Affordable Housing Advances

Plans to bring a proposal for a 60-70 unit senior rental housing structure before the Falls Church City Council for preliminary approval this Monday were put on hold yesterday while City Hall works out some technical issues.

The Falls Church Housing Corporation is under tight deadline pressure to get approval for the project prior to filing deadlines for federal support. But Carol Jackson, executive director of the FCHC, said there would still be time despite this latest delay.

A sparse turnout of the City Council and Falls Church Planning Commission at a work session last Monday found a favorable response to the FCHC's latest revision in its plans for the project, which if build would be the first of its kind in the City.

While the project still proposes to use some of the land adjacent to the West End Park by the W&OD bike trail, it has been reconfigured to use far less than an earlier proposal, helping to assuage concerns it would cut too deeply into the City's scant inventory of open spaces.

Neighbors to the proposed site protested loudly to the earlier plan, claiming it would remove what had been a de facto extension of the West End Park.

Still, most of the neighbors also stated they favored affordable housing, which opened the door for discussions with them.

FCHC officials held a meeting with the neighborhood on July 15, and this Monday, architect Lee Quail laid out a new plan that tucks a V-shaped five-story building into a far corner of the property, leaving almost half of it for open space. Specifically, .77 of an acre will go to the housing project, and .54 will remain as park land. The difference between this imbalance and a true 50-50 split is only 4,000 square feet.

"This amounts to a compromise on a very difficult site," he said. "Not everyone is going to be able to get everything they want."

The project was also scaled back from offering 80 to 100 apartment units to 60 to 70. The ground floor will be dedicated to 10,000 square feet of office space, instead of retail, easing parking requirements and calming the impact of the building on the site. The building will also feature environmentally-friendly "green" components.

The FCHC will partner with the Affordable Housing Coalition of Arlington in the development of the site. The partnership will be known as the West End Development Partnership. Walter Phillips will be the engineer and Quill the architect.

The remaining issues are "solvable," Falls Church Planning Department director Elizabeth Friel said Monday. She recommended it go to the Council to seek "first reading" approval Monday. City Manager Dan McKeever added that a request for a special exception would meet City code criteria because "the proposed use compares to the current use, and it is vacant now. It will represent an enormous benefit to the site."

Council member Lindy Hockenberry reminded her colleagues that if the plan were rejected the land were sold to another entity, then a "by right" use would not only occupy 50% of the land, but also cut off current access to the West End Park from Falls Avenue.

Planning Commissioner Rob Puentes said "the new configuration of the building is a very positive development." Council member Sam Mabry added, "This is a project that should ultimately be approved and should move forward."

However, the consensus Monday to put the matter on the agenda for this coming Monday's City Council meeting was met with a decision to delay the process on a technicality made just yesterday. City Attorney Roy Thorpe determined that the question of whether or not to "package" elements of the approval process — both zoning change and "special exception" approvals — into one vote, or to keep them separate, remained unresolved.