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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]To build on Lee, the community has to buy in. They have not and many are saying it can't be done because the parcels are small. Of course that is false - just look at the shallow space available for the Shell on the Pike. It can obviously be done. They will also say their schools are too overcrowded (not that school overcrowding has ever stopped development in S.A.)
At most, new developments will have a set aside for the minimal CAF, but not enough to really change things.

Barcorft will never go away. It is in a special conservation district to preserve it as "Affordable", the owner has sold the development rights. If it ever changes hands, it will become a CAF.  Greenbriar isn't that big.

Other ideas?[/quote]

Finding parcels north of Lee Highway is a bigger problem than you're acknowledging. Yes, The Shell is on only .76 acres, but finding even that is tough. Further, because developers typically want to make buildings like that mixed-use, with commercial/office space on the ground floor and then residential above it, they generally will only build them on/adjacent to commercial areas. Other than the north side of Lee Highway itself, the only other commercial area up there is the Williamsburg shopping centers at the intersection of Sycamore, Williamsburg and Little Falls. Those don't really provide enough commercial traffic to be attractive to a developer, but even if they were, it's surrounded by SFHs that average less than .2 acres per lot, so to even get a lot the size of The Shell, they'd need to find at least four adjacent homeowners on suitable lots willing to sell. That is a very difficult task, especially when you realistically only have about three different groupings of houses to approach. Further, any developer would have to take the risk of buying all of those houses without a guarantee that Arlington will actually grant a zoning change to put a 6-story building smack in the middle of single-family homes; even if the neighborhood doesn't protest, that's a tall order.

So then you have to look at parcels along Lee Highway itself and find someone with a big enough parcel willing to sell. There are two problems there. First, a lot of those of shopping centers are all but printing money for the owners because they can demand such high lease rates, so developers would have to pay a really high premium to buy them out; Arlington would have to shell out millions in incentives beyond what they already provide to incentivize a developer to build just a single apartment building. Second, several of those shopping centers don't have a single owner -- for instance, the one that runs from Preston's Pharmacy down to Caribbean Grill is made up of 17 parcels owned by something like 13 different entities, and even when one entity owns more than one parcel, in many cases they aren't contiguous parcels. This is part of what has held up the Lee Highway redevelopment project generally, it's really hard to get 13 different entities on board with a proposal without some serious collective action problems.

That part of Arlington didn't become the higher-wealth area by accident. It developed that way because the circumstances there weren't conducive to higher-density development (which supports lower-income populations), so that development was created elsewhere, and the lower density available up there was put to its most lucrative use (higher-end SFHs).[/quote]

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