Developer Greystar broke ground yesterday on an apartment building just a stone’s throw from the Courthouse Metro station.
The under-construction building now has a name: “The Commodore.” Work on it follows about three months of demolition of the “Landmark Block,” previously home to brick buildings that housed a handful of restaurants, including Cosi, Boston Market, Jerry’s Subs and Summers Restaurant.
A newly-reopened segment of the Washington & Old Dominion (W&OD) Trail in Falls Church boasts a feature that could be replicated in Arlington: separate paths for cyclists and those on foot.
Regional parks authority NOVA Parks widened just over one mile of the trail through the Little City in order to accommodate separate tracks. The organization celebrated the completion of the five-year, $3.7 million project this morning.
Elections in Arlington County could change dramatically in the coming years.
First, County Board members are considering whether to do away with first-past-the-post voting for their seats and replace it with ranked-choice voting (RCV). And second, a 16-person bipartisan commission is redrawing boundaries for Virginia’s congressional, state Senate and House of Delegates districts, replacing the former redistricting process led by the state legislature.
(Updated at 2:50 p.m.) Washington-Liberty High School was on lockdown this morning after the school received a call stating that a shooter was inside the building.
ARLnow received more than a dozen tips, some from parents of students, about the incident at 1301 N. Stafford Street. School staff say students have been moved to a safe location; ARLnow hears that several dozen students sheltered in place inside the school.
(Updated at 4:30 p.m.) Arlington has long prided itself on the pathways available to residents to have a say in local policy-making, also known as the “Arlington Way.”
But a growing number of county officials, local leaders and civic groups think the tradition, while noble in aim, doesn’t work for everyone. They say it leans too much on affluent retirees and sabotages the county’s equity efforts.
The head of a local nonprofit that advocates for affordable housing is stepping down after five years at the helm.
Michelle Winters announced Friday that effective Nov. 30, she will no longer be the executive director of the Alliance for Housing Solutions (AHS).
Arlington’s top prosecutor is seeking an attorney to lead a new unit that reviews potentially wrongful convictions.
The unit — the first unit of its kind in Northern Virginia, according to Commonwealth’s Attorney Parisa Dehghani-Tafti — launched a little more than seven months ago.
Sponsored by Monday Properties and written by ARLnow, Startup Monday is a weekly column that profiles Arlington-based startups, founders, and other local technology news. Monday Properties is proudly featuring 1515 Wilson Blvd in Rosslyn.
A local agricultural technology company is offering tools to help industrial farmers grow food more sustainably and fight climate change.
More than a dozen major redevelopments are in the pipeline in Arlington, from the second phase of Amazon’s HQ2 to large-scale apartment buildings.
Of the 16 ongoing and anticipated major site plan reviews, the county’s planning division expects 10 of them to go before the County Board for approval over the next nine months, before the beginning of the 2022-23 fiscal year on July 1.
A discussion about improving Georgetown-Rosslyn connectivity last night was not supposed to be about the controversial yet ironically beloved gondola.
But the gondola — which 47% of respondents to a recent, unscientific ARLnow poll said they support — was nonetheless on Arlington transportation commissioners’ minds during their Thursday meeting.
A man who was arrested for attempting to rob a store in Arlington two days ago had just posted bond for another arrest in Fairfax County on Monday.
Karim Clayton, a 44-year-old D.C. resident, attempted to steal electronics from a pharmacy in the Buckingham neighborhood on Tuesday, according to Arlington County police. On Sunday, a Fairfax County Police Department official said he was arrested for assault and battery and held on a $2,000 secure bond.
Arlington County's transportation division is kicking off its ambitious plan to eliminate traffic deaths with a series of relatively quick safety projects.
For now, most of those projects appear to be in North Arlington.
Four months ago, the Arlington County Board adopted a five-year action plan that aims to eliminate traffic fatalities and severe injuries, known as "Vision Zero." The plan lays out a systematic approach to safety improvements, addressing the most urgent needs through data analysis, equity and community engagement.
These improvements vary in scope: "quick-build projects" address immediate needs quickly using low-cost materials, while larger-scale projects require funding from the county's Capital Improvement Program or grants. Others include pilot projects and regular maintenance work.
"We're focusing initially on small-scale operational improvements... a small but important part of program," said Dennis Leach, the director of transportation for the Department of Environmental Services.
Residents will see upgrades such as curb and median extensions, improved bus stops, curb-and-gutter repairs, new ramps and new high visibility crosswalks. DES has already completed eight "quick-build" projects and 11 are underway, according to its website.
Staff identify projects by analyzing crash data and considering reports by police, Arlington Public Schools and community members. They are constructed on a rolling basis.
For example, this month, staff completed a new mid-block crosswalk across N. Ohio Street that will improve access to Cardinal Elementary School and Swanson Middle School School. Staff are now installing a crosswalk with accessible curb ramps over Sycamore Street for better access to Tuckahoe Park and Tuckahoe Elementary School.
Of the 19 completed and under-construction projects, only three appear to be in South Arlington. One Twitter user mapped out the geographic spread of these projects, raising questions about how these projects are chosen and when DES will make its way south, given that equity is a core tenant of Vision Zero.
https://twitter.com/CarFreeHQ2/status/1442889831034597379
Leach said that could be because there are a number of older community and school requests being worked through.
"I think there's an issue of a pipeline of small projects that may have gotten their start in early years," Leach said. "What you see in the pipeline of quick-build projects has been built up over years... These projects may have gotten their start before Vision Zero was adopted."
Transportation and Operations Bureau Chief Hui Wang said these projects are "a very small, skewed piece of the transportation program" because they don't show large-scale investments, such as those on Columbia Pike.
"When we're talking about balance, equity, we have to make sure that we're not looking at it through a shaded lens," she said.
Leach agrees.
"[Columbia Pike] is our single largest focus areas, as it has some of our oldest infrastructure," he said. "In other parts of the county, like the Rosslyn-Ballston corridor, private development builds a lot of the infrastructure. In Columbia Pike, until recently, there's been little private development -- there's more now -- but it's been left to county to actually make those investments in advance of redevelopment."
When asked if certain communities generate more traffic reports than others, Wang said DES doesn't map out community reports because it's hard to categorize them and her team doesn't have the resources for that.
"My team is focused on the engineering part -- our goal is trying to get things done," she said.
The data-based approach helps weed out what is a perceived safety risk versus actual safety risks, Wang noted.
"We use crash data to identify real problems," she said. "We're using data as a guiding force, focusing on high-injury networks."
Chris Slatt, who is president of transportation advocacy group Sustainable Mobility for Arlington County, said it's not surprising that initial projects will skew toward North Arlington.
"Complaint-driven processes are well-known to reflect the biases of whom within the community is best equipped to spend precious time and energy complaining, so we would fully expect that method of identifying projects to skew toward the more affluent areas of Arlington unless staff works intentionally to correct that bias," he said.
