Some Falls Church officials are hoping 2025 will be a year of moving from conversation to concrete decisions in addressing affordable-housing goals.
“It’s the action side of things that has always been the problem — not the aspirational nature of what we want,” City Council member Erin Flynn said during a discussion of how city leaders will move forward on housing issues in the new year.
The Dec. 9 discussion zeroed in on the 24 goals recommended by a city-government working group that had spent much of 2024 focused on affordable housing. Council members will dig deeper during a Jan. 5 work session.
If the current timeline holds, final decisions on the policy package will be made in March. It then will be incorporated into the city’s Comprehensive Plan.
Flynn said it was good to see the various aspirations collected in a single document, but pressed staff on implementation.
“How do we actually start accomplishing the goals?” she asked.
Several Council members expressed fears that, with so many prospective priorities, there could be paralysis by analysis in attempting to address them.
“That’s a lot of goals,” said Council member Marybeth Connelly of the two dozen. “They’re good goals, but there’s just a lot of them.”
Twenty-four would be “a lot to adopt and even more to think about financing,” Council member Debora Schantz-Hiscott added. She recommended distilling the list by “identifying key action items that give tangible results.”
Staff responded that of the 24 proposals, seven were seen as top-tier priorities.
Incorporating any or all of the proposals in the Comprehensive Plan did not require Council members to take further steps to implement them, City Manager Wyatt Shields said.
“It’s a chance to articulate goals,” Shields said. “They are non-binding.”
Council member David Snyder said ladling more on the plate of community leaders already facing challenges in addressing affordable housing could prove problematic.
“We’re going to have our hands full preserving the housing we have, and if there’s a super-priority, that ought to be the super-priority,” he said.
Among the working group’s proposals for rental housing:
- Increasing the ratio of affordable housing (whether market-rate or subsidized) from the current 8% of the city’s total apartment stock to 12%.
- Setting goals for the number of units for those earning between 30% and 50% of area median income.
- Encouraging creation of more family-sized units of two or more bedrooms.
“The group with the highest housing cost burden in the city are renters,” said Jill Norcross, executive director of the Northern Virginia Affordable Housing Alliance. Her organization provided support services to the working group, which met eight times over the summer.
The median family income of Falls Church homeowners is $212,000, while it is $116,000 for renters, Norcross said.
But even $212,000 a year is seldom enough to purchase single-family homes or even townhouses in the community, based on current prices and mortgage-interest rates.
For owner-occupied housing, the working group is asking city leaders to support first-time ownership opportunities for those earning between 80% and 120% of area median income, described in the report as “a segment of buyers who do not have current opportunities to purchase a home in the city.”
The working group seeks also policies that will diversify the Falls Church’s housing stock with more duplexes, triplexes, townhomes and apartment complexes of six or fewer units.
Snyder voiced concern over of a proposal to designate a percentage of the city’s budget each year for affordable-housing initiatives. It’s something that isn’t done in other areas of the budget, he noted.
“I think that’s a really bad practice,” Snyder said of putting mandates into the budget-development process. “It removes flexibility.”
His Council colleague, Justine Underhill, cautioned that aspirations ultimately will run into real-world constraints, and all involved need to be ready.
“There’s a reality in terms of funding and budgets,” she said.
After the Dec. 9 Council discussion, the proposal spent a number of weeks making its way through city advisory commissions for their review. After the work session on Jan. 5, city officials plan to hold a community forum on the package of proposals later that month.
