There was no way this newspaper could ignore the exchanges at Tuesday night’s Falls Church Economic Development Authority meeting where its chair Ross Litkenhous expressed major concerns about the costs associated with the new plan to redevelop the 4.5 acre Virginia Village site to add significant net new affordable housing units.
A lot of heat will be accompanying this project every step of the way, and it will surely challenge Falls Church’s local leaders’ commitment to the goal of adding significant new affordable housing to the City’s stock of otherwise absurdly expensive housing. Despite the fact that lack of affordable housing is the nation’s Number One crisis right now (at least outside of what’s going on in the White House), when it comes to taking the kinds of measures required to deal with the matter, there always appear to be a myriad of obstructions and most of them arise at the local level.
This newspaper was around for every one of the numerous painful public hearings that occurred in the first decade of this century when yeoman and tireless efforts of the local housing association led by Carol Jackson and backed by the late Bob Young ran into such powerful resistance at the neighborhood level. Plans to build new affordable housing at numerous locations around the Little City ran into a growing blizzard of resistance, and when it finally came down to the Wilden Project, a modest five-story senior housing proposal on S. Washington St., the carefully tended multiple of contributing elements, including federal, state and local money, came crashing down on one 4-3 vote on a hot summer night that undid the whole shebang.
More painful meetings of that same sort have already begun, including Tuesday’s. Not that there shouldn’t be careful and watchful oversight of every penny going into this thing, as Litkenhous’ diligence exhibited Tuesday. There should be for sure. But what has to be watched is the extent to which the same old tiresome “Not in My Back Yard” (NIMBY) sentiment is behind a usual, highly uncreative mantra of “I’m for it, but just not here, or now.”
On the plus side, there has arisen a fairly recent YIMBY (“Yes in My Back Yard”) movement of housing advocates which is growing in the wake of the increasingly desperate need for housing that families making average salaries can afford.
Our favorite image invoked the last time this was going on was of the invisible people who were not in the room, the elderly, the infirm, the disadvantaged, who filled chairs as the future residents of the housing being sought. They are present in our minds and our spirits at all these meetings.
