With another blowout victory, the Washington-Liberty Generals remained undefeated at 8-0 with two games remaining in the 2024 high-school football regular season.
The host, Liberty District leading and defending champion Generals defeated the McLean Highlanders, 47-8, Friday night (Oct. 26) in a league contest to remain atop the standings with a 4-o mark.
An Alexandria resident has been arrested and charged in the murder of two people, including an Arlington man.
The Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office announced that 18-year-old Marlyn Medrano-Ortiz, a suspected MS-13 member, has been arrested and charged with second-degree murder for a double homicide in Sterling in August.
This regularly scheduled column is written by Eli Tucker, Arlington-based Realtor and Arlington resident. If you would like to work with Eli and his team in Northern Virginia and the greater D.C. Metro area, you can reach him directly at [email protected].
Question: How much of an impact do you think the ROAD to Housing Act will have on housing affordability in Arlington?
Answer: The Road to Housing Act became law ten days ago, with the stated goal of improving housing affordability in the United States.
I don’t see many policies in the Act that will improve affordability in the Arlington/Northern VA/DC Metro markets, outside of incentives for more affordable multi-family housing, but there are policies that should improve affordability in other markets that are more saturated with institutional investors that own swaths of single-family homes (e.g. Atlanta and Phoenix) and for manufactured/mobile homes.
The Local Conversation Needs to Change
If we are going to improve affordability in our market, most of the change has to be done locally/regionally, not nationally, but it requires a paradigm shift in how we discuss and solve for housing affordability.
Affordability Disconnect: Near Term Expectations Not Realistic
A disconnect between housing affordability expectations and reality prevents the right community and political conversations from happening. We expect/demand housing affordability immediately, ignoring the difficulty, and consequences, of achieving it that quickly.
Stable and healthy housing affordability is a long-term process requiring gradual change over a 10-15+ year period.
Demand-Side Solutions Won’t Work
Demand-side solutions, such as lower interest rates or easier financing, artificially inflate home values, as seen during the COVID-era housing boom and early 2000s. They are not a good long-term solution to affordability because they push values even higher (along with your property taxes) and affordability gets worse when rates/lending normalize and no longer provide artificially low monthly payments.
Supply-Side Solutions Are Not Immediate
Most policy discussions focus on supply-side solutions: building more/faster and denser housing (e.g. Arlington’s Missing Middle/Expanded Housing Option), incentivizing more existing home sales, or disincentivizing concentrated ownership by companies and individuals. Econ 101 tells us that more supply = lower prices = affordable housing (winner winner!).
This is the only path to stable, long-term housing affordability…BUT, at current interest rates, prices must drop 30-35% in the United States to become affordable, at current income levels. A 30-35% drop in home values would devastate the economy, so a supply-side solution won’t (shouldn’t) provide immediate affordability. (more…)
Good Friday evening, Arlington. Let’s take a look back at today’s stories and a look forward to tomorrow’s event calendar.
The following articles were published earlier today — Oct 25, 2024.
Since it’s Friday, we’ve also compiled a list of the most-read articles of the week, below.
Here is what’s going on Saturday in Arlington, from our event calendar.
Here are the events planned for Sunday:
Expect a predominantly sunny day, as temperatures reach around 69°F accompanied by a northwest wind blowing at 10-16 mph and gusts soaring up to 24 mph. The evening will continue to be mainly clear with temperatures dropping to around 40°F, and the northwest wind persisting at 7-9 mph. See more from Weather.gov.
“It is never too late to be what you might have been.”
– George Eliot
The MonumentCam screenshot above is used with permission of the Trust for the National Mall and courtesy of EarthCam.
We hope you have a great weekend, Arlington! Feel free to discuss the most-read stories of the week, the upcoming weekend events or anything else of local interest in the comments. 👋
With a top runner missing from each team, the Bishop O’Connell Knights didn’t finish as high in the team standings as hoped.
The O’Connell boys placed fourth and the girls sixth at the Virginia Catholic State Championships held Oct. 22 on the 5,000-meter cross-country course at Occoquan Regional Park on a hot afternoon.
*Mamistad Groups meet IN PERSON-only the introductory Zoom call is virtual. :)
Pregnancy and new mom groups are a lifesaver when it comes to normalizing those feelings we just can’t be prepared for.
Bye weeks are designed to provide calming and healing times for high-school football teams. That wasn’t entirely the case for the Washington-Liberty Generals.
The Liberty District leading and undefeated Generals (7-0, 3-0) resume play tonight, Oct. 25 with a 7 p.m. league home game against the McLean Highlanders (3-4, 0-3), who have lost three straight contests.
A group of Arlington Public Schools fifth graders received some unexpected attention from First Lady Jill Biden this week.
Twenty-two students from Hoffman-Boston Elementary School arrived at the White House on Monday ready for a tour of the East Wing, teacher Belinda Folb told ARLnow. They had no idea that they would be personally meeting the First Lady herself — or that five of them would be accompanying her on a private tour.
Metro train traffic was halted near Ballston after an armed man reportedly fled into the tunnels.
Police were dispatched to the 7-Eleven store across Fairfax Drive from the Ballston Metro station around 2:50 p.m. for an armed robbery. Initial reports suggest that a man robbed the store of wine, and pulled out a gun when confronted.
Missing Middle construction projects that halted after a court decision last month received permission to move forward today.
Despite declaring Arlington’s Expanded Housing Options unlawful and preventing the county from issuing any more EHO permits last month — a decision the county now intends to appeal — Circuit Court Judge David Schell presented a path forward for some developers Friday morning.
A man accused of masturbating in public in view of a local pickleball court is back behind bars.
Police say 50-year-old Arlington resident Alexei Rodriguez was seen peeping into homes, exposing himself and masturbating last night on the 300 block of S. Glebe Road, near Thomas Jefferson Middle School. He was arrested after a foot chase.
