Housing & Land Use in Alexandria West

Sept. 27, 2023

TO: Richard Lawrence, Principal Planner, City of Alexandria
Jose Delcid, Urban Planner II, City of Alexandria
CC: Jeffrey Farner, Deputy Director, City of Alexandria
FROM: Owen Curtis, President, SWCA

Hello, Gentlemen,

Due to the conflict with the AFCA meeting this eve, I will not be able to attend. Our Association will be represented, as we are certainly interested in the topics of housing and land use. I thought I would put down in writing some of the key views of our Association as input to the discussion of those two topics.

Housing

Housing, and especially housing affordability, are vital aspects to the Alex West area. While I do not have hard data, it is clear by being a resident for 47 years that our area has some of the largest amounts of market affordable (and even some true affordable) housing in the City. Immediately adjacent to the Seminary West area are places like:

The former Hamlet garden apartment complexes mostly/all owned by Morgan Properties, who have not done a very good job of maintaining them, especially re rats
Southern Towers, where the renting community is up in arms about their management
Newport Village

My guess is that between these, there must be more than 5,000 apartments, perhaps several thousand more. And here's the key thing: the most important thing the City can do for affordable housing in Alexandria is to work to preserve this very large number of affordable rentals.

It is no secret that the plan was, e.g., for the purchasers of the Hamlets to replace them with high end townhouses. So they invested a pretty penny, and they are not getting their intended return by managing aging garden apartments. But rather than trying to revise all the zoning in the City and in Alex West to higher density (as per ZFH/HFA), which is highly unlikely to create affordable dwelling units, the City needs to work with these owners (or, get new owners, including City housing agencies) to manage them, keep them clean and safe, and continue to rent them (or, go to a co-op situation) at affordable rates.

Affordable housing is a dilemma. On the one hand, housing becomes affordable when it gets very old or in poor condition and is not maintained. We have a few SF homes in our neighborhood like that. We don't like that, since it is shabby absentee landlords who are making a buck off of poor folks. That is a code enforcement issue, though, not a SAP issue.

Alternatively, some SF homes become affordable when they are overloaded with multiple people or families or large extended families. We have a LOT of those in our neighborhood, but if they keep up their property, who cares? These are mostly/all hard-working immigrant folks, and once they make enough money, they gradually upgrade (by splitting up the multi-family homes back to single family use), and all the while, they are contributing members of the community.

But the largest number of affordable units are the aging rental properties, where many of the people in our neighborhood (including me) once lived when we had little money and needed an inexpensive rental. The threat to these properties is enormous, and it seems that staff and Council are not focused on the preservation of these units. Yes, in VA, cities' hands are tied to some degree by the Dillon Rule, but Council needs to get creative within what it is permitted to do, and work with the owners of these places, or get new owners, and keep these places decent/safe habitations at an affordable rate. If that does not happen, we all know what will: the investor/owners will build what the City should never have granted them in the BSAP, and we will not only lose affordable housing, driving out the lower income folks, but we will get car-centric, wealthier owners, and higher densities, none of which is good for our City.

So, please: Let the Alex West Plan reflect as its primary housing objective the preservation of market affordable rentals, and set aside all the emphasis on ZFH and HFA. Nice goals, but not practically achievable in such a small, already high-enough density area where the job market is strong, demand is high, and as a result, prices for housing are high and will continue to get higher, not despite the added density, but BECAUSE of it. The only winners of a continued emphasis on ZFH/HFA are the developers, who will clean up while providing no net gain in affordable housing.

Land Use

The SWCA views on land use are several-fold:

We favor the current balance on uses (residential, commercial, retail) in Alex West. We fear that in the post-COVID world, the commercial (chiefly office) space is becoming a thing of the past, and with it goes ancillary supporting retail that also serve us, the residential community. We doubt that the AWSAP can correct that trend, but we encourage staff to look for ways to help induce that balance. The balance is important, as it balances demand on City resources. If Alex West loses much of its commercial land use, then schools, roads, transit, sewage and storm water, and other infrastructure elements will be under greater demand by the larger residential population. Those resources are not ready to handle all that much more demand, and the cost is not something we care to incur.
How the land is developed is of great importance to Seminary West. In the previous (1992) plan, business and residents and staff all agreed that heights and densities would be highest next to I-395. Once you crossed N Beauregard, they would greatly drop as a buffer between the higher densities and the adjacent residential neighborhood. That preserved the quality of life in our residential area, and maintained N Beauregard as a grand, tree-lined boulevard. We want to get back to that approach, which the BSAP did significant damage to. The latest development, The Blake Apartments at Seminary/Beauregard, have totally ruined the impression of Seminary West at is primary entry point. Every mature tree was destroyed on that parcel, and the buildings were moved adjacent the public ROW as if this were Crystal City or Rosslyn. We do not want anything like that. We do not want our neighborhood to look like the extreme urban design the City has permitted at Beauregard/King. Yes, we are part of a City, but we can maintain the ambiance of the other lovely parts of this City if this plan insists upon it. And we insist that it does. Please:

let us maintain our tree canopy;
let us maintain setbacks from the public right of way;
let the high densities and height stay between Beauregard and I-395, with much lower ones between Beauregard and our community;
let us preserve light and air in our residential homes, and not block both as the Blake does to Seminary Park and Seminary Heights.

There may be other dimensions of these topics you will touch upon this eve. I regret the conflict, and I look forward to working with you to help assemble a great Alex West SAP which reflects these ideas.

Thank you.

Owen Curtis
President
Seminary West Civic Association