Numerous affordable-housing advocates showed up at a recent local government meeting to push for county support in removing regulatory hurdles around construction.
The advocacy group Virginians Organized for Interfaith Community Engagement (VOICE) is pressing for state-level changes to streamline the construction of affordable housing on land owned by faith-based and nonprofit organizations.
“The status quo is not working,” VOICE representative Pat Findikoglu said at an Aug. 27 meeting of the Housing Commission’s legislative-priorities subcommittee.
The proposed changes, which would effectively limit some land-use powers of local governments, is billed as the “Yes in God’s Backyard” initiative.
Some religious congregations are facing dwindling attendance and aging facilities, leaving them penny-poor but land-rich, Findikoglu said. To provide a cash cushion and serve the broader community, some churches have turned to building affordable housing on that land.
But the regulations on developers, both nonprofit and for-profit, can be onerous.
VOICE points to the Unity Homes project in Ballston, a collaborative effort between Central United Methodist Church and True Ground Housing Partners.
The resulting mixed-use project, which opened in 2024, “took 10 years, maybe 17 years, depending on when you start counting,” Findikoglu said.
Other collaborative Arlington projects died because the hurdles were too steep, she said:
“The Unitarians gave up on a housing project … and now Clarendon Presbyterian’s vision of building senior housing is on hold after three years of work and $300,000 — not because of a lack of will, but because bureaucratic hoops are making it almost impossible.”
“This should not happen,” Findikoglu said. “We believe the housing shortage is the key moral issue of the day.”
Another speaker at the meeting, retired attorney William Fogarty, embraced the idea of more affordable housing, but had concerns about the focus of earlier, unsuccessful legislation solely on land owned by religious organizations.
He cited the separation of church and state as reason for his discomfort — a concern that extended to the “Yes in God’s Backyard” tagline advocates are using.
A positive step, in Fogarty’s view, is the fact that the proposal for the 2026 General Assembly session would be broadened to include land owned by nonprofits. But he wanted local leaders to support an even more comprehensive effort to loosen restrictions on affordable-housing development.
“The first step is to achieve regulatory reform — make it quicker and less cumbersome and less costly,” he said. “I would like to see [the proposal for fewer restrictions] opened to all.”
Because Virginia concentrates power at the state rather than local level, “it starts with the General Assembly,” Fogarty said.
“Writing legislation is a tricky business,” he told members of the subcommittee. “We need many voices involved in the process to avoid unintended consequences.”
Later this month, the full Housing Commission is expected to consider a variety of possible subject areas that the General Assembly might consider and recommend positions to the County Board.
The Board likely will choose some of the recommendations for inclusion in its 2026 General Assembly package, set for approval in December.
In both 2024 and 2025, the county government’s legislative-priorities package did not include the proposal that VOICE and other housing activists are seeking.
Instead, Arlington — like many other local governments across the commonwealth — pressed state legislators not to dilute existing land-use powers of localities.
Kellen MacBeth, who chairs the Housing Commission, said getting the County Board to reverse that position doesn’t mean the county would then actively push for reduced regulations on affordable-housing development at the expense of local zoning powers.
While county leaders actively fight for some positions included in the annual priorities package, others are included merely as long-term aspirational goals, he said.
“They’ve been doing it kind of a combination,” MacBeth said. “It’s seemingly random.”
