Editorial

Burdening the Falls Church Housing Corporation with a $1 million deficit while at the same time stripping the effectiveness of its efforts does not constitute, in any way, “striking a balance” between the City of Falls Church's affordable housing and open space needs. It is a cruel abnegation of public responsibility by the Falls Church city government to its senior citizens and those who've undertaken the thankless work of serving them.

Yet, the Falls Church City Council is poised to accomplish just this result this Monday, cloaking itself in the false and self-deluding righteousness of “balance.” Pressured by imminent deadlines to apply for federal assistance, the FCHC is over a barrel and has little choice but to take whatever the Council offers it. But let there be no mistake, by forcing the FCHC to take one more bite out of its West Broad St. senior affordable housing project proposal, the Council will be in no way achieving a “balance,” but only groveling in a shameful manner before a handful of boisterous neighbors to the site.

Furthermore, and this may be the greatest scandal of all, such failure of nerve in the face of what is prima facie “the right thing to do” in this case only translates into a greater cost to taxpayers throughout the community, which the Council hopes to disguise. By promising ways “"quietly” and “behind the scenes” to subsidize the shortfall in the FCHC project, City Hall is planning to gently redeploy $1 million taxpayer dollars to, in fact, subsidize Council cowardice.

Moreover, the community-wide goal of addressing affordable housing needs here, as formally adopted in policy form by a unanimous vote of a recent City Council, will be severely diminished by a building scaled back from over 70 financially self-sufficient units to around 55. Unless the Council deviates from its current plan, and reinstates a substantial portion of what the FCHC says its needs to make its project viable, Monday will mark a travesty rivaling the February 1994 forced closing and expulsion by the Falls Church City Council of an operational food bank called “Lazarus at the Gate” serving homeless and hungry families throughout Northern Virginia in the dead of one of the worst winters in decades.

Admittedly, it will take a lot to ever rival the basic human cruelty of that 1994 action, which was done to clear the way for the City's sale of the so-called Whittier Tract for a townhouse developer. That incident stands in a class by itself in Falls Church history, at least since the City resisted integration of its schools for two years after surrounding jurisdictions integrated in the late 1950s. But there are parallels to what's about to happen now, including a pompous and delusional self-justification by Council members destined to be judged quite differently by history. But then, what do they say? “Those who do not learn from history are destined to repeat it.”