Arlington-based Axios HQ released a report today (Monday) that it says should be a reality check for company leaders.
“What we see every year — this year is no different — is there’s a lot more misalignment happening than a lot of leaders are aware of,” Chief Operating Officer Jordan Zaslav tells ARLnow.
For instance, nearly half (44%) of surveyed leaders think staff are aligned with business goals but only 14% of employees agree, per its report, which surveyed some 1,500 executives and employees. Most (85%) leaders think internal communications are helpful and relevant but only 45% of employees agree.
A majority of leaders (62%) think their communications keep everybody on the same page but Axios found the average worker loses up to 46 working days each year searching for the information they need to do their jobs.
“There’s a lot that needs to be better — like what topics you’re covering, how frequently, how clearly you communicate them, and on what channels,” Zaslav says.
The findings dovetail with the startup’s AI-driven software aimed at improving communications between leaders and employees. Clarendon-based Axios HQ (3100 Clarendon Blvd) developed the product after becoming a separate company in late 2022, when Cox Enterprises bought the media side of its parent company, Axios, for $525 million.
Leveraging a $20 million fundraise in spring 2023, the company expanded its product — which facilitates effective company communication while tracking employee engagement and analytics — from email to now include platforms such as Slack, Teams and SharePoint.
Zaslav says the company is working on upgrades that will help leaders write more “scannable and engaging” communications tailored to each organization.
Axios HQ ended 2023 on a strong financial note, reporting $10 million in annual recurring revenue. The company says only 13% of startups reach this milestone in their first 10 years, typically taking five years to do so, compared to Axios HQ’s three.
“I think Axios HQ’s success has been so fast because of how distinct it is,” Zaslav says, attributing this partly to the its patented communications methodology developed by award-winning journalists. “We built a tool more powerful than competitors’ and we were ready for the world when it was finally ready for us.”
The company knew before Covid how critical internal communications are, he continued.
“Until the last few years, internal communications was also one of the most under-resourced areas in any organization. But then the world changed and every organization, overnight, had to become a remote or hybrid organization,” he said. “It was impossible to ignore how outdated and office-centric their approach to employee communication was.”
With its success, Axios HQ is able to court big names to lead conversations about communications. This month, former White House Press Secretary and current MSNBC host Jen Psaki will discuss “how leaders can address difficult political topics with precision and empathy” and in January, a Slack co-founder discussed employee communication strategy.
Today, Axios has more than 600 customers, up 100 since its funding raise. Almost all customers (80-90%) say the software improves internal communications and helps them collect employee feedback and another half say it saves them time, per a press release.
The company has used its spring 2023 fund raise to hire staff. It added its first chief marketing officer in January after appointing Zaslav COO in November. The company tapped an AI pioneer at Mailchimp to lead Machine Learning and hired data and Machine Learning engineers and a data scientist, bringing the total number of employees to 138.
Looking to the future, Zaslav says Axios HQ is following the increasing pressure and interest within federal government to regulate AI. The COO says lawmakers are concerned about security, privacy, transparency and clarity, which are also Axios HQ’s priorities. He noted the company does not share user information with AI providers and routinely updates its terms.
“Any organization delivering AI, like we are, or using AI — which is basically everyone by now — needs to be following the conversation about regulation. That’s smart leadership,” he said. “As for how it could impact Axios HQ, that doesn’t worry us.”
Results from Arlington’s first guaranteed income pilot reveal that an additional $500 per month significantly enhanced the quality of life for impoverished families.
Parents with children under 18, earning less than $46,600 annually, reported that the additional $500 monthly helped them obtain better-paying jobs, address basic needs and improve their overall well-being, according to a new report by the Arlington Community Foundation (ACF), the local nonprofit that oversaw the pilot.
Moreover, the monthly payments enabled individuals to invest in certifications and educational advancement and tackle their medical bills, credit card debt and student loans.
Between September 2021 and last December, ACF provided the monthly stipend to families earning 30% of the area median income so they could continue living in Arlington, which is known for having some of the highest living costs in the nation.
The pilot sought to challenge the stigma associated with guaranteed income, which grants a minimum income to those who do not earn enough to support themselves. It drew inspiration from similar programs in Stockton, California, and Jackson, Mississippi.
In the long term, Arlington’s Guarantee is meant to persuade state and federal lawmakers to implement some form of guaranteed income. This is not to be confused with universal basic income, another touted policy reform that guarantees income to people regardless of their eligibility for government assistance or their ability to work.
Findings from the pilot come on the heels of a separate report, which found that more than half of families living in South Arlington cannot afford basic food, housing, medical and childcare expenses, compared to just 15% of families in North Arlington. ACF noted that most guaranteed income pilot participants reside in South Arlington.
While private donations and philanthropy fully funded the $2 million program, Arlington County’s Department of Human Services (DHS) helped select, track and evaluate participants.
DHS randomly chose 200 households to receive $500 a month and created a control group with similar demographics and income levels, which did not receive stipends, to compare the results. Most (53%) of participants identified as Black or African-American, followed by people who identify as white (23%). Thirty percent identified as Hispanic or Latino and 70% as non-Hispanic.
Arlington’s office vacancy rate remains high but may be stabilizing after an initial, sharp increase due to Covid remote work policies.
As of the fourth quarter of 2023, the countywide office vacancy rate stands at 24.4%, according to a new report from commercial real estate company Colliers.
Since 2020, Arlington’s overall vacancy rate has risen 4.3% points, per the report, prompted by the pandemic-era shift to remote work and in defiance of return-to-office efforts. The county saw a 3-percentage-point jump between 2020 and 2021 followed by a more modest 1-percentage-point increase over the last year.
“The big story last year was the delivery of Amazon’s HQ2 which drove absorption earlier in the year,” Colliers Research Manager Miles Rodnan tells ARLnow. “Sublet space across the D.C. region has leveled off, which has helped slow down vacancy increases.”
“Additionally, as companies continue to settle into their return-to-office/hybrid policies, the decisions to offload space have been made in many instances,” he continued. “As leases continue to expire, there will be downsizes, but the rate should taper off.”
(Arlington County also tracks its vacancy rate and, notably, it reported a rate hovering around 21.5-22% this fall. This discrepancy may be because the county and Colliers have different numbers for total office buildings and rentable square footage. Graphs tracking rates over time, from the county and Colliers, have similar trend lines.)
At the end of 2023, the Colliers report says vacancy rate was slightly higher for the Rosslyn-Ballston corridor, at nearly 25%, than for National Landing — Pentagon City, Crystal City and Potomac Yard — at 24%.
While the difference is marginal, the rate is trending down in National Landing dropping 0.7% point over 2023, while the rate increased 0.8% point on the R-B corridor, the report said.
Compared to National Landing, where all the new office construction was tied to Amazon, the R-B corridor saw more speculative office projects: 3901 Fairfax Drive in Virginia Square, slated for delivery next year, as well as George Mason University’s FUSE at Mason Square building, which will house university programs in addition to private office space.
Overall, however, these projects contribute less than a million square feet of leasable office space. Rodnan says this could be a saving grace, given predictions that vacancy rates will continue to rise.
“A breath of fresh air comes from the restrained construction pipeline, which will hopefully allow vacancy rates to stabilize in the region as negative absorption is still anticipated in the near future,” he said.
Generally, newer office buildings — which real estate analysts dub “Class A” — are attracting tenants who are willing to pay upwards of $2 more per square foot to get out of dated office stock, or so-called “Class B/C” buildings.
This is a trend playing out across the region, Rodnan said, not attributing the submarket-level upticks to any tenants in particular.
Amid the well-established “flight to quality,” Arlington County is working on several initiatives to make it easier to reposition these obsolete buildings from which people are moving.
“The work is cut out for us: zoning needs to become reasonably more flexible and less burdensome,” Arlington County Board Vice-Chair Takis Karantonis said during his New Year remarks this week. “We need to be innovative and courageous in repositioning and reusing obsolete buildings.”
County Board member Matt de Ferranti spelled out what this office vacancy rate means for the county budget.
“We depend on our office vacancy rate, which leads to a lower tax rate than our surrounding localities in northern Northern Virginia,” he said, noting that commercial real estate comprises a greater percentage of Arlington’s budget than that of neighbors.
Either this month or next, Arlington County will learn the extent of the impact of decreased office property values on the expected budget deficit, which is preliminarily projected around $20-$40 million.
“That will be sobering news, or perhaps hopeful news,” de Ferranti said.
Through April, the 2024-25 budget process will address the ongoing challenge of high office vacancies.
“Why is this budget more difficult than our last? Haven’t we known about the work-from-home paradigm shift for two years?” said de Ferranti. “Well, we have, but the office assessment process and that market is based on 5-, 10- and 15-year leases. So this year, we’re seeing the reality come home to us.”
Arlington has a slightly higher than average crime rate compared to the region overall, according to a new report.
The Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments recently released its annual report, in which it compiled crime statistics reported out by local police departments, including Arlington County Police Department.
Overall, MWCOG found the D.C. area is seeing 18.3 crimes per 1,000 people involving rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny and motor vehicle theft. This is higher than the 2021 rate of 16.8.
Arlington County’s rate increased from 15.9 to 19.7 and is now higher than the regional average, though the lowest in the region’s urban core, which also includes Alexandria and D.C. The former claims second-highest rate, at 20.8, and D.C. claims the highest crime rate, at 40.6.
Larger, more suburban counties tend to have lower crime rates, including Fairfax County, with a rate of 15.6 crimes per 1,000 people.
“This is something that you didn’t necessarily know the data point but you knew to be true: crime is increasing across the region and, right now, is at elevated levels that we haven’t seen in quite some time,” Arlington County Board Chair Christian Dorsey said during a meeting on Tuesday.
Among Northern Virginia jurisdictions, Arlington saw a 25% increase in offenses, the median rise in crime for its Virginian neighbors.
“We’re all struggling and we’re not struggling any more than anyone else,” Dorsey said.
Property crimes drive the trends regionally, according to 5-year trends in the MWCOG report. That appears to be reflected locally, with an uptick of reported motor vehicle thefts: 412 thefts in 2022, up from 313 in 2021.
Carjackings are this year’s headline-grabbing offense, regionally, one that Dorsey stressed is thorny to tackle.
“There is a lot of interagency cooperation on these issues, but they are also quite difficult for police to bring to a satisfactory conclusion in terms of arrests and prosecutions,” Dorsey said.
Earlier this month Arlington surpassed the total number of carjackings from 2022, according to ARLnow’s count. While the county is seeing more carjackings, they are still less common than in D.C. and Prince George’s County, according to heat maps by the Washington Post.
One crime for which Arlington is an outlier, according to Dorsey, is assaults.
“We experienced a ridiculously huge increase in aggravated assaults in the year and are definitely a regional outlier, and not in a good way, with a 43% increase,” Dorsey said.
ACPD says “aggravated assault” is a category that includes distinct 20 felonies and three misdemeanor charges, spanning a broad range of crimes, including:
- throwing items at occupied vehicles
- brandishing firearms or similar-looking objects
- child abuse
- malicious wounding
The fact that 23 different charges encompass “aggravated assault” makes it difficult for community members to understand what exactly is happening in their community, says Chuck Miere, a Virginia criminal justice reform lobbyist who dug into ACPD data earlier this year.
“There’s very little transparency as to what gets counted year to year as falling into any of these categories because there isn’t a single ‘aggravated assault’ charge in Virginia,” he tells ARLnow. “There are a bunch of assault charges that can be aggravated.”
(Updated at 12:45 p.m.) Within Northern Virginia, South Arlington has one of the highest concentrations of families who cannot afford basic needs and childcare.
In this half of the county, 52% of families cannot afford food, housing, medical expenses and childcare, compared to just 15% of families North Arlington, per a new report.
South Arlingtonians are not alone.
About a third of families across Northern Virginia are not earning enough money to subsist, dubbed “income inadequacy” in the report, prepared by Insight Region, the research arm of the nonprofit Community Foundation of Northern Virginia.
The report states that inflation pushed many more families into income inadequacy in the first half of 2023. However, several needs-based nonprofits in Arlington say inflation is not the only contributing factor, pointing also to the rollback of Covid-era benefits.
They tell ARLnow it is time for a systemic overhaul to mitigate increasing income inequality.
“Those basic needs numbers are really concerning to us,” says Brian Marroquín, a program officer at the nonprofit Arlington Community Foundation. “What happens when people lose those benefits is really important… It’s a Catch-22 for many people in our community to try and get ahead while kind of facing the system as it’s set up currently.”
Why families are struggling today
Before the outbreak of Covid, Charles Meng, the CEO of Arlington Food Assistance Center, said his organization typically served about 1,800 to 1,900 families a week. At the height of the pandemic, that number rose to about 2,500 families a week in 2020.
For a short while, the demand for food assistance decreased as case numbers dropped and individuals returned to work. But that changed in February 2022.
“If you’ll remember, inflation started hitting, fuel prices went up first, and then food prices started going up. And since that time, we have seen a steady increase in the number of families coming to us,” Meng told ARLnow. “We’re now serving 3,238 families [a week]… That’s basically a 30% increase from the prior year.”
“I’ve never seen a 30% increase in a year before,” he added.
Meng also attributes the sudden jump partly to inflation, which reduced the purchasing power of already struggling families. He noted the clawing back of other government benefits, such as SNAP, played a role as well.
“These families have effectively gotten a 14% to 15% reduction in their income… They’re paying more for food for a whole bunch of other things,” Meng said.
Data from ACF highlights that over 10,000 households — about 24,000 people — in Arlington make under 30% of the area median income. That translates to about $45,600 for a family of four. AFAC serves many households in that group.
“There’s a lot of families in Arlington County who are hurting,” Meng said.
In addition to SNAP, Marroquín, said the elimination of the Advanced Child Tax Credit, which cut child poverty nearly in half during 2021, also dealt a big blow to Arlington families.
“What that did was it put money in parents’ pockets. At the time, it was particularly important for childcare. Childcare was hard to find and got more expensive as well during the pandemic in 2021,” Marroquín said.
(Updated at 5:15 p.m.) One pocket of Arlington County has the most office space on the market and seeking tenants in the D.C. area, according to a new report.
A submarket made up of Courthouse, Clarendon and Virginia Square tops the charts for its “availability rate” — which includes any offices that can be leased now or in the next year — because of its high concentration of older office buildings.
“There are a number of dated 1980s-constructed buildings that sit idle as tenants continue to re-evaluate their office needs and often move to newer or renovated buildings in different submarkets,” says Ben Plaisted, vice chairman at commercial real estate company Savills, which produced the report.
In this submarket, Arlington Economic Development staff says 80% of offices were built more than 20 years ago.
“National and regional trends show that new leases tend to prefer buildings built in the past 10 years,” the county’s economic development arm said in a statement. “As a result, submarkets with newer product tend to have lower availability and submarkets with older product tend to have higher availability.”
Across Arlington, vacancy is concentrated in older buildings: about 75% of vacant square footage is within buildings at least 30 years old, says AED.
In response, why Arlington County is trying to infuse old office buildings with a mix of emerging businesses, such as research and development, artisan workshops, breweries and distilleries, and even pickleball courts.
AED provided a few caveats to the report.
It says Savills combined Courthouse, Clarendon and Virginia Square into one submarket, while another real estate company, CoStar, only combines Courthouse and Clarendon. That changes the overall availability rate.
Without Virginia Square, Clarendon-Courthouse has the second-highest availability rate in Northern Virginia and the D.C. area, behind Herndon, according to July 2023 data from CoStar, AED said.
Including Virginia Square means adding one major construction project to the mix: George Mason University’s FUSE building, says AED. The new facility has over 100,000 square feet listed as available for tenants.
The economic development division also says availability rates should be taken with a grain of salt.
“Availability rates can mask available square feet, as submarkets vary greatly in size,” AED said. “Therefore, the same amount of available square footage would appear as much lower availability rates in larger submarkets.”
Like other parts of the nation, Arlington is seeing tenants seek out smaller offices in higher-quality buildings, dubbed the “flight to quality.”
Overall, the report notes Arlington has some of the highest rent prices in the D.C. area, which is due to building quality plus proximity to D.C. and Metro. Over 60% of Arlington’s office product is listed by CoStar as Class A, or those built recently with attractive amenities and high rents, among other features.
“[Tenants] are willing to pay top dollar for high quality space but by reducing their footprint, they are not increasing their overall real estate costs,” Plaisted said. “The war for talent continues to be prevalent in the market and occupiers are looking to incentivize staff to be at the office by upgrading their physical location and space.”
Not everyone is reducing their footprint, however. AED says a half-dozen Arlington-based firms, from consulting firms to to government contractors, expanded their offices over the last year.
Meanwhile, a handful of British tech firms recently opened outposts in Arlington, while shipbuilding company Huntington Ingalls moved some of its offices from D.C. to National Landing.
Arlington has scored some commercial real estate wins with retention of tenants. The only notable tenant that AED says — to their knowledge — fully moved out of Arlington over the past year is the tech company Ostendio, which is now fully virtual.
Photo via Google Maps
Households of color face significant barriers to homeownership, according to a new report from Arlington County.
A division of Arlington’s planning division, Housing Arlington, conducted the study to understand trends in the local homeownership market. The report, released earlier this fall, was the first step in a multi-phase homeownership study that kicked off this summer.
It follows on the heels of the Missing Middle Housing Study, which identified a number of low-density housing types that could be added to Arlington’s housing stock. The result of this study was a series of proposed zoning changes intended to encourage their construction beyond where it is currently allowed and, possibly, lower home prices.
“We know that the benefits of homeownership are exponential and home ownership is one of the most effective ways to build generational wealth in this country,” said county planner Akeria Brown, discussing the report in a recent Housing Commission meeting. “We also know that many households, minority households in particular, were not or traditionally have not been afforded opportunities to be able to purchase in this environment.”
Racially restrictive deeds excluded certain racial and ethnic groups, particularly Black people, from certain neighborhoods last century, while certain zoning policies, at least to an extent, had the same practical effect. Arlington County maintains that there is a strong relationship between these older policies and today’s lack of homeownership opportunities for households of color.
While the county has a number of programs to help people earning below 80% of the area median income access homeownership, such as by providing counseling and helping households make down-payments, the aim of this study is to gauge their efficacy, improve them and potentially launch new ones.
“We want to look at ways to support moderate-income households to be able to build generational wealth, to build that long-term housing and financial stability and take advantage of incentives that go along with home-ownership to right some of those issues that have occurred along the way,” Brown said.
Before staff could do that, they needed to go beyond the data points showing lower homeownership rates among households of color.
Staff cited data showing that banks are less likely to lend money to Black and Hispanic borrowers when they are buying a home or refinancing.
Black and Latino households had the highest mortgage application denial rates, 9.3% and 7.2%, respectively, compared to non-Hispanic white borrowers, 2.7%, and those of Asian descent, 3.9%.
“The leading reason for loan application denial in 2021 was insufficient income to meet lender requirements, followed by incomplete credit applications and credit history issues,” the county report said.
Black and Latino households also obtained 30-year loans with higher interest rates than other borrowers on average.
About two-thirds of mortgages originated in 2021 were for refinancing existing homes when interest rates were low. Application denial rates were higher across the board, but still divided along racial and ethnic lines.
Interest rates were higher in relatively lower income neighborhoods including Buckingham, Halls Hill, and Glebewood, as well as the western portion of the Columbia Pike corridor and the Columbia Heights neighborhood.
In addition, homeownership rates are lowest in Arlington’s three historically Black neighborhoods, noted Mike Hemminger, the incoming president of the Arlington branch of the NAACP, in the meeting.
The county has to be intentional about reversing this trend, Alice Hogan, who sits on the Board of Directors for Arlington Partnership for Affordable Housing, said in the meeting.
“It’s not just about making ownership an option,” she said. “What is the demographic makeup of the folks who are going to achieve that ownership if we really want to get to the equitable piece of this?”
(Updated 4:40 p.m.) There are more than two dozen steps local affordable housing developers, Arlington County and the state can take to improve quality of life and respect tenants, according to a new report.
Written by a Joint Subcommittee on the Status of Aging Properties (JSSAP), the report walks through the kinds of protections tenants need to live safely in committed affordable dwellings in Arlington, many of which are affordable because they are older and more prone to maintenance issues.
Work on this document, unofficially dubbed “the Serrano report,” began last October in response to the attention tenant advocates drew in May 2021 to longstanding problems at the Serrano Apartments (5535 Columbia Pike). Residents of the affordable housing complex, owned by affordable housing operator AHC, Inc., were living with mold and rodent infestations and in units decaying due to deferred maintenance.
“I think it’s an important, historical document to say, ‘This is what happened,’ and to help the county and the state to prevent these issues from happening again,” said Kellen MacBeth, chair of the Arlington Branch of the NAACP’s Housing Committee. “It was a lot of work, but I’m hopeful we can build on the changes the county has been making to further protect the rights of tenants and prevent another Serrano from occurring.”
The document could be presented to the Arlington County Board as early as next month.
Reaction to the report has been mixed. Advocates are urging the Board to implement the local recommendations and incorporate suggestions for the state into its annual legislative priorities. Some members of Arlington County’s Housing Commission critiqued the report, however, for not including the perspectives of affordable housing business partners or costs associated with implementing the recommendations.
“We went back and forth on that,” Housing Commission Chair Eric Berkey told the Tenant-Landlord Commission last week.
For its part, AHC said it respects the subcommittee’s work but is concerned about the financial impact.
“We appreciate the effort that went into the report,” AHC spokeswoman Jennifer Smith said in a statement. “As a non-profit organization, any recommendations that add cost without accompanying revenues would be burdensome. AHC has 23 properties in Arlington alone.”
Where to start
Tenant advocates say the county’s first order of business, after accepting the report, should be requiring housing providers to fund organizations that support tenant associations.
“We think it’s critically important for the Barcroft Apartments — and the redevelopment that’s going to be happening in the next year — so that tenants have a voice, if there are serious problems they’re facing,” MacBeth said. Maintenance issues, he added, are already arising.
Late last year, the county and Amazon agreed to loan more than $300 million to facilitate the sale of the Barcroft Apartments on Columbia Pike to developer Jair Lynch Real Estate Partners, which agreed to preserve 1,334 units on the site as committed affordable units for 99 years.
Tenant education on their rights provided by a third party would ensure these tenant councils will have teeth, says Elder Julio Basurto, a former Serrano resident and co-founder of a new advocacy group called Juntos En Justicia (Together in Justice).
“They have to train the residents how to advocate for their needs,” he said. “Without the oversight, the residential councils won’t work.”
Janeth Valenzuela, who helped draw attention to conditions at the Serrano, said tenants need education to know how to report their problems. Residents would talk with the county, but if it wasn’t the right staff member, work would be delayed, she said.
“We still have tenants afraid to say things for fear of retaliation, and they don’t have training in how to file reports,” said Valenzuela, another co-founder of Juntos En Justicia. “They didn’t know who to go to, what to do or how to talk.”
An estimated 7.8% of Arlington households experienced food insecurity in 2019, according to a new report.
The report, completed by Urban Institute in partnership with Arlington County Food Security Task Force, provides a snapshot of the financial and food challenges for Arlington households, including in otherwise pricey parts of town like Crystal City and Pentagon City.
“Despite the area’s reputation as wealthy and well-resourced, more than 6,700 of the county’s 108,604 households were referred to the Arlington Food Assistance Center in 2021, signaling that this abundance is not shared by all residents,” the report says.
The report made many recommendations to the county, including to incentivize affordable grocers, offer gas cards, subsidize public transportation, expand SNAP outreach, provide grocery gift cards, subsidize or waive grocery delivery fees for SNAP participants, and open more free food distribution sites in higher need areas.
The study, conducted last year and released this month, indicated food insecurity rates were higher particularly in the Glencarlyn, Buckingham, Ashton Heights, Pentagon City, Crystal City, Forest Glen, Arlington Mill neighborhoods.
“We surveyed residents living in four neighborhoods with the highest food insecurity rates (from 13.3 to 14.6 percent) in the county and found that residents were more likely to rent their homes and have low incomes, and 17 percent were Social Security beneficiaries, which suggests they are living on a fixed income,” the report says.
For residents experiencing food insecurity, budgets for food were often the first to be cut in order to pay bills like rent and utilities. Some of the factors affecting the ability to buy food included the local food environment, labor market, transportation, housing, child care and debt.
Food accessibility
The study considered grocery store or other non-convenience retail food locations accessible if they were within 40 minutes of roundtrip travel. Such stores were accessible to most residents, even those that lived in neighborhoods with high estimated food insecurity rates.
But residents that were surveyed prioritized groceries’ cost when determining where to shop, making it more challenging to afford healthy food.
“Residents reported some challenges in paying for groceries, especially meat, as the cost of food increased 6.3 percent (and 14.8 percent for meat) between December 2020 and December 2021,” the report said.
Those who were food insecure were more likely to walk, get a ride or use Metro to get groceries than those who were food secure and likely own a car. About half of the residents experiencing food insecurity during the survey used free groceries or meals, according to the report, and most of those residents said they accessed those resources one to three times each month.
While the Crystal City and Pentagon City areas had relatively high estimated food insecurity rates compared with the rest of the county, they had low access to existing charitable food resources.
Food insecurity disproportionately affects Black, Hispanic, and Asian households in Arlington, according to the report. Asian households with low incomes, of which there was a concentration in the Crystal City area, had to travel farther to access charitable food sites, compared with Black and Hispanic households.
Arlington County says it’s reviewing the report.
“The Food Security Task Force is reviewing findings and recommendations from the study, and will consider investments where Arlington County could build on its strengths and address residents’ concerns and barriers,” a newsletter from Arlington Department of Human Services said.
Is Arlington experiencing a Gen Z takeover?
Zoomers — the generation born after 1997 — make up the “only active generation of apartment seekers nationwide,” and they are disproportionately choosing Arlington County, according to a new study from RentCafe.
Between 2020 and 2021, Arlington saw a 55% increase in apartment applications submitted by this age group, according to the website, which follows trends in the apartment market. It analyzed 3.2 million applications for the study.
“Once known as a verified Millennial hub, Arlington is getting a much-needed glow-up from this up-and-coming generation of young renters, ranking as the country’s sixth trendiest Gen Z hub,” RentCafe said.
That ranks Arlington behind the cities of San Francisco, Jersey City, New York City, Philadelphia and Boston and ahead of San Jose (California) and Seattle.
Zoomers are gravitating here after spending a one-year hiatus back home or in their college towns, RentCafe says.
“Young adults returned to their families’ homes in larger numbers in 2020, and with Gen Z being particularly affected by the pandemic, it’s safe to say it played an important role in their migration pattern,” RentCafe spokeswoman Michelle Cretu tells ARLnow.
But now, as society emerges from the pandemic, Zoomers are “following in the footsteps of their Millennial counterparts when it comes to independent living,” she said.
Millennials came to Arlington in droves during the Obama years, according to a previous RentCafe study, which found 52% of Crystal City’s population was made up of the generation also known as Gen Y. For them, Arlington offered employment opportunities plus plenty of nightlife and housing options, Cretu said.
Now, Gen Yers are in their home-buying years, and many are ditching their renter status to buy homes in Alexandria, Reston and Frederick, Maryland, according to RentCafe.
Younger Millennials, however, are still renting because they’ve been “outpriced by an overly competitive housing market,” she said.
Data show the new generation is, on a relative basis, choosing Arlington over D.C., which recorded a smaller increase — 31% — in the share of Gen Z renters. The City of Alexandria, the 13th trendiest Zoomer hub, also ranks higher than the District.
“So, it’s not a matter of Gen Z not choosing D.C., but one of Zoomers choosing Arlington in higher numbers,” Cretu said.
One reason is Arlington’s growing concentration of tech jobs, fueled in part by the construction of Amazon’s second headquarters.
“While both cities score in diversity and vibrant social scenes, Arlington is a developing city where new career opportunities are just emerging,” she said.
Zoomers are showing a keen interest in tech jobs, with three in 10 ranking software development as their top career choice, according to a study by the software company CloudBees. So it comes as no surprise that they are choosing Arlington alongside the well-known tech sectors of San Francisco and Seattle and the new tech hubs of Atlanta, San Diego and Baltimore.
Another factor behind the trends Cretu cited is that Arlington has bigger apartments.
Developers are building larger units here than they were five years ago, while in D.C., the average square footage of a new apartment is shrinking. The prospect of more spacious new construction could also be why the RentCafe list features suburbs of New York City and Dallas.
The Animal Welfare League of Arlington is bucking the results of a study suggesting the county has a deer problem.
Arlington County hired a consultant last spring to count the local deer population using drones. The company published a report in September saying that parts of Arlington had populations of 20-39 deer per square mile in certain places, exceeding what’s considered healthy (between 5 and 15 deer per square mile).
In a statement released Monday, AWLA, which oversees animal control for Arlington County, disputed the idea that the local deer population reaches unhealthy levels and urged the county to adopt a “practical, humane, and sustainable deer management plan” that doesn’t place too much focus on the numbers.
“From our extensive work in humane wildlife management, we know from experience that the issue is not the number of deer but rather the conflicts we have with them,” AWLA President & CEO Samuel Wolbert and Chief of Animal Control Jennifer Toussaint said.
The joint statement comes as county staff prepare to incorporate this data into a broader look at what steps Arlington needs to take, if any, to maintain a healthy white-tailed deer population.
Wolbert and Toussaint say there’s “scientific basis” for the claim that 5-15 deer per square mile is healthy, arguing no single count of deer qualifies as over-population.
“The fact is, determining a ‘healthy carrying capacity’ is a political judgement that is not rooted in biology: some communities, and even areas within a community, will be able to sustain different numbers of deer based on multiple factors, like type and quality of food and cover,” they said. “There is no one ‘magic’ number that any community should have. Saying Arlington County, with 13 deer per square mile, has too many deer is a political determination and not based on the environment in which the deer are located.”
AWLA leaders say complaints about deer may have precipitated this survey, but of all the calls and online reports their animal control division receives related to wildlife, relatively few involve deer.
Since November 2020, when it launched an online reporting system, AWLA has received over 650 wildlife concerns, and of those, 17 (3%) related to deer. Meanwhile, in 2021, 131 calls of the 2,733 calls for service related to wildlife (or 5%) were deer-related — and the most common concern was about the health of orphaned fawns.
“If there truly were ‘too many deer’ we, as the County’s wildlife experts, would have more deer-related complaints or issues arising from deer — which is simply not the case,” Wolbert and Toussaint said.
As for the argument that deer contribute to the destruction of the forest understory, cited in the report, AWLA leaders argue that deers are unfairly blamed for the impacts of other factors.
“It’s easy to blame deer for any forestry growth woes, when the reality is that forests are affected by many factors: insect damage, disease, pollutants (like harsh fertilizers), invasive species, increased foot traffic, climate and weather extremes, over-development… and deer,” Wolbert and Toussaint write.
In response, Arlington County Department of Parks and Recreation said the survey was just the first step in determining whether Arlington needs to more actively manage deer. Next, the county will hire a professional wildlife consultant to interpret this data and gather additional information to determine if and how deer are impacting the natural landscape, said DPR spokeswoman Susan Kalish.
All this information will guide a public engagement process that will culminate with a presentation to the County Board this summer.
“Deer are necessary aspects of wildlife with important ecological functions when in balance with the surrounding habitat,” Kalish said. “Arlington takes its role as a steward of wildlife and its natural lands seriously.”
Arlington County recently funded a deer survey to establish a count of our white-tailed deer population. The results of this survey suggest that Arlington County has a “deer problem”…but we disagree. Read our President & Chief ACO's statement here: https://t.co/eFH9tuSHOc pic.twitter.com/0F4W3i7SL1
— AWLArlington, VA (@AWLAArlington) February 7, 2022