, Housing Commission chair Kellen MacBeth said.
Through the years, a number of Arlington neighborhoods have waged extensive battles on redevelopment proposals, not necessarily out of antagonism to affordable housing (as wording of the Housing Commission recommendation suggests), but to the increased mass of the proposed new development.
The Housing Commission’s recommendation also could run into a buzzsaw of opposition by the Virginia Municipal League and Virginia Association of Counties, which are antagonistic to efforts restricting the zoning powers of localities.
And any bill would have to find enough support in the General Assembly to move it through the process – and, if it got that far in 2025, might have to survive antagonism from the Youngkin administration.
Even among members of the Housing Commission’s subcommittee who vetted the idea, there was division on how any legislation should be framed – whether converting religious parcels to housing should be by-right, or whether there should continue to be a process for the public, advisory bodies, government staff and elected officials to weigh in.
Owing to declines in overall religiosity, internal disputes and the growth of a new generation of religious congregations siphoning away members, many mainstream denominations that dominated religious life in the 20th century are facing declines in membership that run from modest to catastrophic.
In Arlington as elsewhere, maintaining a large building built a century or more ago to accommodate a declining congregation often is less appetizing to church leaders than partnering with a developer that will provide a smaller worship/office space as part of a larger, mixed-use property that includes a housing component.
(The fact that some of these church buildings have a degree of historic provenance generally has been ignored by leaders; County Board members have approved redevelopment of several sites by saying that the greater good trumps historic-preservation goals.)
To prepare for its final submission to the County Board, the Housing Commission let a subcommittee do the initial vetting. From a list of nearly two dozen proposals, the subcommittee recommended 10 to the full commission, which then removed three, leaving seven to be sent to the County Board.
MacBeth said careful culling was important; the more items on the list, “the board is less likely to pay attention,” he said.
In recent history, only a single recommendation of the Housing Commission has ever made it onto the board’s legislative-priorities package, he said.
