Falls Church City Manager Wyatt Shields and his staff currently are attempting to juggle requests from various organizations to close streets for Halloween-themed events.
At least six have come in, double the typical number of street closings allowed on any given day, city officials say.
Casually work the name Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier into a conversation, and you’re likely to get blank stares from all but the most intense history buffs.
But substitute his better-known aristocratic title — the Marquis de Lafayette — and many will know of whom you speak, even if they might not know the intricacies of his long, complex and decidedly eventful life.
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…)
Tight games had been the norm the last few times the Liberty District rivals Yorktown Patriots and Langley Saxons met in high-school football action.
What a difference in 2024. Host Langley won big, 48-14, having taken control right from the start.
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 18, 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 sunny skies and a high near 70 degrees, accompanied by a northwest wind at roughly 6 mph which will die down to a calm breeze as the afternoon progresses. The clear night that follows should bring a low temperature of around 43 degrees, accompanied by calm winds. See more from Weather.gov.
“The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched – they must be felt with the heart.”
– Helen Keller
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. 👋
Live standup comedy in Arlington on Friday July 31 starring Jim Bryan, Kim Villamera, and Greg Billet.
Friday, July 31, 2026
Dominating its competition at times, the Yorktown Patriots finished a fourth straight regular season undefeated against district field-hockey rivals.
Yorktown (11-3 overall) was 6-0 and outscored Liberty District opponents, 26-1 with five shutouts, in play this fall. The Patriots will be the top seed in the seven-team district tournament, a competition they have won three straight times with 2-0 records each year, and have a first-round bye.
Their fifth-place finish wasn’t what they hoped for. Yet the experience of just playing in the state golf tournament for the first time was notable for the Washington-Liberty Generals.
The squad capped its best season in program history with a 324 team score on a chilly and windy day at the Virginia High School League one-day, 18-hole Class 6 state tourney Oct. 15. The event was held on the par-72 Norman course at the Lansdowne Resort in Loudoun County.
Decades of preparation were put to the test when Arlington’s public-safety community came face to face with chaos last December.
And that training and collaboration paid off when neither first-responders nor those in the general public suffered significant injuries from a house explosion following a tense standoff in the Bluemont neighborhood.
The two contenders for an open seat on the Falls Church City Council used the same word to describe how city leaders should address housing policy going forward.
“We have to attack it in different ways. We have to be aggressive,” said Laura Downs.
The Arlington government’s updated “bike-comfort map” will rely more on available data to help bicyclists get where they want to go.
With five levels of color coding, numerical scores for each stretch of road and more prominent notices of hills, the new design builds on previous evaluations of all major roads in Arlington.
