City of Falls Church Mayor Letty Hardi has been appointed to the transition team of Virginia’s just-elected new governor, Abigail Spanberger. She has already begun serving on a housing policy committee under Chris Lloyd, appointed her new commerce and trade secretary.

With the appointment, Hardi becomes the first mayor of Falls Church ever to serve on a statewide political body.

She told the News-Press in an interview Tuesday that she has already begun a series of video and Richmond in-person meetings which have been added to her always busy schedule of events in the Little City.

She said the involvement is short-term, defining key issues on housing for the incoming Spanberger administration up to the point of her swearing in in early January.

Her contributions on the housing front will reflect her work and that of the Falls Church City Council on affordable housing, which was a major topic of discussion at the City Council work session at City Hall this Monday. At that meeting, members of the City’s Economic Development Authority (EDA) and Housing Commission were also present. Newly-elected Council member Arthur Agin (who will be sworn in in early January) also sat in.

As the housing shortage and affordability issue is paramount nationwide, and in Virginia, the local Falls Church effort could become a model, especially when carried into the corridors of statewide policy making by its mayor.

But Hardi told the News-Press that she also hopes to learn from her involvement on the transition group things that could be applied here.

Right now, in an update report presented to the Council by housing specialist Kayleen Mark and housing development specialist Brenden Woodley this Monday, the City has a total of 189 units under its affordable dwelling units policy, which means that reduced rates are offered to persons or families that qualify by virtue of incomes that fall below the “area median income” (AMI)  level.

Of the 189 total, 99 units have been added in just the past year, for which anyone at 40 percent of the AMI are eligible. So far, 17 percent of the total available units have become occupied by City employees.

This includes the recent addition of three quadplex units in the 4.2 acre Virginia Village, a community of a total of 20 quadplexes, of which the City, including its Economic Development Authority, now owns nine (or 36 apartments). Three were added this fall through the effort of the City’s Acquisition Strike Fund which was set up to enable swift responses to newly available housing.

Now, the City faces a tight schedule to set processes in motion for the redevelopment of the entire site, optimally through construction of a large building of affordable units there that will offer significantly greater numbers of units than are currently on the site.

The Council, with members of the EDA present Monday, was told that in order to move in a timely fashion to get something to happen there by the Fall of 2027, the City need to meet a near-term deadline to set out requests for proposals (RFPs).

EDA member and former Falls Church Mayor Alan Brangman expressed concern that putting out an RFP will immediately drive up the asking price for units in Virginia Village not currently owned by the City or EDA.

However, Mayor Hardi pointed out that it has long been publicly known what the City hopes to do on that site, such that putting out an RFP should not come as a sudden surprise to anyone.

Council member David Snyder expressed concern that building a new affordable housing building there should offer significantly more housing than is already on the Virginia Village site.

After a decade hiatus, the site is back under serious consideration for a new, large scale affordable housing structure since an earlier proposal late in the first decade of this century was killed in a 4-3 vote by the Council then.

But the Council is also tasked with maintaining existing affordable housing apartments elsewhere in the City that are due to expire in the next three years, including 99 units at The Fields, currently mostly occupied by non-English-speaking tenants, and at Pearson Square apartment on S. Maple.

In the last year, the 99 new units, all part and parcel of new large-scale mixed use projects, have come with no expiration dates, a major improvement in the City’s negotiated policy.  

Dana Jones, director of the City’s Housing and Human Services department, and Leslyn Barrow, noted that new affordable units that are currently available include 4 at the Modera, the new project just opening up in Founders Row 2, and 14 at Broad and Washington, which are mostly studio units, since seekers of affordable housing tend to be families needing more space.

Falls Church City Manager Wyatt Shields, in comments made to the annual meeting of the Village Preservation and Improvement Society (VPIS) held last Sunday, noted Falls Church’s relative advantage in the “economic turbulence” he said faces the wider region.

“So far we’ve been weathering it well,” he said, “But it is the trajectory over the horizon that I am worried about.”

Regionwide, he said, “we need to reposition our economy” away from the stability it has enjoyed since the 1970s of 300,000 federal jobs and growing numbers of contractors.

He said the City of Falls Church has benefited in particular from low interest rates that were in effect when it had to do most of its borrowing for the new high school and other major infrastructure improvements.

“Our timing was right,” he said. “The rates for the West Falls project and the Whole Foods came in just before interest rates started going up. Already for the last two years, budgets for our neighbors, Arlington and Fairfax counties, have been far more difficult for them than for here.

But with the changing overall economic climate, for the first time in over two decades, there are now no major developments in the City in the pipeline.

Finally, Hardi told the News-Press this week that a discussion of a possible tax overlay on City businesses that came up at the Council financial subcommittee last week was merely to update two relatively new Council members on discussions the Council has had intermittently for over a half dozen years, but that nothing is about to happen on that front.