It was a tight squeeze in the Dogwood Room at City Hall Monday night for a Falls Church City Council work session on the proposed development of affordable housing at the 4-acre Virginia Village site on S. Maple. Guests Monday included the Planning Commission, Housing Commission, Economic Development Authority and more, including very attentive audience members who tend to align with the “Not in My Back Yard” (NIMBY) contingents.

The meeting lasted past midnight, according to our reports. We could not handle more than about three hours, ourselves, as those who are advocating for the least-impactful approach to the process hope, we can only assume, that comments close to filibusters in length will lull their opponents into agreeing with them through little more than “Please, I can’t take it anymore. Whatever you say. Just stop talking!”

It was noted by Mayor Letty Hardi at some point in the extremely democratic exercise that the effort last year on behalf of an ordinance to permit auxiliary dwelling units in the Little City had produced exactly zero applications to build so far. Could it be because so many strings were attached to make such a process prohibitive?

Now the City is coming again to the affordable housing issue, every bit if not more contentious than the earlier transitional zone modification fight and the ADU fight. At least the t-zone case produced some modest new housing now under construction on Park Avenue. The affordable housing issue left City leaders flummoxed and disillusioned after an almost decade-long effort to find a spot where citizens might permit a building where subsidies could allow persons who can’t afford market rates could possibly hang their hats was dashed in 2010.

It reminds us of trying to get off the sinking Titanic. There was so much packing and decisions to be made as to what to take along into the lifeboats. As in that case, too many of the passengers just didn’t appreciate the seriousness of what was happening and how it would wind up changing their lives in major ways.

Frankly, far too few people in Falls Church are feeling any pain, much less discomfort, around the issue, except those who want to avoid the fuss altogether. Not yet anyway. It is seen as a charitable matter, not as a necessity for community survival. So the endless banter continues, and we predict the net result will be a modest gain at a great cost to serve those whose incomes may yet be a fraction of the median income, but not by that much. Some affordable housing already here is available to persons earning close to $100,000 because the median incomes here are so high.

Appropriate emergency action, we suggest, would include things like putting the entire acreage under an eminent domain order, or an urgent global search for state of the art new technologies for really cost-effective housing.