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[quote=Anonymous]Wow....I am just now finding this whole thread....it would have been so helpful a couple of years ago when I moved to S. Arlington from my native Alexandria, VA.  I can relate to so many themes in this thread, that have angered and baffled me as I try to get the best education for my child....

....Yet as much as I care about my little situation, it doesn't matter diddly squat if the vast majority of Arlingtonians are being squeezed in both directions, funneled every more sharply into the haves and have-nots, which every trend in this city is siphoning us into.  It's as dang depressing to watch the middle class shrink below my feet as a polar bear must feel standing on his vanishing iceberg...knowing he has a limitless swim ahead to find rest and solid ground again...

YES and double yes to 9/24 16:05  what I have heard from some older neighbors is that they favor affordable housing generally because they don't like how the character of Arlington has been changing. In their view, it used to be a more collegial, accessible, middle class place, and now it's becoming snobby and out of touch. They like their neighborhoods and they're sick of the ostentatious new builds.

That also describes the sweet little neighborhood I grew up in in Alexandria to a "T".  My parents are still there, in their late 70s, and even though I am in my late 40s, I have been mourning for many decades now the now accelerating trend towards tear-downs, the complete deforestation in some cases of whole yards, and the difficulty in finding common ground with neighbors whose payscales are nothing in the stratosphere of the ordinary low-level bureaucrats and city public servants whose doors were once all open to all of us kids running up and down the block....There was no such thing as "home security systems," no one locked their doors, and if you were bored, you just went outside because there was almost always a group of kids playing ball in the middle of the road....most of the moms were stay-at-home, and there were little stars on cardboard posted in windows so that elementary kids who walked home in small groups by themselves would know which house door to knock on if they needed any help.  I was actually a latch-key child, which worked out fine because the neighborhood was so safe, and my friends' Mom's were home, so I didn't feel alone.

That was the late 1960s-70s.  Even by the time my sister, ten years younger, came along, that world had started to disappear...3 families on our block became empty nesters, and YUPPIES (Young, Urban, Professionals?), as they were known in the 80s, moved in, childless.  I think this was the time Arlington, too, was shutting down schools and starting rec centers?

I worked in Mitch Synder's Community for Creative Non-Violence homeless shelter in down town DC... he later killed himself, which unfortunately seems emblematic of so much of the idealism of the 70s that I was raised in, especially as part of the first bussed and integrated schools generation.   But like other posters, in my 20s and 30s I had tons of roomates, low pay (I actually lived outside the area all over the country), and didn't expect housing to be affordable for me in this area.  When I came back, it wasn't affordable, and like another poster, it took me decades to save enough to buy a house when I was 45--and then it was "a crappy condo in S. Arlington"---which actually I am so grateful for since, at last,  I am building equity--and I hope to have paid off before I am 75.... I never had a chance to buy in N. Arlington where the better schools are, nor in any area where the better schools are, nor could we ever afford private schools....so it's nice for those who do, but that is unfortunately a very privileged minority....

But still, Alexandria on the surface looked remarkably unchanged even through the 1990s, while Chevy Chase and Bethesda were bemoaning the loss of their neighborhoods... the first rumblings started in the 2000s, and are in full force today...as they are in Arlington...who can afford these $800,000 (tear down old colonials) to $5 million homes?  Is it the K-St. lobbyists who are also corrupting our democracy into an oligarchy?  What ordinary person has that kind of money, or at least financing???

And yes, yes, and yes, to the poster who had kids in both S. and N. Arlington who knows the timber and tone of the  N. and S. schools are night and day....from flyers about food for needy children to be fed over the weekend, to a wealth of expensive extra-curricular opportunities....We were just FLOORED at how bad Abington actually was...moldy carpet, windowless dark halls, but above all, the children were months, if not years behind grade level....and they kicked my child under the desk for participating, since it made their non-participation look bad! The principal and other admin just gave me the BS lip service that "All Arlington schools are equally good"....and my child said it was heartbreaking that the other children truly were starving, and begging for food....

So I totally relate to the FARMS numbers just starting to trend down in some of the S. Arlington schools, where middle class people on ordinary salaries can afford to buy, and now the Columbia Pike affordable housing is going to re-concentrate this intense poverty into a few schools and raise FARMS kids back to 80% (which some have already been at times if  you look on School Digger, which has more historical data....)....Whereas as long as FARMS kids in any one school are around 30%, as Charles Barret in Alexandria was, EVERY child seems to get a great education.....

Which brings us back to the bussing discussion...Arlington would have maybe 30% FARMS in every school if evenly distributed....but "bussing's not going to happen" because there doesn't seem to be the will?  I know it is unpopular to everyone to leave the relative comfort of their neighborhood, but I agree that VOICE is aiming too low to accept schools with such high concentrations of poverty, and to agree to further that trend.

If we keep siphoning our city's children into these two wildly disparate school systems, aren't we shooting ourselves in the foot?  By creating an underclass who can never escape poverty, and another group who doesn't need to ever see or feel the sting of inequality in their bubble of comfort and privilege?  I totally agree with the posters that putting more affordable housing down when already the schools are over-crowed, and intensely unequal, is just ludicrous.   Especially because this city is NOT affordable at all who make too much to get help, but not millions---the retirees in N. Arlington are quaint indeed, when they think that this shrinking middle class, their children (the Millenials) are going to get the help....no, as the posters on this thread note, only people who are way below the starting level salaries of the millennials who are going to get "affordable housing."

My brain hurts trying to figure out any workable answers.  The trends are in place.  We are living in one of the highest points of inequality in the U.S. since the days of the robber barons, and it sucks for everyone, even the super rich even if they don't realize it yet. I wouldn't feel very safe if I was rich in a country whose underclass was growing and getting hungrier by the day.  The whole New Deal of the 1930s was created to stave off a revolution, to placate and mollify, since the rise of communism was a real fear in such desperation. Even more than the New Deal, the WWII preparations that put everyone to work, even women, ushered in a vibrant middle class that stayed strong until the decline of unionism starting in the 1970s....when even the head of corporations made no more than 40 times the lowest paid worker...as opposed to 400 or more times more today... I don't know of a political revolution in history that was not precipitated by increasing levels of inequality...

So yeah, for the short term, voting for independent candidates in this one-party rule of the Democrats that has gotten us so out of touch may be the best we can do.  As much as people are leery of Clement, I am really scared by Dorsey's comments in the earlier quoted Washington Post article... there aren't great choices, and I was SO happy Vishstadt won, and is continuing to deliver on the promises he was elected on....though I definitely WONT vote for Cristol...

Thanks so much to everyone who participated on this thread....you all really, truly, get it, and bring up excellent points describing the problem to a tee....where we go from here remains to be seen, but no matter how much affordable housing is or is not built in Arlington, I have to hope, as a new S. Arlington purchaser, that the trend is towards gentrification of S. Arlington, just as Del Ray Alexandria went from solidly working class  to unaffordable in my little lifetime. 
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