Alexandria could eliminate single-family-only zoning this fall under a draft proposal unveiled by city planners Tuesday evening, putting this Northern Virginia city on track to follow one of its neighbors in adopting an increasingly popular — and often contested — idea in urban planning.
That plan is one of several potential amendments that city lawmakers will consider in November as part of the city’s ongoing “Zoning for Housing” initiative, which looks to increase housing supply and lower costs in this community of 160,000.
But among nearly a dozen items presented to city lawmakers Tuesday, this change is expected to be the most controversial. The proposal would make it easier to construct buildings with up to four units in neighborhoods long reserved for one house with a yard on each lot.
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City planners have also recommended rolling back rules that require off-street parking at residential buildings near Metro stations or rapid bus transit. Such a rule would apply to single-family-only neighborhoods as well as areas that are largely filled with townhouses, such as the city’s historic Old Town.
“We are experiencing a housing crisis, and the purpose of this work is to strengthen our toolbox,” Karl Moritz, the city’s planning director, said in an interview Tuesday afternoon. “That’s why there’s a variety of things being looked at. The idea is to better position Alexandria to address our housing challenges.”
If the city’s all-Democratic council votes to support the change, Alexandria would in some sense be following Arlington County. After an explosive, months-long debate, Arlington lawmakers approved a “missing middle” policy to allow buildings with up to four — and, in most cases, six — units in any residential area in that county.
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Like its neighbor to the north, Alexandria is a liberal, mostly wealthy inner-ring suburb — and it, too, has seen housing costs soar in recent decades. The median single-family house in Alexandria sold for about $851,000 last month, compared with about $570,000 for all types of homes across the city.
Officials have also estimated that at least 19,000 households in Alexandria are “cost-burdened,” meaning they spend more than 30 percent of their income on rent or mortgage payments and other associated costs.
Even before the meeting, the plan was already generating pushback from some longtime homeowners.
A newly launched organization, the Coalition for a Livable Alexandria, drew dozens of people to a rally outside City Hall last week as speakers suggested the initiative was being rushed through and would not significantly lower housing costs.
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“It’s a very simplistic way of looking at it,” the group’s chair, Roy Byrd, who owns a three-bedroom house in the Clover College Park area, said in a speech at the rally. “They say that if you create more density to create more housing, that will trickle down to more affordability. Where has that worked?”
The Coalition for a Livable Alexandria, a newly formed group, just wrapped a press conference this evening outside City Hall on the city’s “Zoning for Housing” initiative.
They are challenging what they call an “accelerated timeline” this fall on major rezonings. pic.twitter.com/iXbvgm5s5n
— Teo Armus (@teoarmus) August 28, 2023But Peter Sutherland, the events director at the urbanist group YIMBYs of Northern Virginia, said that soaring housing costs required a more aggressive approach from city lawmakers.
He and his wife, who rent an apartment in Old Town North, have been looking to buy a home and submitted one of eight bids on a rowhouse. They came up short about $100,000.
“Having a small drop of one or two tweaks to the zoning code doesn’t cut it anymore,” he said, adding that he is excited to see the city was taking on “a more holistic approach about zoning that applies across the board and is really cutting to the heart of the issue.”
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In the draft plan on single-family neighborhoods, city planners laid out two options for lawmakers: One, which the planners strongly recommended, would allow for buildings with up to four units across these areas. Another would allow these “fourplexes” in areas with smaller lots and buildings with up to two units elsewhere.
They did the same for parking rules. Planners recommended an option eliminating any requirement for off-street parking in areas near public transit and lowering that requirement in other areas to one off-street parking spot for one- and two-unit buildings and two spots for three- and four-unit buildings.
An alternative would reduce those requirements, but only in areas close to transit: It would require one off-street parking spot for duplexes and two spots for triplexes and fourplexes.
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Altogether, planners projected the policy’s impact would be relatively modest: With the same standards around height, lot coverage and other specifications, these new zoning rules — if passed — would lead to the redevelopment of about 66 properties, adding 150 to 178 units over the next decade.
Melissa McMahon, vice chair of the city’s planning commission, suggested at Tuesday’s meeting that the proposals did not go far enough. “I want to admit that I’m a tiny bit underwhelmed with the potential impact I’m seeing in the proposals,” she said.
Unlike Arlington — where until recently most of the county was zoned for single-family houses — just over a third of the land in Alexandria is set aside for such use, planners said. Neighborhoods such as Arlandria-Chirilagua, Old Town and Landmark are largely filled with garden apartments, high-rises or townhouses.
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Those areas could be affected by other pieces of the “Zoning for Housing” initiative, which formally kicked off in March with events that presented potential policy changes as a way to fight the city’s history of residential segregation.
Other changes would push for more affordable housing in the conversion of empty office buildings to apartments — an area in which Alexandria has emerged as a national leader — and lift existing limitations on the number of units per acre, including in areas with large apartment buildings.
The city already regulates the height, setbacks and floor-area ratios of buildings, Moritz said. These per-acre rules have forced some developers into creating unnecessarily large apartments that go for higher prices.
“Alexandria uses a belts-and-suspenders-and-suspenders-and-suspenders approach to regulating how much development can occur on a parcel,” he added. “This is getting rid of one pair of suspenders.”
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Notably, the draft changes do not include any recommendations that could open up parts of the city to taller buildings in some neighborhoods.
Under current zoning rules, developers can ask to construct an extra 25 feet on construction projects if they promise to use some of that added space for affordable housing — but only in neighborhoods that already have buildings over 50 feet.
Planners had studied extending those changes to other areas last year, in a controversial process considered separately from “Zoning for Housing.” last year. But they concluded that such a change would not have created much more housing, Moritz said.
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