Editorial

We applaud those neighbors to the West End Park and their pro-open space friends for coming before the Falls Church City Council Monday night to affirm the Falls Church Housing Corporation's effort to develop a senior affordable housing project in the 1100 block of West Broad St. Many of the neighbors have acknowledged the need for affordable housing all along, even while they fought hard to preserve the portion of the undeveloped land the City of Falls Church negotiated with land's owners, the Falls Church Volunteer Firefighters, designated to be added to the West End Park.

As the dialogue on this developed, it became clearer to many that the Firefighters would retain half the land for its own purposes, which in this case would be to get a good price for it in order to further their own mission of funding improvements and upgrades to the City's rescue and firefighting capabilities. It was that half of the land the Firefighters cut a deal for sale to the Housing Corporation, and it is clear that should that deal fall through, the Firefighters would remain determined to sell it to someone else, including a developer intent on a retail or other use. This understanding contributed to the acknowledgment by the neighbors of the Housing Corporations' right to its half of the land.

Now, however, the dispute has been reduced to a tenth of an acre on the land, the exact location of a slim buffer zone that City code mandates to separate the Housing Corporation project from the land designated for expansion of the park. While generously affirming the Housing Corporation project on the one hand, the neighbors proved stubbornly stingy about this tiny strip, treating it as some sort of symbolic “line in the sand,” without regard for its impact on the cost or feasibility of the Housing project. It would be patently absurd if this slim strip, adding up to less than a tenth of an acre, would decide the fate of the Housing Corporation's important contribution to meeting the City's goal of providing affordable housing in an overall housing market that is anything but. It also makes no sense that the neighbors would endorse the project but then engage in a turf war over such a tiny portion as to jeopardize it.

Still, the Housing Corporation is stuck now with the task of providing the City Council with an idea on Jan. 10 of what further downsizing its project will do to its size and cost. If, for example, it were to increase the cost of the project by $1 million, as well it might, then the cost of preserving the tenth of an acre would be equal to $10 million per acre. That would hardly be justifiable, especially to City taxpayers if the Council felt obligated, as it indicated it would at Monday's meeting, to make up the difference in the cost. As with the neighbors, we also applaud the City Council's stated determination to make the Housing Corporation project work, and expect it to make good on that at its next meeting.