A year after the passage of Arlington’s “Missing Middle” ordinance last March, the jury is out on the long-term implications of the zoning change.
Challenges include a substantial slowdown in Missing Middle applications and continued opposition from some residents.
For the sixth year in a row, Arlington County has been named the No. 1 Digital County for 2023 for counties of comparable size.
The accolade highlights Arlington’s progress toward moving its operations onto the cloud — which Arlington County Chief Information Officer Norron Lee says makes county processes safer, greener and easier — as well as its broadband access study and the priority placed on customers.
(Updated 4:45 p.m. on 3/14/23) Builders and entrepreneurs tell ARLnow they are waiting up to twice as long as they used to for Arlington County to issue permits, costing them thousands — if not hundreds of thousands — of dollars.
Permits that used to be issued the same day now take 1-3 weeks while those that took 2-3 months take double that time, they say. Meanwhile, the Arlington Permit Office’s limited hours of operation compound the delays and the high permitting fees exacerbate the costs incurred from waiting.
Nearly all land development permits that Arlington County issues are now online.
Following the launch of the online Permit Arlington in 2019 with 18 digitized permits, county staff have since added others. The last batch of land development permits — Certificate of Occupancy applications — are set to launch the week of Feb. 27.
Arlington County is surveying residents and businesses to understand how they use broadband internet service and if their access can be improved.
The results of the survey are part of a $250,000 study that could inform ways to bridge the digital divide between residents with good internet connectivity and those without it, using the county’s existing fiber-optic network, dubbed ConnectArlington.
In Green Valley, resident Portia Clark says she and her neighbors are bombarded with calls and letters from realtors and potential investors about buying their homes.
“We were once a very stable community of homeowners who bought our homes to live here and pay them off,” she said. That increasingly seems to be changing.
Arlington’s planning division is looking to change the definition of a “family” in the county’s zoning code.
Housing planners say this would stop potentially exclusionary housing practices that discriminate against larger groups of unrelated residents who live together in order to afford staying in Arlington, where home prices and property taxes are rising and there’s a shortage of affordable housing options.
An ongoing redevelopment project on the “Landmark Block” in Courthouse is poised to realize a significant portion of a 2015 vision to transform the neighborhood.
But beyond the “Landmark” project (2050 Wilson Blvd) by Greystar, there are no near-term private or public projects set to pick up wherever Greystar leaves off.
Once the epicenter of D.C.’s punk scene, Inner Ear Recording Studios it is set to be razed by Arlington County to make way for an outdoor entertainment space.
The new open space, comprised of two parcels of land — 2700 S. Nelson Street and 2701 S. Oakland Street — would be part of the county’s efforts to implement an arts and industry district in Green Valley.
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.
Since 1980, Glebe Road has been considered the border between central and west Ballston.
But in recent years, the dividing lines drawn in Ballston’s 40-year-old sector plan have become more stark, with businesses thriving in one area and struggling in another.
